History of the Department of Educational Sciences

A Brief History of the Department of Educational Sciences

Pedagogy as a scientific discipline in Slovenia has been closely linked to the University of Ljubljana since its inception. As early as the founding of the University of Ljubljana in 1919, the Faculty of Arts also included pedagogy as a field of study, and future grammar school teachers were required to study it as a compulsory part of their studies.

In the summer semester of 1930, Dr. Stanko Gogala, also a representative of spiritual or cultural pedagogy, joined Ozvald as an external collaborator and head of the practical pedagogical seminar; three years later he also began to give lectures. Until the academic year 1937/38, the pedagogical studies did not include didactics or special methods of gymnasium subjects. In the winter semester of 1937/38, Gogala also began to develop and lecture on didactic subjects, which he then lectured on every year from the following academic year until 1942. After the capitulation of Italy, in September 1943, when Ljubljana was occupied by Nazi Germany, the collaborationist head of the provincial administration, Leon Rupnik, decreed that all lectures at the University of Ljubljana would be suspended until further notice.

The study of pedagogy was reintroduced in the winter semester of 1945/46, but on new and different ideological and political foundations. In the winter semester of 1947/48, Dr. Vladimir Schmidt, who became the leading theoretician of Marxist pedagogy in post-war Slovenia and one of the most prominent in socialist Yugoslavia, began to lecture in pedagogy as an honorary lecturer. In the winter semester of 1950/51, Milica Bergant joined Gogala and Schmidt as a trainee assistant.

From the 1950s onwards, pedagogy began to be intensively articulated and differentiated into various sub-disciplines and related sciences (educational sociology, didactics, educational methodology). At the end of the 1950s, a gradual drive towards greater professional autonomy began in the field of pedagogy, which began to shed its exclusively political-transformational role and to shift from a purely deductive to an inductive empirical knowledge of pedagogical reality.

In the 1960s, the department paid increasing attention to the development of empirical educational research methodology, and its members critically pointed out the shortcomings of the politically planned reform of first primary and then secondary education through a series of debates.

The introduction of the school counselling service in the 1970s and the development of the theory and practice of adult education and the theory of continuing education provided an important stimulus to the study of pedagogy. At the end of the 1970s, the study programme in Pedagogy began to move closer to practice, and the hitherto unified study was split into three streams - school, andragogical and home.

In the 1980s, the idea of an independent andragogy course was given more thought and, after much debate, it was introduced in the academic year 1992/93. As a result, in 1996 the Department of Pedagogy was renamed the Department of Pedagogy and Andragogy.

In 2004, the Department started to renew its study programmes in line with the Bologna reform guidelines. At the end of 2006, it was decided that the study programme in Pedagogy and Andragogy would be unified at the first Bologna level, while at the second level it would be divided into two separate programmes: the study of Pedagogy and the study of Andragogy. In 2008, the doctoral programme was also reformed, with two separate fields of study: pedagogy and andragogy.

Quoted after: 

Vidmar, T. (2019). Oddelek za pedagogiko in andragogiko: Krajša zgodovina oddelka in predmet poučevanja. V G. Pompe in B. Pihler Ciglič (ur), Slavnostni zbornik ob 100-letnici Filozofske fakultete Univerze v Ljubljani (str. 60-62). Ljubljana: Znanstvena založba Filozofske fakultete Univerze v Ljubljani.