(CZ) K problematice obsahu vzdělání v našÍ škole
(EN) The Problem of the Educational Content of Our School

The author has tried to analyse the way in which the question of the educational content of our school has hitherto been handled. In the twenty years’ development involving an ever-increasing amount of experience, this appears to be a very complex problem. This complexity results from the inner structure of the given problem, whose focus is the meeting point of the following factors to be considered: the educational aims determined by the requirements of society, then the work of the pupil who to the light of these aims is to master the educational contents, and finally the work of the teacher who is trying to find the most suitable media and to create the most favourable conditions for contributing to the development of such an educational process that would make it possible to achieve a synthesis of these five factors. This complexity further appears in the dynamic of handling the given problem, in its development where two periods can be clearly distinguished. In the first period (approximately from 1948 to I960) two viewpoints predominated in the handling of this problem: the view of a new quality of the educational content which was to be in keeping with the new socio-historical reality, i. e. with requirements of the society engaged in building socialism; then the viewpoint of a new quantity of the educational content which enabled the largest possible number of pupils and citizens to take part stages of education. In the second period however, the quantitative aspect was being influenced more and more by the unprecedented expansion of science, technology and culture, and by the necessity to face up to this growth of knowledge, experience and values in the concept of the educational content in view of the limited possibilities of the school and the physical and mental capacities of the pupils. This was accompanied by the emergence of a need for a new quantitative reform of the educational content which would allow science and the modern spirit of science and culture to penetrate into the centre of the activities of the broadest masses of people and to free man for creative activities which would give the world and man himself a real human face. The Marxist pedagogy in its initial stage of development was not in a position to grasp this complicated problem in all its complexity. As a rule, individual structural components of this problem and the changes gradually taking place in the concept of the quality and quantity of the educational content were being solved separately, in isolation and incompletely. The author concludes, however, that Marxist pedagogy is gradually beginning to overcome these shortcomings so that what is taking shape prospectively is a new concept of the educational content in which its structural components and developing changes are getting closer to a qualitatively and quantitatively new synthesis. Therefore, the author looks upon the whole period of Marxist pedagogy from its beginning in 1948 up to the present as a period during which it gradually became conscious of itself and shaped itself.