[1] He was born of a good and old Serbian family in Ripanj, about 25 kilometers south of Belgrade at the foot of Avala mountain, on the fourth of June 1831.

[2] Milićević was an indefatigable pedagogue and a prolific writer, so that he left behind him, as the fruit of his labours, a large number of books, novels, and monographs.

When Milićević was appointed secretary of the Ministry of Education he immediately put into practice methods of the most celebrated reformers of education of the past and present, Dositej Obradović (Serbia), Teodor Janković-Mirijevski (Austria and Russia), Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (Switzerland), Friedrich Fröbel (Germany), Adolph Diesterweg (Germany), Ferdinand Buisson (France), and others.

He translated the works of the great French writers, philosophers and educators of his time, Paris in America by Édouard Laboulaye (1863); Moral History of Women (1876) and Fathers and Children in the Nineteenth Century (Vols.

Milićević translated Russian author Alexander Hilferding's history of the Serbians and Bulgarians, Pisma o istoriji Srba i Bugara, and Ignaty Potapenko's 1892 short story Istinska sluzba (True Vocation).

In his early years, Milićević acquired a love of national customs and traditions which his humanist education never obliterated, while, in addition, he learned to know the whole range of our popular literature (Narodne pesme) -- legends, songs and fairy tales which were collected and published by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić.

These circumstances explain the richness of his vocabulary and joined to an ardent patriotism they fitted him to become a political leader and a leading scholar, proponent of the Vukovian School (Vukova škola).

In the introduction of his Principality of Serbia (1876), Milićević concluded in didactic verse: "Knowledge is enlightenment, will is might, let us work, day and night."

As president of the Learned Society, Milićević enlarged the resources and number of the institution, which had hundreds of members by the turn of the century.

As an author, he wrote on the government treatment of the poor, underprivileged, and general political economy besides producing monographs on the life of Petar Jokić, a buljukbasha of Karađorđe's guard who died in 1852, and the history of Serbia in his own time.

Literary critic Jovan Skerlić classed Milićević with Stjepan Mitrov Ljubiša (1824–1878), an excellent Serbian short story writer originally from Montenegro.