{"id":611,"date":"2019-02-11T12:15:30","date_gmt":"2019-02-11T12:15:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/1918local.eu\/?p=611"},"modified":"2019-02-11T12:19:36","modified_gmt":"2019-02-11T12:19:36","slug":"school-conditions-in-prekmurje-after-the-yugoslav-annexation-of-the-region-in-1919","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1918local.eu\/hu\/school-conditions-in-prekmurje-after-the-yugoslav-annexation-of-the-region-in-1919\/","title":{"rendered":"School conditions in Prekmurje after the Yugoslav annexation of the region in 1919"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jernej Kosi, February 11, 2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In July 1919, the Yugoslav delegation at the Paris Peace Conference\nreceived permission to occupy segments of two western counties of the Kingdom\nof Hungary: Vas\/\u017delezna and Zala. In early August 1919, Yugoslav forces\ntherefore crossed the state border and acquired control over the Hungarian\nregion, in line with the demarcation drawn in Paris. A year later, the Yugoslav\nterritorial acquisition was confirmed by the Treaty of Trianon. Except for a\nshort interruption during World War II, the area has since been under Slovene\nadministrative control and officially recognized as Prekmurje (in Hungarian, Muravid\u00e9k<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Soon after Yugoslav forces crossed the border in early August 1919,\nthe Slovene central executive in Ljubljana established an ad hoc office of\ncivil commissioner in charge of public administration in Prekmurje. The\ncommissioner, who had his office in Murska Sobota (in Hungarian, Muraszombat<\/em>), was subordinate to the Slovene Provincial Government in Ljubljana,\nwhich retained exclusive authority to assign and dismiss officials in the\nregion. Unsurprisingly, the government began replacing Hungarian administrators\nwith Slovene ones immediately after the occupation, transferring the latter\nfrom their posts in the former Cisleithanian crownlands to Prekmurje. At the\nsame time, the Slovene government in Ljubljana began sending experts to the\noccupied territory in order to gather information on social, cultural and\npolitical circumstances in the region. Lacking reliable and verifiable\ninformation, Slovene politicians and public servants who worked in Ljubljana\nsought precise observations about the state of affairs in the region. Prekmurje\nwas, after all, without a direct railway connection to other Slovene\nterritories; as such, it was a very remote and almost inaccessible area far to\nthe east of the national heartland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About a month after the occupation, the Higher School Council in\nLjubljana, the\nleading administrative body responsible for the school network under the\ncontrol of the Slovene Provincial Government, sent Franjo Cvetko to Prekmurje.\nCvetko, a head teacher from the neighboring East Styrian village of Vu\u010dja vas,\ndeparted on a mission to assess the existing situation and report in detail on\nthe organization of the school network in the region. In a series of documents\ndispatched to Ljubljana in the following weeks, Cvetko meticulously described\nthe cultural circumstances and social conditions in local schools and evaluated\nthe competence of the existing teaching staff. In addition, he suggested the\nmeasures that should be taken in Prekmurje\u2019s schools, focusing first and\nforemost on the language of instruction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Given that in autumn 1918, the\nSlovene language was declared the official language of the territory under the\ncontrol of the Slovene government, Cvetko proposed an immediate dismissal of\nteachers who were fluent only in Hungarian or German and their replacement with\nSlovene speakers from the former Cisleithania. His proposal was certainly quite\ntypical in a post-1918 Central European transitional period marked by the\ntriumph of the \u201cprinciple of nationality.\u201d It also corresponded with the\nprevalent discourse spread by Slovene politicians, national activists and\njournalists, living in the recently established Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and\nSlovenes, who described the annexation of Prekmurje as a redemption of Slovene\nbrothers who had suffered for centuries under the Hungarian yoke. What is much\nmore surprising, however, is Cvetko\u2019s attitude towards the local literary\nSlavic language, which was traditionally used as an unofficial auxiliary\nlanguage of instruction in several elementary schools in Prekmurje. Cvetko\nclaimed that this local Slovene should be prohibited in schools as well.