The School Reform and the Teaching of History

The basic problem of the school reform is that of linking up school with life and the practice of the transition to communism. This presupposes a qualitative change, firstof all in the content of the school: to do away with verbalism and to lead the pupils to learn methods of work, thinking, and acting, and not just passive knowledge of facts.
The qualitative change requires the formation of the unity of all the content of the school reflecting the unity of the objective reality. The formation of the unity of content means that each subject contributes, in its own specific manner, to the knowledge of objective reality in harmony with science. In history lessons pupils ought to be progressively trained in such a way as to be able to make a historical analysis of any concrete situation, to be able to distinguish the new (i. e. that which is growing according to the laws of development) from the old, the out-of-date, and to know how to fight for the new.
A great shortcoming in the iteaching of history has been hitherto the fact that pupils have learned about the development of historical phenomena in the past (e. g. the system of government in ancient Rome) without having any experience form the contemporary society, and so they have shown very little interest in the difference of these past phenomena. To create a new quality in the teaching of history means, in the first pláce, to get rid of the isolation of history from the other subjects and, at the same time, to extend systematically the immediate experiences of the pupils regarding contemporary society, and to raise the interest of the pupils in current affairs.
We recommend that the teaching of history at the Nine-Year School should be divided into several cycles graded according to difficulty of the subject-matter (its basis would be Czechoslovak national history within the context of international history, studied in the 8th and the 9th year). The grading of the subject-matter from the phenomenon to the substance froih the immediate knowledge to the knowledge of laws governing all phenomena creates the pre-requisites for pupils to master the method of historical materialism.