Primary schooling in interwar Yugoslavia was a 4 year course. Although enrollments more than doubled between 1919 and 1940, on the eve of World War II only about 27.3 % of Yugoslav young people between five and 24 were listed in school or receiving some kind of instruction. Only about 4% of the pupils who completed primary school went on to secondary schools. Muslim parents remained suspicious of education for women, and many rural areas had no schools at all. In the late 1930s, about 40% of the population over 10 years of age was illiterate. Striking regional disparities existed in levels of literacy. While over three-quarters of all Slovenes and Croats could read and write, only a tenth of Kosovo's ethnic Albanians were literate. Yugoslavia's interwar education system was highly centralized, and instruction was exclusively in Serbo-Croatian. Macedonians and Croats particularly resented Belgrade's dominance of education; many Croatian teachers enlisted in the pro-Nazi Ustase forces during the war. World War II decimated Yugoslavia's teacher corps and damaged heavily its education facilities. In 1953, 14.5 % of the active nonagricultural population had not finished four grades of elementary school, while 63.5% had not completed the eighth grade.

Education is compulsory from ages 7 to 15 and both primary and secondary education are free. only 71 % of children of the relevant ages were listed in primary school in 1996, and only 64 % in secondary school. The overall literacy rate is 93 %, but the rate is higher for males (98 %) than it is for females.Literacy rates are not uniform among ethnic groups. Albanian girls obtain less schooling than girls of other groups, and Albanians in general have lower literacy rates. Schooling has been particularly difficult for ethnic Albanians since 1990.