Croatian School Museum's Collection of School Reports

The Collection of School Reports in the Croatian School Museum contains more than 5,000 printed annual reports on the work of secondary and primary schools in the period between the eighteenth and the twentieth century. More than three quarters of the reports come from the schools on the territory of the present-day Republic of Croatia, while the rest is related to schools in the neighbouring countries.

Standardized annual school reports of the kind printed since the mid-nineteenth century were preceded by some less informative versions variously titled as: public exams programme, school subjects content, classification of pupils, list of youth, school programme and similar. From the middle of the nineteenth century until 1918, all grammar schools were required to issue annual reports in accordance with the Article 116 of the Draft Proposal for Organisational Structure of Grammar Schools and Lower Secondary Schools in Austria, and they were also issued by other secondary schools, and also often by primary schools at the municipal or town level. Before the Teaching Gazette, a refereed journal for secondary school teachers, started to be published in 1893, the reports had always contained an academic or pedagogical debate written by one of the teachers. Information about the school usually contained the following categories: the teaching base (the syllabus), the teaching staff with a list of all teachers and subjects they taught and any changes that had occurred during the school year, any relevant orders and withdrawals related to the school, lists of topics for essays in Croatian and German, the school-leaving exam, report on the state of the library and school collections, statistical statements about pupils (in numbers according to age, domicile, religion, parents’ social class), classification of pupils per form with the names of those most successful highlighted and, finally, a notification about the following school year. Some schools would issue two versions of the report – a modest one, in form of a brochure, and a more lavish one, in cloth binding with gold lettering. Apart from their official purposes, these publicly available documents about the activities of a school were also intended for pupils and their parents. Furthermore, they afforded a comparison of the ways different schools worked. Today, they represent a valuable source of information for researching the history of individual schools and the Croatian school system in general, as well as for exploring the biographies of scholars and artists whose names can be found among the secondary school teachers or students of the period.

School reports, particularly grammar school reports, had been almost regularly published until 1918, and only a small number of schools issued their reports in the 1920s. Only in 1930, after the Secondary School Act of 1929 was passed, was a new book of regulations concerning the printing of annual school reports published (in the Educational Herald). During the second half of the twentieth century, some secondary schools continued to publish their annual reports, and their number has grown since the 1990s. The contemporary school chronicles do not have a prescribed structure, but they have retained some elements of the old school reports.

The Collection of School Reports of the Croatian School Museum was entered into the Register of Cultural Goods of the Republic of Croatia in 2013.

Dr Štefka Batinić
Library Adviser and Curator