Effects of Habsburg educational policies measured by census statistics
Effects of Habsburg educational policies measured by census statistics

Summary/Abstract: This paper is dedicated to the multi-ethnic and multi-lingual Habsburg realm, in particular as regards school education, its effects and the census registration of linguistic qualities among its population. After almost a century of German lan-guage dominance, national revival of the Habsburg peoples forced school educa-tion to renounce the upbringing of a supra-national and linguistic uniform leader-ship. Secondary and higher education gradually chose to breed new nationally conscious elites in the variety of peoples, contributing to the decomposition of the realm. Nevertheless, promotion of the ‘national languages’ resulted in wide spread bilin-gualism, at least among the middle and higher classes. This bilingualism, how-ever, was restricted to the nationalities and not implemented to Austro-Germans and Magyars, who, in their own secondary educational institutions, stuck to a vir-tually unilingual practice, a fact that, in the end, weakened their political influ-ence. This inequality has to be taken into consideration when different school types are put in a contraposition. One of the most usual ways to investigate developments in the lingual capacity of the Habsburg subjects is found in the decennial censuses, but these are presented with rigid and dichotomous concepts, just describing ethno-lingual identities, however, aphoristically equated with political ‘nations’. This asks for clearer definitions, and this paper advocates a critical reconsideration of national and linguistic concepts and definitions, as habitually used in Habsburg historiography. An exposé of different educational practices in both parts—Austria and Hungary—of the realm may serve as context to this appeal.

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