1 Educational developments in particular countries can best be understood when related not only to economic and cultural affairs but also to specific historical developments which play an important role; for this assists the differentiation of typical and exceptional features which is directly of moment when conducting international comparative research.

2The well known call of the Czech educational thinker Comenius (Jan Amos Komenský 1592-1670) for universal schooling, without discrimination, upholds a principle which not only surpassed proposals by his precursors and contemporaries in the period of transition from feudalism to capitalism but also those of many later educationists. It is true that by the time of the Renaissance, with the spread of Humanism, education embraced wider social strata than in the Middle Ages. But, if we consider the whole society at this period, progress – on the whole more in educational theory than in practice – affected only the privileged strata even if now representing a bourgeois point of view. Only where educational reform was directly connected with a popular movement against feudal powers did the concept of a fuller democratic education arise as an aspect of popular ideology and a social weapon. Such was the case with the Czech Hussite movement and it is in the context of this Reformation tradition that the Comenian concept of systematic lifelong education for all developed1.

3It was at the outset of the XVth century that Hussitism heralded the Czech Reformation and social, religious, moral and national aspects were clearly related in specific response to the crisis of European feudalism. A fundamental revolutionary tendency envisaging equal human rights in social life, as theoretically reasoned in the Bible, and extending to cultural life made for the concept of universal education2. It was not only proclaimed that every individual should read the Bible but also realised, especially by the radical Taborites. In Bohemia Hussitism spread to the great majority of the inhabitants, continuing after 1434, when the socially radical sector was defeated, through to 1620. In the circumstances from the second half of the XVth century onwards active endeavour for reform was channelled into the area of peaceful educational and cultural work. Literacy spread among the middle class but also more generally, thanks to the activity of the Unity of Brethren (Unitas Fratrum). The Hussite catechisms were not merely religious textbooks and the same may be said of the Czech Primer of 1547 among others3. So far as the Unity of Brethren was concerned regular school attendance was required. While it is not known how general this was it is necessary to take account also of the informal education given in the family, at church, to apprentices in the workshop and so on. More generally the Charles University in Prague, which at this time was responsible for lower schooling, produced important ideas and plans for school reform at the outset of the XVIIth century. But from 1620 such plans, indeed the progress of the Czech Reformation as a whole and the activity of Comenius in his native country, ended.

4It was, then, against the background of devastation produced by the Thirty Years War that Comenius elaborated the pansophic ideas which provided a philosophical base for his advocacy of universal education4. He never saw this as an isolated question and always took into consideration methods of education and the content of teaching. The very aim of universal education led him on to an ever deeper analysis of subject matter, to consideration of how to select from knowledge of the world what could be most important and useful for the life of men in society. Similarly, in the area of methodology, he advocated a combination of approaches designed to develop human powers and came to see Creative activity – labour – as the high road towards both individual education and social reform. For Comenius universal education is the means to attaining perfectibility, to approaching God, the highest perfection. It is also the best means of preserving and developing humanity, of guarding against physical or mental degeneration. In line with the teaching of the Czech Reformation he underlined the duty of everyone to improve himself, his environment, nature, society, the world at large. He even arrived at the concept that educational reform can only be effective when carried out as part of a broad social reconstruction. He saw education as a precondition of a rich social life and called for its extension to all peoples with developed nations helping the underdeveloped: every member of every nation has the necessary instrument – the senses, the mind, instincts and faculties, the heart, the tongue, the hands and the period of growing up. Nor should those who learn slowly be left without help – all live in the world, all men have to develop a right relation towards it. So Comenius sought to work out a system of education relating to human understanding at different ages, one in harmony with natural development and which could contribute to the integrity of personality – to summarise in modem terms.

