Provincializing the Worldly Citizen examines travel to Czechoslovakia by Yugoslav educators and
students in the 1920s and 1930s in the context of educational modernization and national
identity formation. It argues that Slavic Cosmopolitanism was an important element in educating
the Yugoslav child and in the development of schooling practices in Yugoslavia. The book
examines how notions of Slavicness circulated and were related to visions of the ideal Yugoslav
linking together these two concerns - not merely to cross-fertilize Slavic studies the history
of education and the field of comparative education but as part of an effort to develop new
intellectual strategies for transnational cross-cultural scholarship. To this end it examines
Yugoslav student and teacher travel as an entry point to analyzing the regulative ideals that
were inscribed in the Yugoslav child as a future citizen. From the broadest perspective the
book offers ways of thinking about the functions of travel and schooling by exposing the
fabricated categories of ethnicity and nation as they become worked into cultural and
pedagogical ideals. In specific terms it is an examination of how interwar Yugoslav schools
produced worldly minded Yugoslavs - not just through the official curriculum but across a wide
range of cultural practices.
