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Historical Background
| | | | The education system established shortly after Greece gained independence was the result of a combination of the French Elementary School Law of 1833, the Bavarian system of secondary education, and the pre-World War I German university system. Between Greece's independence in 1832 and the early 1990s, many elements of that system survived with very little change under a great variety of political leadership. The major factors in this stability were the obligatory use of Katharevousa, the artificial official state language; poor funding of education; centralization; and the influence of the Orthodox Church of Greece on secular schools. Until 1976 employment in business and the civil service required fluency in Katharevousa, creating a vicious cycle that sustained the language in schools spite of its distance from spoken, or demotic, Greek (see Language , this ch.). In the twentieth century, a half-dozen reform programs failed to make a significant impact on the system's reliance on traditional subjects and teaching methods. In 1974 the collapse of military rule and the Karamanlis government's quest for membership in the EC began a wave of new legislation aimed at closing the gap between Greece and other European countries, especially in the realm of technical education. Touching all levels of Greek education at varying depths, the reforms continued through the 1970s. The 1976 reform changed the number of compulsory years in the basic schooling cycle from six to nine and revamped the technical education program. The 1977 reform made technical education more widely available, with the aim of increasing the ratio of graduates with practical rather than academic expertise. Adult education was also decentralized in 1976. In the 1970s, there was a new emphasis on mathematics, the physical sciences, analytical thinking rather than rote learning, and individualized teaching.
Meanwhile, the rapid urbanization of the 1950s through the 1970s put new strains on the schools. As the rural population decreased, schooling in many remote areas deteriorated further because normal classes could not be filled from the local population. And the urban influx at the other end of the process forced many city schools to operate double shifts--especially once attendance became compulsory in the gymnasia (sing., gymnasium), the initial stage of secondary school.
The first PASOK government, which took office in 1981, increased education's share of the national budget by almost 50 percent in its first four years. The PASOK program also centralized primary and secondary education under the Ministry of National Education and Religious Affairs (the word national was dropped from the ministry name after 1993), standardized curricula and teaching methods, and assigned inspectors to ensure compliance. In the 1990s, demand for modernization of the Greek education system has accelerated as membership in the EC (now the EU) and continued urbanization have placed more emphasis on reaching West European standards.
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