Croatian school textbooks breathed a Romantic love of the fatherland  and (South-)Slavicist commitment within the official discourse of Croatia’s status as a subaltern kingdom under the Habsburg Monarchy. Accordingly, they celebrate nationality and the nation’s Slavic culture and glorious past while enjoining loyalty to the Crown, and especially to Emperor/King Franz Joseph.

Throughout all reforms of the Croatian education system in the 19th century, the stress on language, geography and national history remained unchanged. Language was considered to be the “soul of nation” and was in Croatian curricula (and indeed in Serbian ones) always listed immediately after religion. In the public debate over the 1874 education law (the first that could be drafted locally by the Croatian parliament or sabor, and sponsored by the then-ban Ivan Mažuranić), language and religion were accordingly foregrounded. The new law divided the language education into reading, writing, grammar, spelling and composition. The Cyrillic alphabet having already been introduced into Croatian schools in 1861, school children, depending on their nationality, could be taught to read in Latin or Cyrillic respectively; textbooks were expected to contain both alphabets. In line with the tenets of the earlier Illyrian movement, with its orthographic and dialectal standardization and its emphasis on Serbian-Croatian interrelations, primary-school textbooks were based on the axiom that, language being the very backbone of national identity, Croats and Serbs, speaking one and the same language (albeit differently-labelled and using different alphabets), belong to the same nation. The same notion of Croat-Serb identity was at work in the teaching of both Croatian and Serbian history.

Secondary-school textbooks also endorsed the tenets of the Illyrian movement, but there was a generational shift in orthographic preferences. While the authors from an older generation (Antun Mažuranić, Matija Mesić, Adolfo Veber-Tkalčević) intended to see the South-Slavic movement embrace not only Croats and Serbs but also Slovenes and Bulgarians, the second generation, active after the 1874 reforms, showed the influence of Vuk Karadžić (after whom they were known as “Vukovites”, vukovci).

At elementary-school level, national history was not a separate subject; it was taught, however, in the context of geography and natural science. In the secondary schools, there were textbooks dedicated to history. The history readers stressed the medieval and pre-modern period: the Croats’ early conversion to Christianity (being the “bulwark of Christianity” bestowed primacy among all the Slavs), the formation of the medieval Croatian kingdom, and its relations with Hungary. Contemporary subjects and political developments were avoided: the most recent events thematized were the Croatian-Hungarian Agreement of 1868, and Austria’s occupation of Bosnia and Hercegovina (1878). The Illyrian movement itself was discussed only in literary-cultural terms. Even so, the history curriculum, in combination with the information in the readers and geography books, made for a clear national-Croatian emphasis.

Croatian secondary textbooks in geography stress population and religion questions, with the language question playing only a marginal role. The equation of language and nation was no longer prevalent. The previously established idea that “Croat and Serb are two names for one and the same people” eroded when the Party of Rights (with Vjekoslav Klaić as a salient representative in the field of letters) refused to acknowledge the existence of Serbs in Croatian lands, and instead endorsed the claim that Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia were Croatian historical lands. Although these views were not shared among all educationalists, they were introduced into the classroom because of the growing popularity of the Party of Rights among young intellectuals, teachers and clergy in the 1880s and 1890s.

The main innovation of the 1874 law was that curriculum control shifted from religious authorities to the state: Mažuranić in his address to the Croatian sabor stressed the importance of “defending the control of the state over public education”. Only state-authorized textbooks were permitted, and except for those teaching religious instruction, all teachers were civil servants under local school boards and ultimately under the State Education Commission (consisting of one state official, one representative of each religion and six public-school teachers). This had the effect of placing the Serbian minority (which constituted about one-fourth of the population) under Croatian state rule (as opposed to that of the Serbian Orthodox Church). This resulted in tensions which originated not only with the Serbian Orthodox authorities, but also with the Croatian radical nationalists, who pursued a programme that was in equal measure anti-Hungarian and anti-Serbian.

These tensions persisted after a fresh law was enacted in 1888, which made important concessions to the Serbian Orthodox Church. The language of instruction was for now called “Croatian or Serbian”, and the use of Cyrillic was prescribed in localities with a Serbian majority. These debates were largely about primary education; in the secondary school types, the curricular emphasis shifted to the classics and/or to German and French as modern foreign languages.