INSTRUCTION AND HISTORY TEXTBOOK IN SERBIAN PRIMARY SCHOOLS (1880-1913)

Abstract

The process of reforms of the education system in Serbia was conducted in the framework of the modernization of its society. New period in the history of education in Serbia begins in year 1880. Intensely is working on the legal regulation of Serbian education, it is introducing the obligation of school attendance, the curriculum is prescribed, books are written according to them and very lively discussion are lead in pedagogic public. Within the Ministry of Education in 1880 the General Education Council is established whose main task was to give an opinion to the Minister on all important matters of education policy according to the "state idea and modern science." That year for the third time Stojan Novakovic was appointed for Minister of Education, he was one of the most important knowledgeable men of his age, the founder of modern Serbian historiography and initiator of changes in the Serbian education. A new law on primary schools was adopted in 1882. That year the issue of textbooks is regulated by adopting of the rules or basics of printing of school books. In them, is prescribed that schools can only use textbooks proposed by the General Education Council and approved by the Ministry of Education. The publishing of a series of history textbooks for primary schools began. Since the eighties, elementary schools in Serbia, as well as the entire education system, received their relatively stable physiognomy. Special role in the formation of socially responsible young generation is given to teaching of history. Therefore at the end of the 19th and early 20th century a concept of national schools was introduced into the school system (1898 and 1904) whose mission is "to educate children in the spirit of the nation and to prepare them for civilian life, and especially to spread education and Serbian literacy to the Serbian people. Among a series of history textbooks for primary schools that have been methodically increasingly successful, the texbooks of Mihajlo Jović are certainly representative for the national-ideological, as well as for educational and didactic analysis of history textbooks for primary schools in Serbia.