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Yugoslavia EDUCATION
History of Yugoslav Education
Primary schooling in interwar Yugoslavia was a four-year
course. Although enrollments more than doubled between 1919 and
1940, on the eve of World War II only about 27.3 percent of
Yugoslav young people between five and 24 were enrolled in school
or receiving some kind of instruction. Only about 4 percent of
the pupils who completed primary school went on to secondary
schools. Muslim parents remained suspicious of education for
women, and many rural areas had no schools at all. In the late
1930s, about 40 percent of the population over ten years of age
was illiterate. Striking regional disparities existed in levels
of literacy. While over three-quarters of all Slovenes and Croats
could read and write, only a tenth of Kosovo's ethnic Albanians
were literate. Yugoslavia's interwar education system was highly
centralized, and instruction was exclusively in Serbo-Croatian.
Macedonians and Croats especially resented Belgrade's dominance
of education; many Croatian teachers enlisted in the pro-Nazi
Ustase forces during the war. World War II decimated Yugoslavia's
teacher corps and damaged heavily its education facilities. In
1953, 14.5 percent of the active nonagricultural population had
not finished four grades of elementary school, while 63.5 percent
had not completed the eighth grade.
In the postwar period, the Yugoslav government invested
heavily in rebuilding the national education system. Besides
building new schools, libraries, and other facilities, the
government took energetic steps to enhance the qualifications of
Yugoslavia's teaching cadres. By 1989 the majority of teachers in
primary and secondary schools held university degrees. In
addition, schools began employing a variety of teacher aides and
specialists, including librarians, media specialists, medical
personnel, special-education instructors, vocational-training
specialists, and computer programmers--most of whom were
university graduates. Within thirty years after adoption, such
measures radically changed the educational base of the Yugoslav
population. By 1981 only 2.7 percent of the active
nonagricultural population had less than three years of primary
school; the portion that had not completed the eighth grade had
fallen to 18.9 percent; and 58.1 percent of that group had at
least a high-school diploma. Of the overall population, 25.5
percent had completed a secondary program and 24.2 had completed
eight years of a primary program (see
table 7, Appendix).
Data as of December 1990
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