(CZ) Východiska dalšího rozvoje 1. stupně základní školy
(EN) Starting Points for Further Development of the Junior Basic School

The success of the further development of our Junior Basic School (i. e. for six to eleven-year-olds) will depend on how far this grade of school — as well as the whole of our educational system-will meet the requirements of a developed socialist society. Its development, however, is influenced by the changing level of child development under the new conditions as well as by traditions which have gradually been formed in the course of the evolution of this grade of school; it is also influenced by the degree of knowledge of pedagogical and psychological laws governing education and junior schoolchildren’s development. These influences are reflected not only in fundamental educational policy decisions but also in partial measures concerning subject- matter, teaching methods and organisational matters aiming to improve educational work at this type of school. If this educational work is to become an intelligent and efficient complex of stimuli aiming at an all-round development of the child’s personality, it is necessary to find the most effective way of influencing the didactic system at this grade of school. In the system being verified this function is supposed to be fulfilled by more broadly conceived syllabi together with comprehensively elaborated targets of Communist education, with a well-considered system of subject-matter and suggestions for making methods more activating and for a more purposeful organisation of the teaching process as well as children’s hobby activities so as to make it possible to start with specialized instruction as early as the fifth year instead of the sixth year of the Basic School, which has been the practice so far. The verification of the new conception of education of children at the Junior Basic School in a four-year cycle is scheduled for a period of at least five years* It is going on at 118 Basic Schools with emphasis being laid, above all, on its comprehensiveness, for the proposed changes in the conception of Individual subjects on the curriculum have already been verified in preliminary experiments. The difficulty of this approach consists in the fact that it is necessary to solve simultaneously some theoretical questions concerning moral education and instruction of school-children in the six-to-eleven age group as well as the didactic questions concerning individual subjects on the curriculum of the Junior Basic School.