Radivoj Radić
Univerzitet u Beogradu
Filozofski fakultet – Odeljenje za istoriju, Beograd
rradic@f.bg.ac.rs

doi: 10.19090/cit.2022.40.51-68
No. 40 (May 2022), p. 51-68

School System and Education in Medieval Serbia

Summary

“Many times where the armies that worked hard failed and the weapons of many ships, only enlightenment succeeded.” This sentence, written by Constantine the Philosopher, imbued with humanism and noble respect for learning, has universal and timeless significance. It can also be taken as a kind of proof that in the Serbian medieval environment there was an awareness of the importance of education and enlightenment. Reduced to a small part of the population, literacy was a limiting factor in education. The acceptance of Christianity, circa 870, and the acceptance of the Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabets created the preconditions for the emergence of schools and education. The creation of the Old Church Slavonic Language of the Serbian Recension was also significant, as well as the activities of Saint Sava aimed at the reorganization of the Serbian Church after it achieved autocephalous status in 1219. In medieval Serbia, there were several ways of acquiring knowledge – they included priests, monasteries, and private secular teachers. However, based on the preserved sources, it is not possible to determine which of the listed methods was prevailing. The works of art and biographical data testify to the activities of secular people as teachers. Serbian teachers acted with the permission of state or church authorities, but it remains unknown what conditions they had to meet beforehand. Over time, the Serbian pedagogical terminology was established. Although the school system and education in the Serbian medieval countries were under a certain influence of Byzantine tradition, some parts of the educational process were influenced by the Latin heritage of Western Europe.

Keywords:

Serbia, the Middle Ages, literacy, monasteries, Saint Sava, school system, Constantine the Philosopher, education, books

Submitted: 29th March 2022
Correction to the manuscript: 6th April 2022
Accepted for publication: 15th April 2022

School System and Education in Medieval Serbia by Radivoj Radić is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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