(CZ) Problémy předškolní výchovy
(EN) Problems of Pre-School Education

The period of the origin and the beginning of the development of the independent state of Czechs and Slovaks was one of clashes and crystallization of ideas as to the conception of pre-school education and the aims the pre-school establishments were supposed to serve. Looking back to a more remote past, one can see what trends and tendencies influenced their origin and development. At the beginning of the 20th century the trend of the reform movement was shaped by Anna Süssovdá and Ida Jarníková. The fifth congress of the Czech nursery school teachers in 1908 gave a definite form to the content of this movement and determined the development of the nursery school as an independent educational establishment, distinct from the initial stage of the primary school. The conception of pre-school education took shape during the work on the Nursery Schools Bill, the implementation of which, however, was impossible in the first republic. In a public inquiry concerning certain fundamental problems of nursery schools and as to who should be responsible for setting them up and running them the conception of pre-school education was formulated by Professor Jan Uher. He regarded a purposeful system of pre-school education as an important component of national culture. The work on the Bill involved, on the one hand, an appraisal of the state of pre-school education in our country as given by statistical data collected before December 31st, 1923, on the other hand a comparison with the situation of preschool education in fifteen other countries. In spite of the failure to give nursery schools a legal status, the first thirty years in the development of Czechoslovak pre-school education represent a period of creative work. It is marked by a search for its own ways and trends, and also by a co-operation with theoretical workers in different fields. This voluntary theoretical and practical co-operation represented a substitute for the work in the field of the theory of pre-school education, which did not exist as a separate field then, having neither specialist workers of its own nor a department for them to work in. The second, twenty-year period, begins with an important milestone. The Education Act providing for the establishment of a uniform system of education incorporated for the first time the nursery school into the Czechoslovak system of education. An intensive development of pre-school establishments met with a lively response on the ‘part of the public. In the qualitative development, however, there appeared some shortcomings caused by an uncritical adoption of foreign models, transferred into different conditions without preliminary verification. The working out of curricula required a lot of efforts and time, and it was done even at the expense of the actual research work. Pre-school education would benefit from a broad discussion which would be joined by theoreticians from various fields who are in any way concerned with the child of the pre-school age.