5It may be said that Comenius’s ideas were successful in his own time insofar as they met the interests of a developing middle class. But they went beyond this at many points, notably in the concept of systematic pre-school education for all children under six and, in the mother tongue, from that age to twelve or thirteen. Outside the Unity of Brethren this aim had never been realised in the class society of his time. Despite the many contradictions in his specific philosophy Comenius voiced a prophetic view, when he related universal education to Creative working activity as a precondition for social reform for the common good, and for many years his concepts remained distant ideals. More than two centuries were to pass before they could openly spread in his native country5.

6To return now to 1620 and the defeat of the Czech State of Estates, there followed an enforcement of absolute monarchy and Counter-Reformation policies by the victorious Hapsburg dynasty which brought a cruel religious, national and social oppression – sometimes dubbed a « second serfdom ». Bohemia and Moravia were depopulated by war, famines and a vast emigration entailing the loss of the progressive Czech middle class and intelligentsia. The social pauperisation of the Czech Lands, during this « dark age », brought the destruction of established schools while the means to education were commandeered by the Jesuits6. The well developed Reformation schools and culture could only be preserved, under difficult conditions, abroad. However, given the level of popular literacy promoted by the Reformation, there was a continuance of this tradition among sections of the peasantry and the urban poor, the so-called Písmáks 7. Despite severe persecution, including the confiscation and burning of the old Czech books by the Jesuits, the Písmáks secretly taught children and were also active in a literary sense; some, having arrived at concepts close to the Deistic philosophy, remained active until the Czech national Revival of the last quarter of the XVIIIth century.

7Slovakia also played an important role in preserving the Hussite and Brethren tradition, from a position within the Hungarian kingdom which did not enforce political, religious and cultural measures such as those operative in the lands of the Czech Crown. Here there were no such laws relating to Protestant schools until 1681. Czech Protestant exiles could settle in Slovakia after 1620 and publish books – the Czech language being the literary language there until 1844 – and Comenius freely visited congregations of the Czech Brethren where his textbooks continued to be used and many Slovak educationists followed his ideas after his death. Every Protestant family in Slovakia had the Czech Bible of Kralice and the Czech hymnbook Tranoscius. More generally, the Protestant middle class and intelligentsia in Slovakia could be culturally and educationally active, an important factor in a country where popular literacy was less developed than in the Czech lands. In the XVIIIth century, during the period of political and economic consolidation in Hungary, many Slovak Lutheran ministers and teachers, graduates of German universities, consciously took up Comenian ideas and set out to promote the education of all children, both girls and boys.

8Protestant schools in Slovakia were never destroyed, then, though at some points (e.g. after Vesselényi’s conspiracy in 1671) they declined in number, owing to the recatholisation of the nobility, wars and neglect by some feudal lords. Since Protestant schools had no overall regulation they were open to progressive educational theories and of a higher standard than Catholic schools run by the Piarists, who were more concerned with elementary schools than were the Jesuits. But religious and social contradictions and conflicts made for a complex pattern of development. Noteworthy during the first half of the XVIIIth century, for instance, was a move to bring Catholic schools under the supervision of the Hungarian monarchy and this had its effect on non-Magyar nationalities by limiting the tendency towards magyarisation of the Hungarian Parliament.

