Since the war ended in Bosnia in 1995, the education system has been a mess. In the central and southwestern parts of the country, which have mixed populations of Croats and Muslim Bosniaks, school-age kids attend the same schools but are segregated into different parts of the buildings. It's been dubbed "two schools under one roof." To me it looks like educational apartheid, which shows up in the teaching as well. For over a decade, the three ethnic groups that make up this country -- Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks -- have been taught three different versions of history.

But the new school year is seeing a few cracks in the apartheid system. Thanks to pressure from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the Council of Europe, children across Bosnia are now learning history from similar texts. What's more, the history books are designed to be objective and include several perspectives.

Before the new guidelines were put in place, old prejudices and nationalist rhetoric crept into the classroom. Bosnian Serb pupils were told they lived not in Bosnia but in Greater Serbia. One textbook asserted that it was the Bosnian Croats and the Bosniaks who had made war against "innocent Serbs." It wasn't just recent history that proved controversial. Bosniak textbooks pronounced the Ottoman Empire a time of enlightenment, while Bosnian Serb texts asserted that the Turks used to torture Serbs.

That's not exactly a recipe for bringing about peace, stability and reconciliation. Whether the new edcuational approaches will do the job remains to be seen: last week officials in Tuzla complained that one of the new textbooks should be pulled from classrooms because it failed to mention Bosnia's war-time president Alija Izetbegovic. Though Claude Kieffer, the OSCE's education director in Bosnia, told me that the new guidelines are only a partial answer to deep problems in education, he said it was a significant step forward. It will be more than that if progress in the classroom brings progress elsewhere.