ABSTRACT
During Eleftherios Venizelos' governments in the 1910s, the education reforms of 1913 and 1917 introduced demotic in the first four years of the primary schools. In the reform legislation, emphasis was placed on the 'education of the people', and specifically on the strengthening of the vocational-technical sector of the system as well as on the introduction of demotic in the primary schools. The main focus will be on the policy of teaching the non-standard Greek vernacular only in primary schools, and the question whether this served the integration of the refugee and native populations in national as well as socio-economic terms. They encouraged 'purist' education with the aim of 'combating the enemies and corrupters of religion, language, family, property, morality, national consciousness and fatherland'. Konstantinos Tsoukalas argues that education in nineteenth-century Greece was the key to upward social mobility for the rural populations and produced 'a large-scale movement from the small peasantry to the urban bourgeoisie'.
