The idea that school classes should be shortened to 30 minutes, justified by the claim that today’s pupils cannot focus for 45 minutes, originated at the top of government, but even from that side different views are being voiced. In recent days, both Prime Minister Đuro Macut and Minister of Education Dejan Vuk Stanković have spoken about it.
The reasoning of those in favour is that the attention of today’s pupils, immersed in the digital worlds of social networks and relentless scrolling, has been drastically shortened. Experts, however, believe that shortening classes will not solve the problem of reduced attention.
Minister Stanković said that, for now, this option is only being “openly considered” and that there is a possibility it could first be tested through pilot programmes.
“I think there is a kind of psychological justification. That is, under the influence of these new technologies, you have the phenomenon of diffuse attention. You cannot focus on one subject, but instead very easily move from one piece of content to another. This simply creates an effect in children where you cannot stay focused for some 45 minutes, which is the maximum duration of concentration even in mature adults,” the minister said, adding that “different arguments are being heard for and against, and that a debate is opening on this issue”.
“After the debate, there will be a practical part that implies an institutional reorganisation of timetables, allocation of teaching staff and perhaps the recruitment of new people, because there will be more classes. There are quite a few intermediate steps before it comes to life, but in any case, we might start with some pilot programme, because changes in education have to be rational,” Stanković said.
Prime Minister Đuro Macut is more reserved and stresses that it is necessary to realistically assess whether it is feasible for classes in schools to be shortened to 30 minutes, and he points to the real problem – curricula are overloaded.
“I think introducing this through administrative measures, shortening or extending something, is not realistic. Our curricula are overloaded or are not adequately implemented in certain schools or in certain groups of pupils. We must first consolidate and adapt those programmes; we are living in the first half of the 21st century, and only then will the efficiency of teaching through shorter classes have an effect,” Macut said.
Although at first glance it may seem that this is an attempt to adapt the education system to contemporary generations of pupils and their habits – an argument also used by Stanković when speaking about adapting to new times – the way this topic is being raised and explained points to a deeper problem: a tendency to reduce complex challenges in education to simple, technical moves.
As a rule, the education system does not tolerate quick and superficial solutions, especially those introduced without a clear analysis of their consequences. Snežana Romandić, a member of the Presidency of the Union of Education Workers’ Trade Unions of Serbia, told NIN that the unions have not received any official proposal.
“Apart from information from the media, there is not a single document explaining what exactly is being proposed. The minister said that it is being discussed, but we do not know with whom – certainly not with the unions,” Romandić said.
Within such a framework, the proposal seems more like an idea being tested through the media than part of a well-thought-out education policy. And education is precisely the area where improvisation costs the most, because its consequences are not immediately visible but accumulate over years, as Aleksandar Markov, a history teacher and president of the Edu Forum, also warns.
“Major changes that can affect the very concept of the education system are not discussed in the media, but in professional and academic circles, on the basis of analyses, research and comparative experience. In this form, the proposal seems ill-considered and essentially meaningless, more like a cosmetic intervention than a systemic reform,” Markov told NIN.
Attention as an excuse
The main argument for the proposal to shorten classes to 30 minutes is the claim that children today do not have the concentration to follow a class for 45 minutes. That is true, but is adjusting the length of classes the solution we need? Especially bearing in mind the experiences of other countries, where a 30-minute class is almost never mentioned. In Ireland, classes last 60 minutes, and in secondary schools even longer. The ministry there even explains that, because of focus, classes need to be longer, not shorter. Classes are 45 minutes long in Germany, Hungary and South Korea, one hour in Spain and the Netherlands, and up to one hour and 15 minutes in some states in the USA.
Romandić warns that in Serbia, the problem is being oversimplified and wrongly framed.
“If we refer to a lack of attention among children, we must acknowledge that children in school also have other problems, such as motivation to learn. Simply shortening a lesson to 30 minutes does not solve that issue, and in some subjects it creates additional difficulties,” she said. She also sees a problem in the illogical nature of a universal solution.
“Would a 30-minute lesson last the same for a final-year secondary school pupil and for a first-grade primary school pupil? Which part of the education cycle does this proposal even apply to?” Romandić asks, stressing that without clear answers to these questions, any discussion remains at the level of improvisation.
It is also important to emphasise that a school lesson is never just a teacher’s lecture. Right at the beginning, several minutes are spent on organising the lesson – pupils settle down, attendance is taken and the framework for work is set. Similarly, the last few minutes of a lesson usually serve for summaries, conclusions and questions from pupils, rather than for new material. In the final five minutes, pupils are often just waiting for the bell to ring. So the actual time devoted to intensive teaching is often significantly shorter than the nominal 45 minutes, and shortening a lesson to half an hour would in practice mean only about twenty minutes of work.
