The process of Sovietization in tertiary education in Slovakia, 1945–1956

Abstract

The socio- political events of 1945–1956 were characterized by several phenomena that significantly marked the formation of tertiary education in Slovakia and determined its subsequent development. In the first postwar years, several Central European countries attempted to maintain political, economic, or cultural contacts with Western countries. Universities maintained their traditional internal academic structures, organization of student enrolment, content of studies, and so on. This situation was mainly fostered by the need for national reconstruction, which at the same time masked the political pragmatism of the new, but not yet fully strengthened, people’s democratic regimes. Gradually, the universities became a priority concern of the Communist Party, whose aim was to gain ideological control over them. Soviet influence in education was exercised in the spirit of communist ideology, centralized state planning, and a bureaucratically controlled process of education marked by ideological influences. This paper aims to analyze the basic changes in educational models and the specific features of Slovak higher education systems after the bipolar division of the world.