9In 1774 compulsory school attendance was introduced by the Austrian monarchy, primarily for economic, political and military reasons. The need to increase exports, to provide better trained labourers and to improve developing manufactures, to raise the level of the army to prosecute the war with Prussia, to fend off impending social problems and improve State administration – all these factors operated. A string of reforms was proposed by Enlightenment-philanthropic circles as necessary to improve the living conditions of the poor and control vagabonds, beggars and vagrant children, but it was the needs of production that were met, at the cost of a terrible exploitation of child labour. Consequently the elementary school was class restricted. Nor was it liberated from the hegemony of the Church hierarchy, remaining at the level of rote memorisation. Curricula and methods were based on the projects of Johann Ignaz von Felbiger (1724-1788) who had advocated obligatory school attendance modelled on the Prussian School Acts (1763, 1765). His Book on Methods (Methodenbuch) was published in 1775 and translated into Czech in 1777. He advocated improved training of teachers and it may be said that he followed up the Comenian idea of mass education8 but only from a didactic point of view, without understanding of its social basis. Indeed it was the aim of the Theresian reforms to uphold absolute monarchy, excluding the liberal components of the Enlightenment in favour of Counter-Reformation oppression while also insisting on the rule of a single language, namely German. In this sense Maria Theresa (1740-1780) conceived of school reform as a political act (politicum). Germanisation in practice contrasted sharply with the statement in the law of 1774 that the education of children of both sexes is « the basis of the happiness of nations ». In the event it operated to complicate educational problems in the heterogenous Austrian State and gave rise to the national Revival of the Czechs. Initially Czech parents opposed compulsory school attendance given a curriculum divorced from work and the way of life. Some teachers tried to overcome this deficiency, combining teaching with productive work, e.g. F. Kindermann. But only those schools which did not insist on adhering to German alone were successful with Czech parents. Eventually the simple fact that rural parents and country teachers – poor and dependent on villages gradually becoming nationally conscious – failed to master German forced the authorities to tolerate the Czech language and allow the translation of educational literature.

10Subsequently there was the Josephine reform, aiming at a system of national (German) schools controlled by the State, connected with the Physiocrat trend of the Enlightenment. Joseph II (1780-1790) founded general seminars for the education of priests to teach the people rational husbandry, tolerant religion without superstition and Austrian patriotism but through their mother tongue. Given this proviso these Enlightenment priests could later be active in the national Revival. In parallel with insistence on the national language (on the model of Comenius) a patriotism developed which led some teachers who had originally insisted on the rule of German to support German-Czech bilingualism (e.g. A. Pařízek, Fr. J. Tomsa among others). State concern for schooling may have been utilitarian but the foundation of many new schools9 inevitably extended education more widely, not to mention the fact of the abolition of serfdom (1781), while the Act of Toleration of 1781 enabled the foundation of Protestant schools – though this met with much opposition from the Catholic Church.

11The next phase saw renewed absolutism in response to the French Revolution and in opposition to Enlightenment reforms. For the Czech Lands this meant a more severe subordination of schools and Education to the Catholic Church. The School Act of 1804-05 brought restrictions in the elementary curriculum emphasising also the production of obedient subjects of Austria. It had been intended that Felbiger’s Schulordnung would cover the whole Austrian Empire but in 1777 there was another School Act (Ratio educationis) for Catholic schools in Hungary with an added recommendation for Protestant schools. Its author was Ádam František Kollár (1718-1783). Directed to unifying the school System this hardly dealt with popular schools and did not introduce compulsory school attendance. This was ordered in 1788 by Joseph II, for a six-year term, but not realised. By contrast with Felbiger’s Act the Ratio educationis of 1777 included a toleration clause allowing for national and religious differentiation and this opened up new possibilities for Slovak Protestants to develop the theory and practice of education.

12During the XIXth century Slovakia was affected by the growing conflicts between Vienna and the Magyar Estates who, contrary to the Austrian policy of germanisation, insisted on their national language – and, also, subordination to this of other nationalities in Hungary. In 1844 the Hungarian Parliament legalised the Magyar language as the general language of instruction and Slovak rights were then defended by the Protestant intelligentsia – there was a disinterested nobility and relative illiteracy among the people – which succeeded in constituting Slovak as a literary language. There had been a new Ratio educationis in 1805, introducing school attendance from six to fourteen although the Protestant school was only unified in 1842 and the Slovak Protestant intelligentsia subsequently asked in vain for an eight-year compulsory schooling in the mother tongue in Slovak schools and for improved teacher training. When in 1867 Austro-Hungarian dualism was legalised and the pressure towards magyarisation increased the fight for a Slovak school was a fight for existence, conducted in cooperation with the Czechs and in the light of the Comenian ideal of universal education in the mother tongue. But nowhere in Slovakia was the eight-year school realised before the liberation of 1918, nor even in some places the six-year school despite an Act of 1868 establishing this in Hungary.

