1. Case-study No. & Title:
224. Bilingual education in an ethnically-mixed area of the Prekmurje region in Slovenia: education in Slovene and Hungarian from kindergarten to secondary school levels

Keywords:

2. Author information
2.1. Author’s name:
Simona Zavratnik Zimic

2.2 Institutional Affiliation and Contact Details:
Simona Zavratnik Zimic, M.Sc.
Institute for Ethnic Studies
Erjavceva 26
SI-1000 Ljubljana

Tel.: +00386 1200 1870
E-mail: simona.zavratnik@guest.arnes.si

2.3 Date recorded
01/12/2000

3. Good Practice Information Sheet
3.1 Local Level Good Practice:
The right to education for members of the Hungarian and Italian ethnic communities has its basis in the Constitution of the Republic of Slovenia (Artricle 64: "...these two ethnic communities shall have, consistent with statute, the right to education and schooling in their own languages, ...").The responsibility for the implementation of this special right mostly falls to local authorities or municipalities within the ethnically mixed areas. The compulsory bilingual education system is unique amongst educational practices. The present case study explores its implementation in the Prekmurje region which is home to a minority settlement of ethnic Hungarians. The most distinctive feature of the region’s educational practice, is that all children, regardless of their ethnic background, attend mixed Slovene and Hungarian classes from kindergarten onwards.

3.2 Location:
The bilingual educational system takes place in ethnically mixed areas in the Prekmurje region, in north-eastern Slovenia along the Slovenian-Hungarian state border. The settlement area of the ethnic Hungarians in Slovenia comprises a narrow strip of land along the Slovenian-Hungarian border which is divided into a southern and northern part by the Slovenian settlements of Kobilje, Strehovci and Bukovica. The total area of the district is 195 km², 65 km² of which comprises the 8 settlements in the northern district, and 130 km² that is home to 22 settlements in the southern district. Administratively the area belongs to five municipalities: Hodoš/Hodos, Moravske Toplice, Šalovci, Lendava/Lendva and Dobrovnik/Dobronak.

The Hungarian ethnic community has so far remained relatively compact in spatial terms. In the ethnically mixed area they are still the most numerous population group, although the proportion of Hungarians has slowly but steadily declined. In the northern part of the ethnically mixed area they still represent about two thirds of the population, and in the southern part just under one half. For education and employment reasons, the Hungarian population migrated to larger Slovenian cities, such as Ljubljana, Maribor, Koper, Murska Sobota etc., which in addition to the compact one also created dispersed settlement.

3.3 Minority/Target Groups:
Minority: the ethnic Hungarian minority in Slovenia (and other Slovene citizens - regardless of their ethnic origin - living in ethnically mixed areas)
Target group: children, attending bilingual education (from kindergarten to primary and secondary level educational institutions) in ethnically mixed regions.

3.4 Major Actors Involved

3.5 Budget allocated by local government authorities and/or by other actors
The financing of schooling and education in Slovenia is the joint responsibility of local authorities (municipalities) and the state, i.e. the Ministry for Education, Science and Sport. The special rights of the Hungarian ethnic community in the field of schooling and education are guaranteed by the Ministry (since in bilingual kindergartens, e.g., additional financial means must be provided in order to put into practice the principle of ‘one language – one kindergarten teacher’, which means a greater number of teachers.

The Ministry ensures that bilingual schools have sufficient means to meet the additional expenses related to bilingual classes. The costs include:

In accordance with inter-state agreements, Slovenia guarantees the availability of material and other requirements for the work of education advisors in Hungarian and Italian languages.

3.6 Timeframe
This particular model of bilingual education has already quite a long history, since it has been practised in the area since the year 1959.

3.7 Local level good practice relation to national level ethnic policy
According to the Constitution of the Republic of Slovenia (23 December 1991), two ethnic groups have a status of indigenous ethnic communities or minorities. These are Italian (3064 or 0.16% of the Slovenian population according to the 1991 census) and Hungarian (8503 or 0.43% of the Slovenian population according to the 1991 census) ethnic communities, whose special rights are provided for and regulated by Article 64 of the Constitution. In addition, the realisation of these rights is morally and materially supported by the central State, which also assures the participation of these minorities in the political system from the local level to the representation in the National Assembly.

Special rights under Article 64 refer to various spheres of social life in ethnically-mixed territories. The most important of these could be summarised as follows:

In sum, the right to education and schooling in their own language is seen as a key feature of the local level implementation of national level ethnic policy, i.e. in municipalities within defined ethnically mixed areas.

4. Good Practice Description
Slovenian constitutional law: the concept of positive protection
The concept of positive protection represents one of the grounding principles of Slovenian Constitutional law, relating to the provisions on the protection of ethnic communities (minorities).

