Introduction and Development of Andragogy at The Faculty of Arts of The University of Ljubljana and in Slovenia

Abstract

The first two Slovene books on the theory of adult education appeared in the 1920s, when pedagogy was becoming more and more focused on school pedagogy. Both the book by Karel Oswald (1927) and by Franjo Žgeč (1923) put forward the question of who will educate the masses of adults. Half a century later, adult education finally established its basic paradigms and foundations as a science within the University of Ljubljana. The first lectures in andragogy took place at the Department of Pedagogy, Faculty of Arts in 1973. Under the auspices of the Head of Department, Vlado Schmidt, three streams of pedagogy studies where created in 1976: school pedagogy, pedagogy of educators in residential institutions, and andragogy. The final stage in the development of andragogy studies occurred in the framework of the European project PHARE, when the independent study programme of andragogy was launched in the 1993/94 academic year with the support of several professors of andragogy from various European universities. In this paper I show where my interest in the development of andragogy originated – it grew out of concrete situations, from the people and for the people upwards – and I justify the need for a humanistically based andragogy.