Like society, like school!

Zdenko Medveš

Summary:  This article predominantly relies on the works of Gustav Šilih, Ernest Vranc and Franjo Žgeč, as well as their social engagement and communication with contemporaries, to analyze how views on education have developed in the context of modern thinking in Slovenia. The period under discussion is primarily the period between the two World Wars, when the areas of pedagogical research and action started to expand well beyond the school classroom. As far as educational theories are concerned, this period was the stormiest in Slovene history, not only because it situated pedagogy outside the school’s framework as well as inside it, but also because the birth of various educational paradigms – the bases for different emerging theories – gave pedagogy some inkling that it was losing the monopoly over the conceptualization of the theories of education. This lead to the start of an ambivalent process. On the one hand, it revealed indisputable possibilities that interdisciplinary approaches bring to the understanding of educational phenomena, while on the other hand it jeopardized the subjectivity of pedagogy as an integral scientific discipline. The culmination of the process characterized the development of pedagogy after the emergence of the great socialization theories in the last decades of the twentieth century. The article demonstrates how relevant the heritage of our ancestors still is, especially since they looked to the strengthening of the role and responsibility of the teacher as educator for the possibilities of developing pedagogy as an integral science.