This article deals with the development of Otokar Chlup’s work and its presentday significance. At the beginning of this century Otokar Chlup looked for a way out of the educational crisis by improving moral education. Owing to the experiences of the First World War and the revolutionary working-class movement he became convinced that under capitalism no school improvement was possible and that any such improvement was conditioned by a change of the social order. The principal scholarly contribution of his work consisted in his solving the content of school education, mainly in his theory of the basic teaching material. The contribution also consists in the method of solving the problem.