Collection of Textbooks and Manuals

A textbook is considered to be the basic school book in which scholarly and vocational topics are mediated in a systematic and didactic way with respect to the mental and physical maturity of pupils and the aims formulated by the syllabus at each level of education.

The Croatian School Museum recognizes the importance of a systematic collection and processing of textbooks within a separate museum collection, which stores the textbooks of all school subjects that were used in primary and secondary schools on the territory of present-day Croatia between the eighteenth and the twenty-first century. The materials for this Collection are obtained mostly by gifts from individuals, publishers and institutions and to a lesser degree by purchasing; recent editions are also collected. The Collection is available to all users for consultation. The Collection materials provide an insight into the development of didactic-methodological design of textbooks and manuals, into changes of textbook contents due to changes of syllabi and curricula, into school subjects, the “liberalization” of the production and marketing of textbooks and manuals and similar. It is processed digitally.

The Collection contains more than 10,000 textbooks and manuals, of which approximately 400 were published before 1850. Textbooks that are relevant in national terms (because of the author, language, place of publishing) have a priority in the collection process. Some textbooks are relevant not only because they help us trace the changes in the contents of learning or methodological approaches to those contents, but also because they reflect the wider social situation (history textbooks or Croatian language textbooks), or the ideological context of the period when the textbook was written. Textbook processing has identified certain sub-units of the collection, such as primers, reading books, school atlases, textbooks and manuals for Croatian, maths, history, geography. Because of its size and the temporal and content-related diversity of its items, the Collection of Textbooks and Manuals is an important reference site for all users and researchers interested in textbooks and manuals, as well as for those who are exploring the development of classroom teaching and of contents of individual subjects in Croatian schools during the past two centuries.

In the permanent exhibition, the textbooks are presented according to thematic units, providing a cross-section by subjects and importance. They are mostly editions from the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century that were used in Habsburg Monarchy, or Austria-Hungary, published in Croatian, Latin, German or Hungarian. It should be noted that there were primers that were published bilingually (ABC knisicza za potrebnozt narodnih skol, 1779 and Imen knisica za haszen ladanzkih uchilinic Horvatzkoga orszaga, 1823), primers for the area of the Military Frontier and those for adult literacy teaching. The reading books on display were used as the basis for reading instruction and served as supporting material in other language-related teaching. They were also used in the so-called real instruction (in the teaching of history, geography and natural science), so we can say they were of an encyclopaedic type (small encyclopaedias with texts on astronomy, nature, human body and similar). There are also grammar textbooks, textbooks for grammar schools and for the subjects of mathematics, catechism, real instruction, physics, chemistry, history and geography. A cross-sectional view of the displayed textbooks, alongside other teaching aids and supporting material, reveals an appreciation of the pedagogical principle of the visual in the school of the nineteenth century.

Branka Manin, MA
Senior Curator