The question of the language of education has been a major concern and political battlefield of Italian, Croatian and Slovenian circles in the late Habsburg northeastern Adriatic. After a period of forced Italianization and the disappear of Croatian and Slovenian language schools, since the end of World War II, Croatian and Slovenian schools began again to be opened alongside the Italians. The aim of this paper is to discuss in particular the problem of minority schools since then, and to concentrate on the case of Italian language schools in Rijeka, attempting a comparison with the case of the Slovenian schools in Trieste. The preservation of Italian and of Slovenian languages and cultures as minorities in post war Yugoslavia and Italy, had to be reconfigured in two very different ideological and political realms. The right of receiving an education in their own language raised problems of defining Italians and Slovenes in a dramatic political conjuncture and in a dynamic multilingual environment, in the context of the Italo-Yugoslav contest and of the Cold War confrontation. The minority schools in Rijeka and in Trieste are seen as places of constant confrontation and measurement of the processes of integration of minority speaking families in the new political, cultural and ideological contexts.