Educational Reforms in Austria and Yugoslavia Part I

SOUTHEAST EUROPE SERIES Vol. XXII No. 3 (Austria, Yugoslavia) EDUCATIONAL REFORMS IN AUSTRIA AND YUGOSLAVIA Part I" Five-Day School, All-Day School, Comprehensive School by Dennison I. Rusinow July 1977 The Federal Republic of Austria and the Social- decades of the monarchy, and in Yugoslavia at ist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia are neighboring least to the communist takeover in 1944-45. All of states with formally very different political and these dates are worth examining further. social systems: Austria is a parliamentary or "bourgeois" democracy with a mixture of public The belated arrival of the "industrial revolution" and private ownership and a populace and parties in the Austrian (and Bohemian) lands of the Haps- almost evenly divided between "Black" Catholics burg Monarchy, beginning after 1867, had by the and "Red" socialists. Yugoslavia is a one-party 1890s given rise to the social and economic struc- state pursuing its own "separate road to socialism" tures that demandand the mass political parties under a Communist Party dictatorship diluted by with ideologies that justifyuniversal primary the unique ideology and institutions of "social self- education and freer access to a better standard of management" and by multinational political and secondary and postsecondary education for the cultural polycentrism. The educational systems of explosively growing kinds and sizes of trained elites the two countries nevertheless display many that such development requires. In Yugoslavia, common features, two of which provide the starting some 50 years later, the ideological commitments point for this series of Reports. The first, a conse- and developmental ambitions of a new communist quence of the fact that Austria and an important regime created functionally analogous conditions. part of Yugoslavia (Croatia, Slovenia, the Meanwhile, the pressure for reform that was Vojvodina, and latterly Bosnia-Herzegovina) had a building up in Austria by the turn of the century shared history in a common state until 1918, is that was relieved and deferred by subsequent political the twentieth century development of their school and economic developments: war and the dissolu- systems and educational values takes off from tion of the Empire, the chronic depression that identical or closely related systems and values and beset the "nonviable" First Republic, Austro- is even today loaded with similar institutional and fascism and Nazism (when some reforms promul- cultural baggage. The second is that both states are gated in 1928 were repealed), war, and immediate at the present moment debating or inaugurating postwar political and economic conditions. In major educational reforms that also have much in Yugoslavia after 1945, at a stage of economic and common, both in terms of what is being attempted social development when any education is better and in the kinds and sources of opposition they are than no education, and with the campaign for meeting. It is additionally significant that in each simple literacy and mass primary education taking reform the most controversial issue concerns the immediate priority, expansion and additions to the purposes and consequent structure of a secondary existing system of secondary schools and univer- school system that has survived the political, social, sities seemed the quickest, lowest risk, and the and value changes of the past 50 years remarkably lowest cost way of training the cadres urgently intact. needed to staff new or expanding socialist elites. If such a strategy carried a price in terms of the In both countries the present reform effort dates quality and appropriateness of such education and from 1969, although the roots in each case can be ideological compromises through preservation of traced much further back: in Austria to the last the "elitist" nature of the system, in the social Copyright (C) 1977, American Universities Field Staff, Inc. [DIR-3-'77] DIR-3-'77 -2- composition of student bodies, and in the retention The revolutionary industrial and tech- of many non-Marxists even in sensitive disciplines, nical development and consequent funda- these were costs deemed temporarily worth paying. mental changes in the structure of Here, too, the pressure for more basic reforms was employment in Austria after the Second deferred. World War gave rise to widespread public uneasiness about the school [system] and led to the school reform of the 1960s. The in- violent student and For the sometimes protest creasing demand for a better qualified labor movements across "counterculture" that swept force was accompanied by a subjective Europe and America in the later 1960s, 1969 was, factor, the growing aspiration of wider of course, a year of climax. These movements social strata for more education. The school and a feebler invoked a strong echo in Yugoslavia system was incapable of meeting either of reasons why one in Austria and were among the these demands not only because the higher that year marked the beginning of a more delib- schools had too few teachers and too little erate and urgent campaign for educational reforms school space and the budget year after year both countries. however, the of the in Here, spirit failed to provide for substantial expansion, moment acted primarily as a catalyst on political but also because conservative educational and educational leaderships often already con- concepts and inherited educational tradi- between cerned by what they saw as a growing gap tions stood in contradiction to contemporary values of mod- the needs and changing rapidly social and educational-policy trends. 2 ernizing societies and what the existing school systems were producing. Such awareness had been increasing not only because it had become inter- While the language is sometimes quite different, nationally fashionable throughout the Western and reflecting differences in official ideology, in socio- Eastern worlds on whose frontiers both Austria and political systems, and occasionally in the rank- Yugoslavia lie, but because only in the 1960s did order of problems, the current educational reform these two relatively belated industrializers and efforts in Austria and Yugoslavia are in fact based modernizers achieve levels of economic and social on strikingly similar and often identical premises development at which both the quantity and the concerning the purpose of contemporary education. quality of trained persons being turned out by This is hardly surprising, since both efforts reflect existing systems were clearly and increasingly in- what has been called "an international ideology of adequate. Previous postwar reforms that had educational reform." Schnell's emphasis on this attempted to respond to these challenges at an point is again illustrative. Citing the central themes earlier stage in their emergenceparticularly a of post-1945 reforms in a number of countries 1962 Austrian package of school reform laws and "education for all" in the British Education Act of several smaller-scale efforts in Yugoslavia after 1944, Louis Cros's exposition of "l'explosion 1963had accomplished some things, but had scolaire" in France, the intimate linkage that evaded several central but politically sensitive should exist between school, life, and work as pro- issues and had inadequately anticipated "l'explo- claimed in the Soviet Education Act of 1958, mass sion scolaire" of the later 1960s. literacy campaigns in underdeveloped countries he observes: One example, among many, of the importance and centrality of such considerations for the These themes have become the universal authors of the present Austrian and Yugoslav slogans of school reform movements in our reforms is provided by a 1974 book about the age of international interinvolvement. Austrian reforms by Dr. Hermann Schnell, Presi- Across all national borders there has thus dent of the Vienna School Board and a Socialist been created a unified ideology of school Member of the Austrian Parliament. Describing reform, which is less concerned with the the belated speed of Austrian economic and social transmission and revitalizing of the culture change during the preceding decade, Schnell con- and its inherent values as the task of educa- cludes: tion, but rather would see the intellectual -3- DIR-3-'77 and spiritual growth and the needs of politically dysfunctional as well as culturally "de- children and youth catered to, while in addi- humanizing" parochialism that is purportedly en- tion recognizing the legitimate demands of couraged by mass education too obsessed with the the society on the school. 3 classroom as preparation for work and political citizenship. It is also defended on the ground that The primary goals proclaimed by both the to abolish a system of "quality" schools designed to Austrian and Yugoslav reforms reflect this "unified select and train elite cadres to perform socially ideology"- equality of opportunity and its alleged necessary elite jobs well (i.e., able to think clearly and etc.) because their "elitism" has corollaries in some form of comprehensive sec- critically been is to throw out the ondary schooling and an "open university," co- historically "ascriptive" with the bathwater. Would it not be education (in Austria, significantly, both baby denoting merely to "democratize" the coeducation of the sexes and of different social preferable system selection based on determined strata), and curricular reforms to through objectively designed give individual potential rather than social origins, and and students a

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