Classics in Croatia

Teaching Classics Worldwide, 2024

INTRODUCTION In Serbian secondary education, classical languages are part of the traditional and uniform school curricula, within which the vast majority of the same subjects have been mandatory since at least the late 1980s. Despite individual revisions or attempts at educational reforms since the early 2000s, high school teaching practice of classical languages has not sufficiently progressed in terms of focus and methodology. The presentation below will be accompanied by some of the findings from responses by fifty-seven high school Latin teachers to a survey conducted in September 2023. Since Greek is mostly a separate case, it is best addressed individually. On the university level, classical languages are studied as the mandatory component of classical philology and as more or less elective at various other programs (Romance Languages, History, Archaeology, etc.) https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/teaching-classics-worldwide-9781350427631/

Symposium Abstracts, 2013

The field on which our group focuses remains largely a terra incognita — the fate of classical languages, those who taught them, those who studied them, those who championed them, and those who tried to suppress them, in what Churchill once called “the ancient states” behind the Iron Curtain that stretched “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,” defining a significant part of Europe dramatically changed after WWII. This new Europe was not homogenous: the situation of classics evolved in a variety of ways depending on each country’s cultural and historical affinity to Classical Antiquity — and on the harshness of the local regime in exercising control over education and intellectual life. Regional differences run parallel to the evolution of the local communist regimes and their own high and low periods. Official attitudes towards classics ranged from fostering ideologically promising fields of research and publication, while practically banning others, to prescribing detailed school curricula, specific selections of authors and texts and grammar exercises toeing party-lines, to treating classics with benign neglect, as quaint, out-dated, and doomed to oblivion. The sources for such research are clearly diverse, ranging from official proclamations and other documents in state archives to textbooks, scholarly journals, newspapers, and personal testimonies.

International Journal of Arts, Humanities & Social Science, 2023

The paper analyzes the position of ancient history in primary school history teaching. Three program documents for history teaching, The Syllabus for Primary Schools from 2006, History Curriculum Proposal from 2016, and History Curriculum for Primary Schools and Gymnasiums from 2019, are compared and analyzed with respect to the prescribed teaching contents related to ancient history. The paper also analyzes history textbooks before and after the 2019 reform, comparing textbook topics and the number of pages dedicated to ancient history, as well as the relationship between the histories of the Ancient East and Egypt, ancient Greece, and ancient Rome.

Note: The course was not aimed at prospective Croatian philologists, and I had to mainly rely on anglophone scholarship. As a result, in many cases the choice of reading materials is far from being ideal. The course is an interdisciplinary survey of multilingual and multialphabetical Croatian medieval written culture, with an emphasis on the social history of languages (Latin, Croatian Church Slavonic, Old Croatian), scripts (Latin, Glagolitic and Cyrillic) and various types of writing, from literature to pragmatic literacy. By the end of the course, students will gain a nuanced understanding of medieval Croatian culture in a broader European context. They will also be familiarized with the current interdisciplinary research trends in the studies of medieval communication.

2016

The aim of this thesis is to provide Croatian teachers with the necessary theoretical framework for incorporating English literature into English language classes, paired with two practical examples of EFL lesson plans. The lesson plans have been developed conforming to the guidelines of Croatia's Comprehensive Curriculum Reform, which is presently awaiting to be implemented into several schools on an experimental basis. Both lesson plans closely relate to the Croatian literature and language subject because they develop either a thematic or contextual aspect of a specific literary work, pertaining to the proposed list of Anglo-Saxon literary works. However, the second relates also to a content-teaching subject, History. These might serve as a guideline in devising integrated language, literature and content lessons, whose main objectives are to develop students' critical thinking, stimulate personal growth, and reinforce their language skills.

Classics and Communism 2, 2016

The core of the volume is devoted to the teaching of classical languages in schools and universities. As it became clear from the outset of the present research into the fate of classics under communism, the situation was different in each of the countries under Soviet domination, and even in each Soviet republic. The common denominator - communist ideology - ensured only a shared general direction; national realities and factors, such as tradition, history, educational systems, affinity with Greco-Roman antiquity, and religion, were decisive in shaping widely divergent features and attitudes.

2020

While the stars of Croatian "women's literature" continue to forge their own styles, a new generation of post-feminist writers has emerged in the crossover between literature and journalism. One theme common to much new Croatian writing is the postwar experience, with authors using marginal characters to explore existentialist tensions between individual and society. Yet what really makes contemporary Croatian writing interesting is the variety of individual literary approaches, writes Andrea Zlatar.

Journal of Croatian Studies, 2018

Specific characteristic of the Croatian medieval culture is the fact that cultural heritage is preserved in three languages (Croatian, Latin and Old Church Slavonic), and that these languages were written in three different alphabets (Latin alphabet, Glagolitic letters and Croatian Cyrillic script). All these languages and scriptures today can be seen in various epigraphic inscriptions, as well as in diplomatic and narrative sources. It is important to stress that the most of these extant sources are more or less directly related with the Benedictine Order, who is the eldest monastic order within the Catholic Church. During the Middle Ages Benedictines, with their abbeys and monasteries, played a key role regarding the development of European literacy and Christianization of Europe. They had the same role in medieval Croatia, where they brought Latin alphabet but they also helped in the spread of Glagolitic scripture and Croatian Cyrillic alphabet. Their most important monasteries in Croatia were in Rižinice (near Solin), St. Chrysogonus and St. Mary in Zadar, St. John Evangelist in Biograd (later Ss. Cosmas and Damian on the island of Pašman), St. Peter in Selo (in Primorska/Donja Poljica), male and female convents in Split, abbey of St. Lucy on the island of Krk and abbey of St. John the Baptist in Povlja on the island of Brač. All these monasteries were deeply involved in all the processes of development of Croatian literal and verbal culture, and monks of Benedictine order in Croatia wrote in all three alphabets. One has to emphasize that such involvement in the Croatian trilingual culture was not characteristic to any other later monastic order.

Ongoing list of studies of Croatian and Serbian history textbooks

In the post Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina, a state in which the war ended in 1995, there still exist unsolved issues considering the complex traditional, religious and national structure. The same applies to the system of education Considering the changed social circumstances, new state organization and formation of government, even with all constitutional principles and legal regulations, it is very diffi cult to establish normal courses of social functioning. In that respect, education is struggling with systematization, especially due to different national, political, traditional and especially language interests of the people in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Nevertheless, in spite of the diffi culties, some solutions in education were achieved. Each constitutional nation in Bosnia and Herzegovina has its own educational system which permeates into the others, complements others in an agreed reciprocity and correlation and in that way manages to establish a common but complex system of...