ДРЖАВНЕ ШКОЛЕ У КОСОВСКОМ ВИЛАЈЕТУ (1876–1909)
STATE SCHOOLS IN KOSOVO PROVINCE (1876–1909)

Summary/Abstract: Education was one of the key segments of the transformation of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. The modernization of the school system was based on European experiences embedded in the traditional Islamic system. Reforms of the educational structure during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were consolidated by the Regulation of Public Education from 1869, and their implementation was most noticeable during the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II (1876–1909). The effects of the reform efforts can be traced in special state documents, the Yearbooks of the Ministry of Public Education, which record the structure and arrangement of all educational institutions throughout the Empire, for each vilayet individually. The paper analyzes the structure and layout of primary and secondary schools on the territory of the Kosovo vilayet, border territory. Primary schools were traditional, religious, sibjan schools or modern, ibtidaje. Until the eighties of the nineteenth century, the vilayet government rapidly opened sibjan schools, especially in areas with a majority Muslim population, and after that it gave priority to ibtidaiya, due to competition with foreign schools. High school students could be educated in rusdia, modern high schools or idadi, lower gymnasiums. Secondary schools were financed from the local fund and therefore there were much fewer of them than primary schools. On the territory of the Vilayet, more than forty rushdi worked, only two idadi and four professional schools. This dualism of educational institutions reflected the complexity of the Ottoman educational system because different institutions functioned side by side at the same educational level, without clearly demarcated curricula. Students could choose between different institutions at the elementary and high school level. The expansion and number of state schools in the Kosovo vilayet, an ethnically and religiously heterogeneous territory, had not only pragmatic goals, but was the government’s response to the national pretensions of the Balkan peoples. Additional problems of the local authorities were the lack of funds to finance the growing number of schools, as well as the lack of qualified professional staff.

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