Pedagogy in Slovenia at the Beginning of the 20th Century

Pedagogy in Slovenia gradually won its recognition as an academic science, and therefore obtained improved possibilities for its conceptualization, when the university in Ljubljana was established in 1919. The time between the two world wars was marked with three principal pedagogical concepts: Herbartianism, geisteswissenschaftliche pedagogy, and reform pedagogy. The first of these to be theoretically conceptualized in Slovenia was the geisteswissenschaftliche , or cultural pedagogy. Ideas of reform pedagogy, especially its social-critical movement, interpreted, represented, and defended primarily left-oriented pedagogues and teachers, who were convinced that actual school reform would be possible only after (revolutionary) changes of social conditions. In the first decades of the 20th century, numerous conflicts and disagreements occurred in the process of establishing individual pedagogical currents and orientations in Slovenia. The strongest and most productive polemics were held between geisteswissenschaftliche , or cultural pedagogy, and some currents, or just individual representatives, of reform pedagogy (e.g., theory vs. praxis, old vs. new school). Unfortunately, the postwar Marxist pedagogical concept was highly unfavorable to the prewar orientations and prevented their further development.