The article reconstructs the development of the academic sub-discipline of theory of education at the Pedagogic Seminar of the Philosophical Faculty of Charles University in Prague in the inter-war period. Attention is focused on the position and grounding of the theory of education in the lectures of Prague professors of pedagogics and in the context of the major work, Pedagogická encyklopedie [Pedagogic Encyclopaedia] (1938–1940). The author shows that in the inter-war period theory of education was not taught as a separate discipline. The themes of the theory of education were addressed in lectures on history of education, and general educational and philosophico-educational lectures.
In this period the theory of education meant consideration of fundamental pedagogical questions and problems and was linked to basic educational research. The main pedagogical problems included not only the definition of education, formulation of the goal of education, definition of pedagogic disciplines such as what were known as auxiliary sciences, but also methodological questions of the understanding of the processes of education as they arose from the very conception of pedagogics as a science, whether natural-empirical or normative. The article analyses the grounding of the theory of education in key general pedagogical works by professors of education at the Philosophical Faculty of CU in the inter-war period. It sets out the different views of Kádner, Hendrich and Příhoda on the founding of the theory of education.