13To return now to the Czech Lands, here the centralising absolutism of the Hapsburgs was unable to cope with developing Czech culture which maintained the tradition established up to 1620 and sought new lines of development in the light of contemporary educational ideas in Europe. Educational reform became an aspect of the national liberation struggle, which had always had a rural base and maintained an interest in popular education, fuelled by germanising reforms which operated to reactivate the bourgeoisie. Hence, in the XIXth century, a counter-Hapsburg opposition, progressive insofar as it maintained popular connections, worked towards social, as well as national and political, revival. Proposals for school reform figured among other bourgeois efforts to sweep away the feudal order at the time of supreme crisis, the revolutionary year of 1848. There were, however, many contradictions in the bourgeois programme – not only in national and religious terms, in opposition to monarchy and Catholic Church, but also internally between conservative and radical trends. It was recognised that economic and educational backwardness go together and agreed that backwardness must be overcome, but conservatives feared the spread of literacy and education to the mass of the people. By contrast radical democrats made a direct connection between the political needs of a future Czech republic and the democratisation of education – specifically a unified, universal, free, eight-year schooling providing a broad popular education as the means to social reform. The original Czech version of Comenius’s Didactica magna was edited in 1848 and had its effect on the development of a scholarly Czech theory of education. The great educator of teachers K. S. Amerling tried to integrate specialised and general education, theory and school practice, school and out-of-school activities. It was he who founded the first Czech main school with a systematic teacher training course, and a special school for maladjusted children, while also. developing a plan for a unified national school for all children up to the age of fourteen to include a school of infancy from two to six years of age. From this point it was characteristic for early education and elementary schooling to be considered together. Amerling’s proposals were applied in Slovakia to be supplemented in 1849 by Jan Kollár with the addition of plans to reform secondary and higher schooling which was the chief concern of the bourgeoisie.

14The belated turn to Enlightenment and national liberation of the Czech bourgeoisie influenced educational developments directed to the fall of Metternich’s régime. The 1848 Revolution posed the need to relate political and economic matters with problems of education and culture. However, by contrast with bourgeois revolutions in western Europe, the outcome in an oppressed nation under the Austrian monarchy was that the liberal bourgeoisie laid primary emphasis on the national question, on the struggle for equality of language rights in secondary and higher schooling. Nonetheless the Comenian ideals of concern for humanity and all round development had an important influence on developing ideas as to the aims, content and methods of education, together with that of such contemporaries as Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Diesterweg. The problem of systematic teacher training was discussed, together with plans for school reform, and the process of emancipating teachers from the Church accelerated. It may be recalled here that by mid-XIXth century the Czech Lands were an industrialised region with a high level of literacy10. By its close the proportion of children attending elementary school in Bohemia and Moravia was 97.5 % and the proportion of illiterates 3 % in the former and 4 % in the latter11 – whereas by contrast, in Slovakia only about 19 % of children attended school12. This despite the fact that Czech and Slovak proposals for reform were rejected by the Austrian Government. In effect, in 1848, the Austrian Government published a Proposal Regarding Basic Features of Public Instruction which established compulsory school attendance for six years and subordinated instruction to the Catholic Church, a step consolidated during Bach’s Absolutism (1849-1861) with the Concordat of State and Church of 1855.

15Not until after the introduction of the Constitution in the 1860’s was there once more a period of relaxation for Czech schools. In 1868 the Church was deprived of control over elementary schooling and at this point there appeared journals for teachers setting out progressive policies for education. Before this, in 1865, Czech teachers had celebrated the work of Comenius, built monuments to him, named schools after him and now developing research (1871) and the edition of his works provided a rich source for Czech education and culture. In 1869 a School Act laid down an eight-year schooling, secularisation, measures for teachers, salaries and pensions, extension of the curriculum with natural science subjects and gymnastics, foundation of schools of infancy and new elementary schools. A change of name now turned trivial into general schools and main schools into town schools, maintained by municipalities and lands but under State control. The realisation of this programme was not, however, easy nor rapid, given opposition from the Catholic Church, feudal lords and that conservative section of the bourgeoisie unwilling to subsidise schools and lose children as cheap labour. In fact, in 1883 the law was amended to enforce only half-day attendance in the countryside and make concessions to the Church, which nonetheless continued to protest against eight-year schooling into the 1890’s.

