In this article the author deals with the teaching activities and pedagogical ideas of an outstanding Slovak teacher in the period of the bourgeois Czechoslovak Republic, the national artist Petr Jilemnicky (1901 — 1949). He gives a brief outline of his biography, his work as a teacher and as an artist The core of the article is a summary of Jilemnicky’s main pedagogical ideas. In his classroom practice Jilemnicky introduced many progressive principles of the arising Socialist pedagogy, the principles of character training in classroom instruction, object teaching, and the like. His theoretical articles contain interesting ideas concerning the problems of moral training and education, the problems of children’s literature, the Soviet school, and the methodology of teaching subjects. A great deal was achieved by Jilemnicky also in the field of pupils’ social welfare.