Vojislav Šešelj - Education

Education

Šešelj began his elementary education in September 1961 in Vladimir Nazor primary school before getting assigned to the newly-built primary school at Bratstvo i Jedinstvo. An excellent student until the fourth grade, he increasingly grew disinterested with the curriculum, realizing the minimal effort he needed to produce in order to achieve adequate grades. An avid reader, having already read most of Branko Ćopić's opus, he choose to devote more and more time to reading literature he would find on his own such as works by Karl May, Tone Seliškar, Momčilo Nastasijević, Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, and Stendhal, rather than studying all his subjects diligently, causing his grades to suffer somewhat. History was his favourite subject and he generally preferred social sciences to natural ones.

He then attended First Sarajevo Gymnasium, receiving excellent grades. In the summer of 1971, at age 16, he accepted an offer to join the Communist League (SKJ), which got extended to him and two other youth workers as a result of the exceptional effort shown at the youth work action in Banja Luka, organized in the wake of the devastating 1969 earthquake. He was also involved with various student organizations in school as the president of the gymnasium's student union and later as the president of its youth committee. Even during his gymnasium days, Šešelj demonstrated his argumentative side, engaging in frequent altercations with school principal Blanka Popović and municipal youth committee president Boban Jakovljević over what he saw to be discrepancies between proclaimed theory and the practical implementation of various initiatives. During these disagreements, Šešelj acted from the platform of communist ideology, as his worldview at the time was very much shaped by works by Marx, Engels, and Lenin, which theorized on social justice and communist ethics. He also read works by Trotsky and even Mao for a time. An exemplary and devoted communist during gymnasium days, Šešelj continued going to youth work actions for summer holidays. In 1972 and 1973, he worked as laborer around the Morava River, building embankments.