A Contribution to the Fundamentals of Technology – a New Optional Subject at the Basic Nine-Year School

The efforts for modernizing education at the Basic Nine-Year School, i. e. its bringing into harmony with the dynamics of the development of science and technology and practical needs, have resulted in a demand for an optimal solution of technical education of pupils according to their differentiated interests in technology. The current analysis of the problems involved has resulted in a suggestion, which is a kind of working hypothesis, that a new optional subject — fundamentals of technology — should be introduced in the upper forms of the Basic Nine-Year School. The study is a partial result of the first stage of the research into this complex problem. It deals, above all, with an analysis of the stages and the laws of the development of technology, the consequences of technical development for education, the contemporary state and perspectives of technical education at the Basic Nine-Year School, the way this problem is tackled abroad, it gives the author’s own suggestion for the conception of the new optional subject, and concludes by giving some of the results of the research and perspectives of further work.