Of primary importance is the fact that representatives of the minority ethnic communities actively participate in the process of building legal norms that apply to various aspects of the development of ethnic communities. In this process they have the status of subjects, whose destiny may not be decided upon without the explicit consent of legitimate representatives from the minority ethnic communities. These representatives have the right to veto all decisions by the legislator (from the state to the local level) in matters that relate to the special rights of the ethnic minorities, and this is the most important guarantee the latter have against possible attempts by majority nation representatives to enforce developments that the minority ethnic communities would find unwelcome.

It should be noted that by actively participating in the process of building the special rights of the minority ethnic communities, which also include the right to veto, members of the minority ethnic communities exercise only a part of the (political) rights that they have as citizens of the Republic of Slovenia. They also have the (political) rights they are entitled to as "ordinary" citizens of the Republic of Slovenia. When exercising these rights, individuals decide in accordance with their world view and ideological orientation. The result of this model which grants ethnic communities dual (political) subjectivity is seen among other things in the dual voting right of members of ethnic communities.

Important guidelines for ethnic minority politics are also those constitutional provisions that remove the commonly present dichotomy in the field of ethnic minority protection – the distinction between collective and individual rights. A starting point for the protection of ethnic communities in Slovenia is provided by the concept of ethnically mixed territory and the system of collective rights which the State grants irrespective of numerical strength or proportion of members of ethnic minorities on the ethnically mixed territory. Collective rights pertain to ethnic minorities as objectively existing subjects. However, it depends on the individual members of the minority ethnic communities when and to what degree they will exercise the special rights they have been granted. The absence of a numerical clause means that the State acknowledges ethnic minorities as a particularly important element in the progress of a territory that is home to several ethnic groups.

Description of the minority population on a national and regional level
Administratively, the settlement area of Hungarians in Slovenia comprises five municipalities: Hodoš/Hodos, Moravske Toplice, Šalovci, Lendava/Lendva and Dobrovnik/Dobronak.

According to the census of 1991 there were 8503 Hungarians in Slovenia, representing 0.4% of the total population of Slovenia. The great majority of those lived in the autochthonous settlement area in the border region of Prekmurje: 7128 persons or 84% of all Hungarians in Slovenia; in the northern part, 59% of the population is Hungarian, and in the southern part, 48% of the population.

Of the 14,418 inhabitants in the entire ethnically mixed area, 7128 or 49% are Hungarians. Some 15% (around 1300) live in other parts of Prekmurje and Slovenia, especially in larger cities, which is the result of economic migration.

The 1991 census shows a somewhat greater number of people having Hungarian as their mother tongue. In all of Slovenia there were 9240 such people, that is 737 (8.7%) more than by ethnic affiliation alone. Of those, 7511 (81.4%) lived in the ethnically mixed area, 656 (7%) in the remaining settlements of Prekmurje, and 1070 (11.6%) in other regions of Slovenia.

The Hungarian ethnic community has thus still preserved the characteristics of a territorially compact community, even through it also displayed evidence of migration, as did other ethnic groups. In addition to the Hungarians and Slovenes who make up the great majority of the population particularly in rural areas, there is a sizeable number of immigrants (especially in Lendava and the surrounding towns) from the neighbouring Medmurje as a result of modern day commuting for reasons of employment and generally better living conditions, and also because of mixed marriages. Immigrants from other republics of the former Yugoslavia are less numerous.

In 1991, 14,040 people lived in the Hungarian minority settlement area. Just over half of them were Hungarians (51.7%), a good third were Slovenes (36.1%), and the remainder amounted to just over one tenth (12.2%). Of that remainder, 821 (5.8%) were Croats who had immigrated after the Second World War. It should be noted also that the Hungarian population in Slovenia has gradually declined in the post-war period, from over 11,000 persons in 1951 to 8500 persons in 1991, thus by more than one fifth. The main cause would lie in migratory dynamics, a certain degree of assimilation and negative trends in the natural movement of the Hungarian population.

The right to education for members of the minority ethnic communities
From the perspective of members of ethnic minorities, an educational system in the language of the minority ethnic community is one of the most important elements of ethnic socialisation.

Under the new Constitution (1991), Slovenia has preserved the basic framework of the educational system for members of ethnic communities that has proven itself in the post-war era to be the most effective and suitable public medium for the preservation and development of the ethnic identity of ethnic communities, while at the same time actively promoting the ideas of tolerance to ethnic differences and peaceful coexistence in ethnically mixed areas.

Bilingual Education
Prekmurje is an ethnically-mixed territory and institutionally regulated Slovene-Hungarian bilingual area in the north-eastern part of Slovenia. Due to a specific historical development, a particular model of bilingual education has been practised in this region since 1959. At the individual level this system gives the opportunity for bilingual socialisation through educational institutions, while at a social level the goal is to develop cultural pluralism in the region.

