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

Abstract

The roots of this paper go back to the author’s early days in Sarajevo researching Austro-Hungariancultural policy in Bosnia. As a naive young man from the cold North I was delighted by the idealism of nineteenth-century Balkan pedagogy, the language of the noble mission of the primary school to guide a suffering people towards the light of national progress. But even a naive young man soon saw that the ideal did not fully correspond to the reality. It took longer to realize that the contrast between affecting aspiration and practical constraints is the tale of primary education in almost all modernizing contexts. Common to all such situations was the struggle to create a new, autonomous and respected branch of the teaching profession in an era of rapid change and increasing social competition. More distinctively Balkanwere the problems of implementing ideas drawn in part from central and western Europe in less developed milieux. The ‘people’s school’ proved a challenging concept in lands where the people were often divided confessionally and ethnically, subject to foreign rule and too poor to sustain some of its underpinnings. Yet Balkan exceptionalism in these respects can be exaggerated and the use west European primary school teachers made of philosophical notions among the elite has parallels with the transmission of ideas between different parts of Europe. The present papermakes no claim to novelty, though it links the experience of various regions, and presents the primary school experience in terms of the teachers’ movement,a little more than is customary. The concentration ismainly on Croatia-Slavonia and Bosnia of the late Habsburg Monarchy’s south Slav lands, with archival material confined largely to Bosnia and illustrations based on some of the extensive pedagogical literature of the time. The primary school has only a modest part in mainstream Balkan historiography. A fine institution, the specialist ‘school museums’ founded in the 1890s on Czech lines in Zagreb, Belgrade and Ljubljana, has perhaps unwittingly contributed to this marginalization and the relative absence of overarching perspectives, even in the Yugoslav period. An exception was the cooperative Zbornik za historiju skolstva i prosvjete, published in Zagreb, then Ljubljana, from 1964 to 1990, whose editor, DragutinFrankovic, was also responsible for two important works on Croatian education. 1 The Vojvodina-orientated Pedagoska stvarnost (Novi Sad) published annually from 1955 is the longest standing historical periodical in the field. In Bosnia work has had a relatively narrow focus on establishing a record of statistical and curriculum development, maintenance and regulation. 2 Wider attention has been accorded primary education chiefly when it most directly involved national issues, as in questions of the language of instruction or in critiques of Habsburg policy, or Serb-Croat confrontation. 3 By the same token, the historiography of secondary education is more extensive because that education contributed more obviously to the emerging intelligentsias which Balkan lands needed in the process of ‘modernisation’. In fact,