Higher education in Serbia during the Constitutionalist regime, 1838-1858

Abstract

After 1830, the year Serbia was granted the status of an autonomous
state, special attention was given to education.
To establish institutions of higher education was quite difficult: 1. the
state had very limited resources; 2. elementary and secondary schools were
in their infancy; 3. there was lack of educated people to teach; and 4. there
was lack of educational tradition.
The first school of higher education in Serbia, Velika škola, was founded
in Belgrade at the end of 1808 and existed until 1813. It was some mixture of
a gymnasium and vocational school, but it formed the basis of higher education
in Serbia.
Several well-known Serbs, especially Stefan Stefanović-Tenka, Secretary
of Education, worked hard to elevate the gymnasium (secondary school)
to the level of a lyceum and to bring capable people from Germany and Austria
to teach. In October 1838, a Lyceum opened in Kragujevac. In the first academic
year 1838-39 it had only sixteen students. Since Prince Milos was not
successful in bringing professors from Vojvodina, Petar Radovanovic and 

Atanasije Teodorovic, gymnasium teachers in Kragujevac, were appointed
the first lyceum professors in Serbia.
The Lyceum in Kragujevac, a copy of the Austro-Hungarian lyceum
with some adaptations to Serbia’s conditions and needs, was a two-year school.
In the first year of its operation, the Lyceum was under direct control of the
Ministry of Education. However, in the academic year 1839-40, direct control
was entrusted to a professor whose official title was that of a rector.
In 1839, the capital of Serbia was moved from Kragujevac to Belgrade,
something that destroyed cultural life in Kragujevac and Belgrade soon became
the main cultural center of Serbia. In August 1841, the Lyceum moved
to Belgrade. Since Serbia needed more and more educated people, the Lyceum
gradually grew. In the second year of attendance the following courses were
taught: Roman law, criminal law and court procedure. Since the Lyceum
students had poor educational background, particularly in Latin, the teaching
of Roman law had to be discontinued after the first semester and the
Serbian Civil Code was introduced instead.
With the begining of a second year of studies in the Department of Law,
instruction at the Lyceum lasted four years—two years of Philosophy and
two years of Law. Since the Department of Philosophy had a general educational
character, those students who wanted to study Law had to graduate from
the Department of Philosophy.
In 1844, “The Organization of Public School Education” was the first
regulation of the Lyceum, a variation of the 1806 curriculum of the Budapest
Lyceum.
The Lyceum’s regulation of 1844 defined that nine professors were to
teach the courses; all of them came from abroad. Later, by introducing
additional courses, Serbs who were educated in Western Europe were appointed
professors, but because of their liberal ideology they taught for only a
short time. Then they were moved to high administrative positions from
where they could not influence directly young people.
In December 1851, the History of the Serbian people and literature were
introduced and the Serb Aleksa Vukomanović, educated in Russia, was appointed
as first professor.
By the end of 1852, Platon A. Simonović. a well-known Russian educator
of Serbian origin, was invited in Serbia by the government. In September
of the next year, he issued a new regulation, “The organization of the Lyceum
of the Serbian Principality” and the Lyceum was reorganized. He defined
that the Lyceum have three departments: Department of Law, of Natural
Sciences and Technology, and of General Education. In fact, in the Lyceum 

only the two first departments were operating.
Gradually, the Serbian government entrusted teaching in the Lyceum
to natives so that by the end of the Constitutionalist regime, in 1858, the
Lyceum counted ten native professors. All of them, except Aleksa Vukomanović,
were educated in West European Universities.
One of the biggest problems of the Lyceum during the Constitutionalist
period was its small number of students. Various sources indicate that the
main cause for a small attendance should not be sought in Serbia’s need for
civil servants and its employment policy, but in the poverty of the gymnasium
students.
Since the Lyceum students were subjected to oral examinations, their
degree of knowledge is unknown, but according to the students it was very
poor.
Until the Revolution of 1848, the Lyceum students were politically
indifferent, however, influenced by the revolutions in West and Central Europe,
they became involved. Their political activities were expressed through
their literary society, the Society of Serbian Youth, which was established
in June 1847. In 1848 the Lyceum students began to carry out non-literary
activities and therefore the government abolished the Society in June 1851.
In the 1860’s when the conditions for political activity in Serbia became more
favorable, former members of the Society of Serbian Youth, experienced
champions of liberalism, by now, began to carry out liberal ideas more successfully.
The Lyceum officially founded its library in 1845 with 319 books, one
manuscript, 119 letters and documents and one portrait.
As early as 1844, the Lyceum professors were obliged to write the textbooks
for their courses, but they lacked originality and a large number of
these books were adaptations or translations of well-known Austrian and
German texts.
During the twenty years of the Constitutionalist regime great attention
was paid to higher education and the results were noticable. The new graduates
together with the young men educated abroad began to plant the seeds
of modernization in Serbian society.