16With the development of the labour movement the problem of providing new schools was once more seen as an aspect of social reform, and the Comenian ideal of universal schooling as a workshop of humanity revived. The autonomy achieved for Czech culture within the Austrian monarchy in 1899, in line with social and democratic trends, indicates that national aims were not yet integrated with economic and political aims.

17Developments in the XXth century can only be briefly indicated. The eight-year attendance of all children was fully realised as late as after 1918 by the national and political liberation of the Czechs and Slovaks. The question of their schools13 was fundamentally solved from the national point of view and the position of the teachers as State employee assured. Concerning the problems with which we are dealing, the whole period of the bourgeois Czechoslovak Republic (1918-1938), within the framework of ideological, political and social contradictions, was marked by a complicated struggle for the unified school which often brought references to Comenius and his concept of basic curriculum. Comenius became a symbol and an invigorating, encouraging factor given endangered national identity and the threats to universal humanity during the Nazi occupation.

18The unified eight (nine) years school was realised after the Socialist Revolution in 1948. The type of the new school has been integrated to economic, political and social trends. Both the Soviet model and the tradition alone, especially that of Comenius, were discussed to overcome difficulties. An always deeper attention has been paid to the principles to solve the problematics of the unified school with the question of the content (curriculum and individual components of education), with methods of education, with out-of-school activities, with the endeavour to integrate all other factors of education (interrelations: pupil-teacher-parents; school-family-society etc.). All this has been directed to abolishing the discrepancies between manual and mental work, between general and specialised education, between individual stages of lifelong education, between rural and urban areas, education and economy, individual and social development etc. Czechoslovak Comenius research has endeavoured not only to prepare editions of the selected and collected works of Comenius but also analyses of the principles of his educational thought, within interpreting studies, and of its relevance to educational theory and practice of today and to future development.

Conclusions

19The level of literacy is usually related to socio-economic conditions, to the development of urban society and a school system. The example of the Czech Reformation from the XVth century, resulting in accelerated progress in literacy at a popular level, points also to other relations. It shows that the way towards widespread literacy in a pre-industrial, developing, country was initially paved by ideological-political (religious) and social factors as the people became a political and social force. This historical background of a tendency towards social revolution was the basis for the Comenian concept of universal, lifelong education for boys and girls, men and women.

20With the Industrial Revolution there was an increased, investment, demand for literacy which favoured the diffusion of education. But moves to meet economic needs which lacked humanitarian aspects brought exploitation of child labour and diminishing opportunities for systematic education. The spread of literacy and popular education becomes significant in overcoming social, ideological, religious, national oppression and for national survival. The question of literacy cannot be investigated in isolation from its role in national affairs in heterogenous States. It must be considered in relation to the national tradition in historical context. With the process of national revival of an oppressed nation (or minority) illiteracy soon comes to figure as a national disgrace and school attendance grows.

21On the other hand compulsory school attendance cannot be successful nor effective when connected with any sort of oppression. Nor can it succeed when the knowledge offered at school is at variance with what is useful in the life and occupations of children and their parents, when the methods are not integrated with the curriculum so that the school cannot become a « workshop of humanity ». The aim of realising a basic, unified school for all children is directly related to social problems, to the achievement of equal social rights for all.

22In this connection the Comenian concept of universal education incorporates relevant principles, namely that education should be considered from a broad interdisciplinary angle and from the point of view both of the individual and society. It is impossible successfully to plan and realise the concept of educating everybody without respect for the integration of all factors playing a role in education – persons, place, time, aims, content, methods, aids to education. This remains relevant to this day.