This contribution looks at the professional and regional associations of Slovenian teachers in the Habsburg monarchy and in four successor countries after WW1 (Kingdom of SCH / Yugoslavia, Italy, Austria, Hungary). What was the contribution of teachers’ associations from the 1860s onwards towards shaping the professional awareness of teachers, to general cultural development and to the Slovenian national movement? Differences in both ideological standpoints (Liberal, Catholic, to some extent Social-Democratic) and in linguistic/national orientations shaped the dynamic development of teachers’ societies and their journals (Učiteljski tovariš/Teacher commrade, Popotnik/Traveller, Slovenski učitelj/Slovenian Teacher, Laibacher Schulzeitung/School Newspaper of Ljubljana). The article also draws attention to what was written in these publications about foreign education systems as an exchange of pedagogical incentives, examples and warnings. In their diversity and political combativeness, educational newspapers were more polemical with Slovenians who held different ideological persuasions than with, for example, German oriented teachers’ organisations. This meant that teachers’ societies and their associations occasionally formed links at the regional or state level (in the Austrian half of the monarchy), and at other times along ideological and/or linguistic lines. Thus in 1889 Slovenian teachers’ associations combined into an organisation, the very name of which hinted at the inclination of the Southern Slavs to combine within the framework of the then state (Zaveza avstrijskih jugoslovanskih učiteljskih društev / The Federation of Austrian Yugoslav Teachers in Ljubljana). Leanings towards a pan-Slav association were thus alive even before World War One among the teachers’ societies of both Liberal (association Zaveza) and Catholic orientation (Slomšek society), even though the latter also felt affinity with German Catholic societies. The development in the new Yugoslav state after World War One of a Slovenian body of teachers was marked on the one hand by attitudes to “Slovenism” and “Yugoslavism” and on the other by the polarisation between Liberalism and political Catholicism. After 1926, Slovenian teachers were mostly organised in the Slovenian part of the joint Yugoslav teachers’ organisation (UJU/JUU) and were also more open to international links and cooperation, and to internationalism. The experience of the Slovenian educational system and of teachers in the other three neighbouring countries (Italy, Austria, Hungary), where after World War One as much as a third of Slovenians still lived as an unrecognised national community, was tragic and marked by the intolerance prevalent during the time between the World Wars.