The Primary School Movement in the South Slav Lands of the Habsburg Monarchy in the Era of Dualism. Ideal and Reality

Abstract

Primary education was an important issue in the Balkan countries during the social and national awakenings of the nineteenth century. While the development of a school system with a structured curriculum, staffed by qualified, faculty-educated teaching staff of both sexes, is well known, its ideological foundations may deserve more attention. This study takes as its starting point the most radical wing of the movement, a (by no means homogeneous) group around the Croatian educational magazine Napredak (1859), which under the partial influence of German Protestant pedagogy advocated non-denominational schools free of state or clerical tutoring, as well as Yugoslav fraternity. were implicit in Croatian taste. Croatian teachers have played a significant role in the development of primary education in Bosnia, although the final adoption of the principle of non-denominational schools is more due to the state's concern to counter Bosnian Serb influence - whose denominational schools developed thanks to immigrants from the Monarchy. . The idealism of the educational movement was submerged by three main factors, exacerbated by official suspicion: religious opposition in the Catholic, Orthodox, and Muslim camps; related ethno-national differences in the last two cases and, finally, the lack resources in still underdeveloped societies. The education budget has been spent too disproportionately on post-primary education, reflecting a propensity for elite and instrumental funding of “class” lines rather than educating the “man” of liberal ideas. In addition to the objective difficulties, there was the problem of teacher dissatisfaction with the gap between ideals and reality, and their low status among a largely indifferent, if not hostile population. The fate of primary education has thus become a symbol of the difficulties that Balkan society has encountered in the process of "modernization".