Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-xm8r8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-20T05:19:08.406Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

History Teaching in Austria and Carinthia: A Slovene Perspective∗

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Andreas Moritsch*
Affiliation:
University of Vienna, Austria

Extract

It is no secret to us history instructors that for some years now there has been a growing sense of uneasiness in our discipline on the part of pupils and students and of helplessness on the part of teachers. Pupils and students repeatedly ask what, after all, is history good for, whether what they are learning is really relevant to their lives, and whether the study of history should not be more than memorizing sterile facts for the purpose of getting grades. Paradoxically, teachers can discern a continuing and in fact ever increasing interest in history. At the same time, we cannot help but notice that the mode of questioning by the younger generation has become different as have the problems that have come with social change.

Type
Symposium (The Carinthian Slovenes)
Copyright
Copyright © Association for the Study of Nationalities, 1979 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1. Translator's note: the term “Kingdom of Illyria” was briefly used by the Habsburg government after the Congress of Vienna had confirmed Austria's resumption of sovereignty.Google Scholar

2. Inzko, Valentin, Zgodovina Slovencev, Part One, “Od zacetkov do 1918” (Klagenfurt [Celovec]: Schulbuch no. 151, 1978).Google Scholar

3. See Barker, Thomas M., “The Carinthian Slovene Question in the Light of Recent German Austrian Scholarship,” pp. 125 of this issue of Nationalities Papers.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Moritsch, Andreas, a Slovene-speaking native of Carinthia's Gail (Zila) Valley, is an instructor at the University of Vienna's Institute for Eastern European History and Balkan Studies (Institut für osteuropäische Geschichte und Südostforschung der Universität Wien. The original version of his paper was presented in May, 1978, as an address to a teachers' seminar at the High School for Slovenes in Klagenfurt. The author's suggestions found immediate approbation, and by the following July the team was formed in order to carry them out. Participants include the history faculty of both the Slovene gimnazija and other Carinthian high schools, insofar as the personnel is Slovene-speaking, as well as historians from the Universities of Vienna, Salzburg, Trieste and Ljubljana. The period 1918–1945 is being treated in the project's first phase, which will be concluded by the end of the school year of 1978–1979. Five working groups have been established, each consisting of three high school teachers plus one professional historian, and each concentrating on a single, shorter time segment. The second phase will cover the period 1945 to the present. The plan is to have the second part of the History of the Slovenes ready by the autumn of 1980. A specialist resident in the United States who would be willing to provide a summary account of Slovene emigration is still being sought. Inquiries may be sent to Dr. Moritsch at his Institute address (1010 Wien I, Liebiggasse 5).Google Scholar