Albina Nećak-Lük, an expert on the issue of bilingual education in Slovenia, describes the bilingual education model in Prekmurje as the minority language maintenance model or more precisely a two way language equality model. Children of Hungarian national origin (the minority group) and children of Slovenian national origin (the majority group) attend classes together and receive bilingual instructions in which both languages function as languages of instruction and as subjects of curriculum. The so-called concurrent method is applied with language switching during each period.

The model of bilingual education that has been developed in the ethnically mixed territory of Prekmurje belongs among two-way models of language preservation. The aim of this specific model is the equal preservation of the two languages. The manner in which this is achieved is the formation of bilingual classes that comprise pupils of two different mother tongues.

The most distinctive feature, and this is a unique practice in educational systems, is that all children, regardless of their ethnic background, attend mixed Slovene and Hungarian classes from kindergarten onwards. Both Slovene and Hungarian are teaching languages used concurrently during each lesson for all subjects, i.e. the classes are held in both languages. In practice, in primary schools’ lower classes individual lessons are performed in such a way that each of the languages is used for about half of the time. In higher classes, i.e. from the fifth to the eighth grade, the structure of participation of each language changes: about 70% of the lesson is in Slovene, about 30% in Hungarian. The equal status of both the languages is achieved by alternating them at fixed time intervals.

In learning their mother tongue and their second language, the students are divided into two groups, since the requirements for mother tongue classes are more demanding. The teachers and other school staff are bilingual (this is prescribed by law). School documents and communications to parents are likewise bilingual.

Kindergartens
The data show that in the ethnically mixed area of Prekmurje there are 11 kindergartens (Hodoš / Hodos, Domanjševci / Domonkosfa, Prosenjakovci / Pártosfalva, Lendava I / Lendva I, Lendava II / Lendva II, Dolina / Völgyifalu, Petišovci / Petesháza, Gaberje / Gyertános, Genterovci / Göntérháza, Dobrovnik / Dobronak, Dolga vasa / Hosszúfalu). In the school year 1997/98 more than 500 children attended those institutions.

Bilingual work is therefore begun at pre-school level, when children are placed in ethnically mixed groups. Two years before entering primary school all children in the bilingual territory attend compulsory and free school-preparation classes. This is essentially a programme for the adoption of a the second language, Hungarian for Slovenes and Slovene for Hungarians.

The staff must have a command of both the languages. As a rule, the instructor communicates with a child in his or her mother tongue. The child’s ability to communicate in the second language differs considerably from child to child at the point of entry to kindergarten. This is therefore the preparation for bilingual school.

Primary and Secondary School
In the 1997/98 school year around 1020 students attended five central bilingual primary schools (Lendava I / Lendva I, Lendava II / Lendva II, Dobrovnik / Dobronak, Genterovci / Göntérháza, Prosenjakovci / Pártosfalva), and 140 students attended six affiliated bilingual primary schools in the area (Hodoš / Hodos, Domanjševci / Domonkosfa, Dolina / Völgyifalu, Petišovci / Petesháza, Gaberje / Gyertános).

After completing elementary school, students may continue their education at the bilingual secondary school in Lendava. The bilingual secondary school has four classes of grammar school curriculum, eight classes qualifying students for the profession of a technician in the field of economics, four classes training mechanical engineering technicians, and three vocational classes in the field of metal working. In the 1997/98 school year, 338 students attended this bilingual secondary school in Lendava. The number of teachers employed by different bilingual institutions in the Prekmurje region is around 130. Classes in primary schools are also ethnically mixed. The share of pupils differs in individual schools, depending on the structure of settlements. This is the so-called concurrent method of bilingual education, meaning that Slovene and Hungarian languages alternate within each school lesson across the range of subjects.

Higher Education
Different Slovenian authors, dealing with various aspects of inter-ethnic relations, have noted that for members of the Hungarian ethnic minority the continuation into higher education represents quite a problem or at least is difficult, since the demographic situation does not allow for the organisation of this level of education in Hungarian. Hungarian language and culture may be studied at the University of Maribor (there is a Professor of Hungarian Studies within the Pedagogical Faculty) and to some extent at the University of Ljubljana (where there is a Lectureship in Hungarian Studies within the Faculty of Arts and Letters). At the University of Maribor there are also courses for teachers in bilingual kindergartens and primary schools.

Evaluation of the project of bilingual education in the ethnically mixed area of Prekmurje
The special rapporteur of the European Council wrote in 1995 in his report that "the Slovenian system of education in the ethnically mixed area is unique. It is of great interest not only because it enables total implementation of special minority rights in accordance with international standards, but also because of the manner in which these rights are implemented. Its guideline is interculturalism, stressing true coexistence and the dual cultural identity of the children who attend bilingual schools" (A Programme of Case Studies Concerning the Inclusion of Minorities as Factors of Cultural Policy and Action. Bilingual Education in Slovenia. Council of Europe, Strasbourg, 1996, pp. 24).