Habsburg School Reform Among the Orthodox Minorities, 1770-1780

Abstract

At the death of the Orthodox Metropolitan Pavel Nenadović in 1768, the educational level of the great majority of his Serbian and Rumanian coreligionists was still very low. In the seventy-year period since the regions in which they lived had again come under Habsburg rule, only feeble and shortlived initiatives had been made to improve their lot. Literacy rates were minuscule, printed matter rare, and schools of any sort so few and so scattered as to make formal education a distinct oddity. This was true even of the Serbs, whose settlements in southern Hungary included a relatively large number of well-off merchants and peasants, and whose statutory position as leaders of the Orthodox minorities was thereby reinforced. Still worse off were the Rumanians, many of whom were just emerging from a pastoral economy and extreme cultural backwardness. Even among the lower Orthodox clergy, the ability to read and write in any language was deemed extraordinary. The literacy problem was complicated by the fact that both Serbs and Rumanians used variants of Church Slavonic instead of their own vernaculars as their literary vehicles.