124 Journal of Contemporary Educational Studies Vol. 69 (135)
 No. 1/2018
 pp. 124–125
ISSN 0038 0474 Editorial
This year’s first issue of the Journal of Contemporary Educational Studies 
brings a selection of three scientific papers by prominent authors from Slovenia and 
Hungary. The first two texts address the area of preschool education, presenting 
the findings of empirical research studies carried out in Slovenia. The authors of 
the first article examine some of the issues relating to children’s early literacy and 
the authors of the second one deal with the participation of preschool children.
In their article Children’s early literacy: The effect of preschool and family 
factors, Ljubica Marjanovič Umek, Kaja Hacin and Urška Fekonja present 
the findings of their study in which they set out to study the effects that the ad-
ditional activities used by preschool educators working towards the goals related 
to early literacy more systematically have on children’s achievements in several 
areas of early literacy. The authors placed special emphasis on the relationship 
between children’s achievements and the education of preschool children’s parents 
as well as some other indicators of the family’s cultural capital. Marjanovič Umek, 
Hacin and Fekonja assert that the different aspects of early literacy are interre-
lated, which indicates that early literacy in early childhood should be understood 
as a child’s holistic ability that includes various aspects of language, pre-reading 
and pre-writing competence as well as graphomotor skills. In contrast to some 
other studies that have suggested that family factors have an important impact 
on, especially , children’s language ability , the authors’ findings do not confirm the 
correlation between parental education, the number of all books and children’s 
books at home, the age at which parents begin to read to children and children’s 
early literacy. The authors assume that a reason for this may lie in the large pro-
portion of children in their sample with highly educated parents, which indicates 
a relatively supportive family environment.
Research findings typically confirm that a high-quality preschool is a sup-
portive factor affecting children’s language and early literacy development, and it 
has compensatory effects especially on children from socially and culturally less 
encouraging environments. This is supported by the findings of this study , showing 
that the children whose parents had a lower level of education and had been enrolled 
in preschool for a longer period of time told developmentally more complex stories 
compared to the children who had entered preschool at a later age.
The next article, co-authored by Sonja Rutar and Tina Štemberger,  
focuses on the issue of how children are manipulated and how they participate as 
experienced by preschool teachers and preschool teacher assistants. The authors 
start by proposing that children’s participation should be understood as a dialogic 
relationship that allows for ample opportunities for mutual listening, but also 
for standpoint adoption and committed contributions by individuals to their own  
development and that of the learning community in the field of learning and shared 
everyday life. They employed the research study , whose findings they present in the 

 Štefanc     125
article, to establish the perspectives that preschool educators adopt on the frequency 
of different levels and forms of children’s participation in preschool education as 
well as on the frequency of practices that can more appropriately be designated 
as manipulative. The educators generally stated that participatory practices were 
most frequent at the level of planning activities and events, although the authors 
write that plans, joint evaluations and reflections recorded together with children, 
which require more planned and structured participation, were less frequent. They 
emphasize that making records together with children would enable children to 
discuss issues (plans, evaluations, reflections) with other children, adults and 
perhaps parents. The highest degree of participation, when children themselves 
initiate the process and identify issues of concern and adults help them realize 
the process, is even rarer. On the other hand, the authors conclude that extreme 
non-participatory (manipulative) practice does not occur frequently in Slovenian 
preschools either. Nevertheless, they recommend further research into the area, 
in particular by including other participants in the processes of planning, imple-
menting and evaluating preschool education.
The next contribution, on the developmental phases of Hungarian educational 
sciences in the 20
th
 century, is by András Németh and Imre Garai. The authors 
examine the characteristics of the communist-socialist dictatorship in Hungary in 
the area of educational sciences. They highlight that the Hungarian communist/
socialist science of education opposed the Western-type meritocratic perception of 
science. Socialist scholars of education discontinued research based on well-estab-
lished empirical approaches to pedagogic phenomena; rather, they implemented 
the pedagogical prescriptions of the Stalinist variant of Marxism-Leninism, using 
literary epic language instead of exact scientific language. According to Németh 
and Garai, this resulted in the suppression of scientific analytical thinking. The 
authors conclude that this had a major impact on pedagogy in Hungary , which had 
been an autonomous scientific field prior to these changes. The formation of the 
essential elements of the party state created the political conditions responsible for 
changing the whole spectrum of the scientific field. The institutional frameworks 
of providing the autonomy and standards of scientific work ceased, and they were 
replaced by collective governing boards, which – Németh and Garai argue – re-
sulted in the elimination of the autonomy of scientific disciplines, which had been 
relatively independent of direct political influence.
Dr Damijan Štefanc,
Editor-in-Chief, acting