Since the proposal has so far not been presented in more detail nor accompanied by concrete explanations, the debate is largely reduced to assumptions about what a school day with shorter lessons would even look like.
“If we shorten lessons to 30 minutes and increase their number, we are essentially creating a ‘shorts’ version of teaching and further accelerating the смена of content. This does not solve the problem, but deepens it. If we want pupils to develop the ability for focused work, it is necessary to allow them to stay longer with one problem, one topic, one line of thought. From that perspective, it would be more logical to think about extending, rather than shortening, lessons,” says Aleksandar Markov, president of the Edu Forum.
According to him, a larger number of shorter lessons would lead to more frequent changes of subjects, greater pressure on teachers and additional fragmentation of the school day. “Shortening lessons does not solve any of the key problems of teaching. It is similar to teaching children to swim in ankle-deep water at a swimming school: the form exists, but the substance is missing,” Markov stressed.
Kristina Mojović Zdravković, a researcher at the Institute of Psychology and a teaching associate at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade, emphasises that the quality of teaching is not measured in minutes, but in how time is used.
“Shortening a lesson to 30 minutes represents a simple, but essentially superficial solution to a complex problem. Before considering such an intervention, it is necessary to precisely define the nature of the problem: is it a reduced ability of pupils to maintain attention for 45 minutes, or a difficulty in directing and sustaining attention on teaching material? This distinction points to different types of interventions – from working on factors that influence pupils’ attention to improving the quality and organisation of teaching itself,” Mojović Zdravković told NIN.
Key to understanding the problem of pupils’ attention and motivation is an assessment of the quality of teaching. Motivation does not depend on the length of the lesson, but on how modern, interactive and adapted to pupils the teaching is, as Markov also points out.
“If a teacher manages to make a lesson meaningful, dynamic and interactive, the pupil ceases to be a passive recipient of information and becomes an active participant in the teaching process. In such circumstances, attention naturally lasts longer. Recently, a game called Mafia has been very popular among pupils; it is based on dialogue, investigation and reasoning. Such a concept can easily be applied in teaching different subjects. For example, in history lessons, pupils can take on the roles of historical figures, both positive and negative, and through dialogue and research work through the material,” Markov says.
However, as he notes, even 45 minutes is often not enough for lessons designed in this way. In most countries of the region and Central Europe, a 45-minute lesson remains the standard, while in some Western European countries it lasts even longer. In these systems, the focus is not on reducing time, but on a different organisation of teaching, lesson content and working methods. Even where there is greater flexibility, the emphasis is on the autonomy of schools and teachers and on linking material into longer units.
Children in some European systems spend more time at school than our pupils, but with one important difference – they complete all their tasks there, while our pupils, after six or more hours spent at school, take their work home, so their working week exceeds 40 hours, meaning that children here work more per day than employees.
Smaller classes?
The debate on shortening lessons cannot be viewed separately from the broader context in which it is taking place. The education system in Serbia has for years been functioning with overloaded curricula that are constantly expanding, which has led to an increasingly demanding and exhausting school day. In addition, Romandić reminds us that unions have for years also pointed to the need to reduce the number of pupils in classes.
“One of the unions’ proposals is that we should have teaching that can meet the needs of the modern child – this implies a great deal of individualisation and an individual approach. The current number of pupils per class makes this difficult. We need to work on reducing the number of pupils in classes so that we can use modern methods of working with children,” Romandić told NIN. She adds that in order to even consider changing the length of lessons, everything needs to be thoroughly prepared.
Kristina Mojović Zdravković emphasises that changes of this scale require careful consideration and reliance on verified data, rather than assumptions.
“Without mutual understanding of the perspectives of all actors in school life and without cooperation in jointly solving problems, it is hard to imagine an effective and long-term sustainable solution to a complex issue such as maintaining attention, or motivating pupils to actively participate in the learning process,” she emphasises.
Aleksandar Markov concludes that work should focus on reforming curricula and relieving them of superfluous facts.
“The focus must shift from the mere transmission of information to the development of understanding, critical thinking and the application of knowledge. The pupil must become the central figure in the teaching process, not an observer. Without an active pupil, there is no quality lesson, and without a quality lesson, there is no lasting knowledge.”
(NIN, 03.02.2026)
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