Before analysing and appraising the educational activities of Ľudovit Štúr, a leading personality in Slovak political and cultural life in the forties of the last century, the author gives a brief outline of education in Slovakia in the first half of the last century.
He shows how school curriculum and school organisation reflected the interests of the ruling class — the aristocracy; he points out that the standard of education was very iow m that period because the aristocracy was not interested in educating the common people.
Ľudovít Štúr’s educational activities, his struggle for a Slovak school and for its improvement in organisation and content, formed an integral part of his progressive political programme. Štúr understood that the education of youth could not be divorced from the immediate political tasks, such as preparing them for life, for cultural and political work among the people. He laid great stress on moral education, which would make young people see the purpose of their lives in devoted, disinterested work for the benefit of the people, in subordinating their personal interests to those of the nation.
Štúr lived in a period when the process of welding Slovaks into a nation was culminating, when the Hungarian ruling class was stepping up its efforts to suppress the Slovak nation and absorb the Slovak element into the Hungarian nation. These efforts found their most flagrant expression in education. In his »Slovenské národní noviny« (Slovak National Newspaper) Štúr made the question of the Slovak national school the main point of the Slovak national political programme. He succeeded in arousing the interest not only of the teachers, but also of a far wider range of national intelligentsia. Never before had these questions been handled in our country with such a deep and all-round attention.
The author concludes this study by pointing out that Štúr’s pedagogical works have not lost anything of their value and freshness even after a hundred years; that they must be thoroughly studied as they teach us the love for the people, perseverance and Consistency in solving all the problems of our socialist education.