German School Reform in Czechoslovakia in the Period 1918-1933

The article is devoted to German move-ments for educational reform in Czecho-slovakia in the period indicated. It traces two basic development phases in German schoul reform and identifies the intellectual and institutional basis of German reform activities.
The first phase of German reform ac-tivities in Czechoslovakia, coveringthe years 1918-1925, was very strongly influenced by the political situation of the German minority after the establishment of the independent state. The reform efforts of German members of the teaching profession were characterised by a lack co-ordination and a lack of unified concept.
The second phase (1925-1933) was distinguished by the emergence of co-ordination centres and institutions that sought to produce a unified German reform concept in the school area. The founding of the Free German Work Association of German Teachers at General and Municipal Schools (Freie Arbeitsgemeinschaft deutscher Volks- und Bilrgerschullehrer) in 1925 was a major landmark in the development of German school reform. The German Work Association for New Education (Deutscher Arbeitskreis filr Neugestaltung der Erziehung), founded by an important leader of the German reform movement in Czechoslovakia, Karl Metzner in June 1927, likewise worked actively on a plan for school reform. The development of the German school reform movement in the CSR was also assisted by new professional journals, especially the monthly Sudeten German School (Sudetendeutsche Schule) and the Educational Yearbook (Pádago-gisches Jahrbuch).
Despite all these efforts the German teaching profession in Czechoslovakia failed to accept a unified conception of school reform of the kind achieved by Czech teachers organised in the circle of docent Václav Příhoda. A minority of the German teachers sympathised with the pragmatically orientated Czech reform of the „Příhoda“ wing, but the majority of German teachers in the CSR inclined to German pedagogic tradition and rejected a pragmatic approach.
The following article offers what is the first comprehensive analysis of the German educational reform movement in the school field in Czechoslovakia up to the eruption of economic and political crisis in 1933 and this fills a gap in the educational history of the interwar period in the CSR.