(CZ) Akcelerácia a socialistická škola
(EN) Acceleration and the Socialist School

In the introduction the author proceeds from a critical assessment of the educational system in the pre-Munich bourgeois republic. It was a typical reactionary bourgeois educational system, which was socially unjust. It helped to reproduce the working class from the working class and the bourgeoisie from the bourgeoisie. The influences of the Marxist-Leninist ideas began to penetrate into educational theory and practice as early as that period, but their impact increased and intensified only after the formation of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Since its foundation the Party has been paying constant attention to questions of education. During the Slovak National Rising the first act of the Slovak National Council was to bring all schools under the state system. The author mentions concrete measures and resolutions documenting the Communist Party’s efforts for democratization in the field of education policy. In the next part of the article the author gives statistical data demonstrating the quantitative development of our education from the liberation of our country until today. He compares the data for Czechoslovakia as a whole with the data for Slovakia, whose development is particularly impressive. He compares all the stages of education and types of schools, the numbers of teachers and pupils. He points out that our education has gone through a revolutionary development. The whole educational system has been reconstructed and changed from an instrument of the bourgeoisie for the maintenance of its power into an instrument of the working class for socialist construction. The rapid development of the economy, the social sphere, the level of education, culture and politics has also been reflected in the development of man. The accelerating development of the history of mankind has also »forced« the development of the personality of man to become accelerated. Not only in the somatic field, where it is most conspicuous, but also in the mental field of development. The revolutionary change in the history of our country since its liberation has made the author of the article undertake an extensive research into mental acceleration of child development in Slovakia. He took the unique opportunity to embark on the research, considering an especially favourable circumstance for such a research: during the period of national oppression in 1941 the author carried out an extensive research into the intellectual and technical level of children’s drawings in the elementary schools in Slovakia. (Research into children’s drawings, Bratislava, State Publishing House, 1946.) The author repeated the same research after more than twenty years, using the same methods, at the same school localities. He evaluated the results of the two researches according to the same criteria and compared them. He found that our schoolchildren in the conditions of a universally accelerated development of our socialist society are developing in an accelerated way. The accelerative increase in the mental level of six-year-olds since 1945 is two years in villages, one-and-a- half year in small country towns and one year in larger towns and cities. The author has analysed the psychological, sociological, and pedagogical aspects of the acceleration in the development of the child. However, he has not confined himself to finding out and stating the development acceleration, but he has gone on to investigate how our socialist school makes use of the above-mentioned accelerative increase in educational work. He has ascertained that the school does not develop this increase systematically, but on the contrary reduces it year by year. The research has exposed the immense sensitiveness of exogenous influences on the development of the child and disclosed latent rational potentialities in children’s development, which are far from being made full use of in the educational process. Considerable attention is paid to the »problem of relationship between development and education. The relationship between development and education is considered to be one of the most important relationships in pedagogy, which until recently was paid little attention to. The author surveys the history of the solutions to this relationship, which especially Soviet psychologists and educationists are elaborating experimentally from the positions of Marxist-Leninist philosophy. In order to make use of the mental reserves in the development of children at pre-school age and junior school age, our socialist school should, in the author’s opinion, pass as soon as possible from the level of empirical thinking, by way of abstraction, to theoretical and scientific thinking. The reproductive school with the »didactic of memory« must give way to an active, dynamic, creative school. The acceleration in child development in a socialist society opens up new and great possibilities in the socialist formation of the child. This means, at the present time, and also in the sense of the Resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Slovakia of July, 1973, to shift the emphasis from the quantitative development of our school system to its qualitative development.