\nInstead, the official Slovene national (standard) literary language should be\nthe exclusive language of instruction in Prekmurje. However, such a linguistic\ntransformation could only happen if the local Slavophone teachers, fluent in\nthe local Slovene but with a very limited knowledge of standard literary\nSlovene, improved their poor language skills. A cohort of \u201cnative\u201d local\nSlovene teachers should, Cvetko concluded, take courses in the standard Slovene\nnational language and pass the test of fluency to continue teaching in\nPrekmurje elementary schools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To his meticulously written assessment of school affairs in\nPrekmurje, Cvetko attached a spreadsheet that provided the civil servants in\nLjubljana with a condensed and multifaceted overview of his findings and\nrecommendations. In this document, the future path of Prekmurje teachers\u2014 the\nimplicit common theme of the whole report\u2014came to the fore in an unambiguous\nway. Starting with the school network\u2019s organizational dimension, Cvetko listed\nschool locations in the first column of the spreadsheet, thus delivering an\ninsight into the territorial dispersion of schools. The second column of the report\nrevealed the founders and financial backers of every single elementary school.\nIn 1919, schools in Prekmurje were financed by the municipalities, by churches\n(Catholic and Protestant) or by the state itself. The third column defined the\nnumber of grades. Schools had between one and four grades, the exception being\nthe state school in Murska Sobota (Muraszombat<\/em>),\nwith five grades. The fourth column of the report focused on school attendance.\nOn average, each school was attended by a few hundred pupils, with only 50\nenrolled in Predanovci\n(R\u00f3naf\u0151) <\/em>and as many as 520 in Turni\u0161\u010de (B\u00e1ntornya)<\/em>. In the following column, the headmaster\nlisted all the employed teachers: in autumn 1919, there were 124 in total in\nPrekmurje. In the next column, these teachers were categorized according to\ntheir \u201cnationality.\u201d The spreadsheet reveals that\nCvetko labeled the majority of teachers either as Hungarians (59) or as\nSlovenes (57), but there were also four Slovaks, two Germans, a Serb and a \u201cHungarian\nSerb\u201d who taught in the region.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The last two columns, however, comprised the most interesting data,\nfor they somehow sealed the destiny of the existing teaching staff. The penultimate\ncolumn described each teacher\u2019s \u201cknowledge of Slovene.\u201d Only six of the 59\nteachers categorized as Hungarians were considered to be qualified in Slovene.\nBeside 53 Hungarians, five Slovene teachers and one German teacher were also\nevaluated as being incapable to speak Slovene. Interestingly enough, the Slovak\nand Serbian teachers\u2019 knowledge of Slovene proved to be sufficient, which was\nalso true in the case of one German teacher. Cvetko\u2019s overview of the local\nschools ended with a column euphemistically titled \u201cSuggestions\u201d or \u201cRemarks.\u201d In\nthis column, Cvetko \u201csuggested\u201d or \u201cremarked\u201d that teachers capable of\ncommunicating in the Slovene language\u2014regardless of their nationality\u2014should keep\ntheir posts, while all those with an insufficient command of Slovene should\nsimply be dismissed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On October 30 1919, the Higher School Council issued the decree that\nput an end to the period of uncertainty and conclusively regulated the question\nof language in Prekmurje schools. It seems that a decision of civil servants in\nLjubljana somehow reflected the linguistic reality on the ground. The decree\nunsurprisingly proclaimed standard literary Slovene as the language of\ninstruction in all Prekmurje schools, where supposed Slovenes represented the\nmajority of enrolled pupils. Yet the officials also left the door open for\nnecessary compromises. In those schools where teaching in the Slovene national\nlanguage was not possible due to a lack of appropriate teaching staff, the\ndecree allowed the use of \u201cPrekmurje Slovene\u201d or the \u201cdialect of Prekmurje.\u201d\nStill, the pupils educated in schools where local Slovene was used were\nexpected to acquire a satisfactory level of knowledge in standard Slovene pronunciation,\nwriting and reading by the time they finished their schooling. The decree also\nmade standard Slovene a compulsory course in places where the population was\nprevailingly Hungarian and\/or German and hence the language of instruction was\neither Hungarian or German.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The text summarizes part of the argument\npresented in the article \u201cSlovene Ethnolinguistic Nationalism as Rhetoric and\nPractice in Post-Imperial School Administration in Prekmurje\u201d (Spiegelungen. Zeitschrift f\u00fcr deutsche\nKultur und Geschichte S\u00fcdosteuropas<\/em>;forthcoming).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Material: <\/p>\n\n\n\n