Abstract
This chapter re-examines the system and pedagogical concepts of Slovene preschools from the end of World War II to Slovenia’s independence in 1991 in order to draw up a historical context into which recent developments in preschool education in Slovenia can be better understood. Key characteristics of socialist preschooling in Slovenia in this period are explored, including the establishment of a unified system for all the preschool-aged children, from 1 year old to entry to elementary school, this extending to the introduction of the 1979 Educational Program, a central curriculum for preschools in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia. Attention is then given to some of the external and internal critiques, including those by Slovene and Yugoslav academics, contributing to some changes in practice prior to 1991 that were also connected to policy trends in non-socialist contexts. Based on this analysis of the socialist period, and the comparative work, I conclude that, contrary to more conventional assessments, the socialist period brought some important advances to early education in Slovenia that included the unitary system of preschools, a wide net of relatively high-quality preschools and the public concern for all the children in the local community.
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Notes
- 1.
The author of this chapter was the consultant (psychologist) in the largest Slovene preschool (for approximately 3,000 children) from the mid-1980s until 1991 and is currently a lecturer for developmental psychology in the Faculty of Education, University of Ljubljana.
- 2.
The author of this chapter was one of the four authors of this section of the White Paper (1996).
- 3.
The People’s Republic of Slovenia was established in 1947, soon after the establishment of new Yugoslavia. With the 1963 Constitution, it was renamed as the Socialist Republic of Slovenia.
- 4.
In comparison with 12 EU countries and USA the proportion of children between four and six in Slovene preschools was quite low (i.e. 53% of 4 year children in Slovene preschools were lower than in ten countries compared). The proportion of children under 3 years was high but hardly comparable because in the majority of countries children of that age mostly attended private institutions (White Paper 1996: 60).
- 5.
Private preschool institutions were not allowed in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia, but nevertheless there were (and still are) unregistered people who take care of one or a few children.
- 6.
Children came to preschool at different times depending of their parents’ work schedules, but most of them stayed in preschool for about 9 h. According to the Preschool Education and Care Act (1980) preschools provided the education and care for all the children in the local community.
- 7.
Each of the six republics of the SFRY had a degree of autonomy with respect to organising their own systems of ‘national’ education. The Yugoslav Communist party defined the basic values of education, however, such that the preschool systems and educational concepts across Yugoslavian republics were similar.
- 8.
Even though psychologists stress that there is no clear-cut division between work and play, in this concept play signifies everything which is not formal learning, for example, didactic games, singing and counting-out rhymes, debates and storytelling with the help of visual prompts (Educational Program 1979: 101).
- 9.
Kolar et al. (1969: 41) explain that tasks in educational work with preschool children are a form of activity with the defined contents of participation, appropriate for the age of children, and are an intermediary stage between play and work, which lacks neither attractiveness nor spontaneity, but at the same time leads to realisable goals.
- 10.
To work was one of the ideals of the socialist ideology. As all women were encouraged to be full-time employed, one of the basic educational aims in families and in preschools was to develop working habits in children (Kolar 1977: 215–216).
- 11.
Here, the coordination between family and institutional education is referred to.
- 12.
By way of comparison, let us mention the former German Democratic Republic. There, each child from the age of three could be admitted into preschool. All programs were all-day and free, and the curriculum was centrally, state controlled (Tietze et al. 1996).
- 13.
According to Early Childhood Education and Care in Europe: Tackling Social and Cultural Inequalities (2009: 10) in the EU, only the Nordic states (except Denmark), Latvia and Slovenia currently have unitary systems of preschool education and care that includes children from the age of one through to school age.
- 14.
Although the ideological aim is evident, the formation of a child’s character in accordance to the ideal of adult (self-manager) in self-managing socialistic society, it also coincides with prevailing developmental thinking of the time. James (1999) talks about the model of ‘developing child’, the most used concept in psychological research, according to which the child is ‘not yet’ adult but has the potentials to become. Flaker (1990) is even more radical saying that this view sees the child as ‘deviant’ and the childhood as ‘sickness’ which has to be ‘cured’ by education.
- 15.
Moss (in Kroflič 2011: 19) criticises Anglo-American neoliberal word in which the education of young children is still often formed as a market with private provision and as business. Such thinking is just the opposite of the idea we can find in Nordic countries and (as he knows) also in Slovenia that education is seen as public good which must engage all children and their families.
- 16.
Bergant (1981: 95) writes, ‘Within them [local communities] control over the life and needs of individual people could be re-established, as well as a closer control over the life of the youth’ (author’s emphasis).
- 17.
Criticism of the acceleration of development as the consequence of a wrong interpretation of Piaget’s theory was first made in the 1980s. Today, the constructivist interpretation of Piaget’s theory dominates early childhood education; it does not see the main aim of early childhood education to be accelerating the structural changes in the child’s thinking in order for him/her to reach a higher developmental stage, but rather supporting the child’s development (Zigler and Stevenson 1993).
- 18.
Kolar et al. (1969: 129) claim that ‘the daily schedule allows normal physical development, because it defines the time for eating, sleeping…’
- 19.
The Educational Program (1979) stipulated in more than one place what tasks (and how many times a week) the preschool teacher should carry out. For instance, once a week a directed musical task should be done for children above the age of five, in which three or four activities should be integrated (Ibid: 124).
- 20.
When a colleague and I visited the Faculty of Education in Madrid (Spain) a couple of years ago, we witnessed a much higher degree of schoolisation (i.e. the absence of any specific preschool doctrine) than Slovenia has ever known both in the education of preschool teachers and in the preschool we visited (which had been introduced to us as a high-quality one).
- 21.
Eight years ago, I wrote my doctoral thesis on the same topic (Batistič Zorec 2003), and the invitation to write this chapter gave me the opportunity to rethink my positions and arguments and put them in the contemporary context. I have tried to follow what Bradiotti (in Bahovec 1999) said ‘the power of repeating … requires memory, replacement and dedication to change’, and so I continue to evaluate history in order to know the complexities of the present.
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I thank the editors for their feedback and editorial suggestions and my dear colleague Zsuzsa Millei in particular for her insightful comments and suggestions in regard to conceptualising and structuring the chapter.
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Zorec, M.B. (2012). Slovene Socialist Early Childhood Education: Returning, Surpassing and Reinterpreting History. In: Griffiths, T., Millei, Z. (eds) Logics of Socialist Education. Explorations of Educational Purpose, vol 24. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4728-9_7
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