Anthropological and Didactical Evaluation of the Implementation of Nine-year School in the Context of Slovene School Development

Abstract

The development of school towards a paradigm - partial or holistic, transmissive or transformational, automatic or holistic - depends on the answer to a basic anthropological question, i. e. whether school educates a divided or integrative individual and human personality. The question is whether this open, limited and mortal person can be holistic. To a holistic person just a holistic education suits. Our aim is to determine whether the curricular reform, completed in 1999, put forward a thorough anthropological transformation from a divided to a uniform person reflected in the relation between the existent eight-year and the evolving nine-year school.

By comparing the learning, teaching and thinking styles in the eight- and nine-year school (on a small random selection of 3 nine-year and 3 eight- year schools), we have tried to establish whether the characteristics of the transmissive school model have already changed in some respect and in which terms they are supposed to change in order to make the teaching and learning human being - homo educator and homo educans - more uniform.

In transformation school, teaching styles denote learning in the broadest sense. This means the use of such flexible styles of teaching, thinking and learning that entail many layers of existence and not just one, e.g. the rational or the empirical. At the outset we observed didactical performance and/or improvement in teaching one scientific and one social subject and one language at the six chosen schools. We have based our findings on interpretation of the empirical research instruments, e.g. questionnaires and interviews for teachers and students.

Most of the Slovene primary schools are still of the eight-year. The curricular reform has not yet gained ground. Therefore, no unambiguous answer can be given to the above mentioned question. However, it is encouraging to note that there are signs of a transformation process in the eight-year school even though it is probable that the transmission model is prevailing due to the known factors.