Bohumil Bydžovský and Czechoslovak Education

This study was written on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of birth of the prominent Czechoslovak mathematician Academician Bohumil Bydžovský (1880— 1969), an outstanding figure in Czechoslovakia’s cultural history, whose merits for the development of Czechoslovak education and science were extraordinarily high.
With regard to the character of this journal the author does not aim at presenting a general picture of B. Bydžovský’s life and work, but he only concentrates on one particular field of Bydžovský’s many-sided activities — on his efforts to reform secondary education in the period between the two World Wars and on his part played in the struggle of progressive forces for the establishment of a comprehensive state school in the years following the liberation of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Army.
The author characterizes B. Bydžovský as one of those protagonists of the pedagogical reform movement who, under the difficult conditions of capitalist Czechoslovakia helped to pave the way for making schooling more democratic, and in the years after the liberation intensified their activities to establish a progressive educational system. In the years 1945— 1948 Bydžovský was a prominent campaigner for a comprehensive state school. Significant, too, are his merits for the development of Charles University in Prague, where he was rector in 1946—1947 and in W 8— 1949 and deputy rector in 1947— 1948 and 1949— 1950, as well as his merits for Czechoslovak scientific institutions, especially the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, whose full-fledged member- academician he was appointed immediately on its establishment in 1952. Briefly the author also touches upon his work as a mathematician.
B. Bydžovský’s views on education are documented by quotations from some of his works and speeches.