Efforts to Reorganize and Unify Municipal Education in Bohemia in the 16th and Early 17th Centuries

This paper deals with the complex problem of development of the municipal school system and education in the period characterized by the onset of the Counter-Reformation, which laid a great emphasis on the upbringing of young people and on schooling in particular, for the latter was to become one of the principal means of influencing, and winning back to the Roman Catholic faith, members of the Reformed Churches. The autor deals especially with the problems of the countrys Utraquist (Reformed Church) education system (which was in a majority) and pays attention to the way the Czech Reformation society reacted to the onset of the Counter-Reformation in the field of education and moral training, the way it sought to reorganize and unify all its educational experience it had gathered till then. By analysing and characterizing some significant school regulations and teaching rules issued for municipal schools under the supervision of Prague University the author demonstrates the gradual process of transformation of the Czech Particular School into a school in the humanistic sense, which was also in line with the specific demands of the Czech urban society. He shows that the conception of school and education in the pre-White-Mountain Czech State (i. e. in the Czech State prior to the year 1620) corresponded with the postulates of Erasmus of Rotterdam or Juan Luis Vives more than with the model of the German Lutheran school although it was connected with it, too, in many aspects. Introduction of all these school regulations into everyday school practice was not a simple matter and Prague University did not have enough strength and means to push through their adoption by all schools so that the new demands on teaching and the unifying tendencies inherent in them might be fully complied with. Individual school regulations clearly demonstrate the basic development line of the gradual transformation of the Czech municipal school.