Czechoslovak Secondary Education
By KAREL VELEMÍNSKÝ, Ph. D.
Conditions in Bohemia have always been favorable to higher education. For a thousand years the regulations of the Catholic Church made necessary the training of candidates for priesthood in the Latin language. Other classes of the population were also reached very early by school influences. From the Hussite wars we have much contemporary evidence to show that knowledge of reading and writing was widely spread; Silvio Piccolomini, papal legate, states that plain Hussite women knew the Bible better than many an Italian priest.
Prague, the seat of the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, became the cultural headquarters of Central Europe after the foundation of the university in 1348. This institution organized after the manner of the Paris university promptly took charge of the lower schools in the country in order to raise their standards and man them with university graduates. At the beginning of the 16th century we hear of more than one hundred such secondary schools of which about 30 could be compared to our present gymnasia. These schools were primarily Latin, but the Unitas Fratrum (Unity of Bohemian Brethren) which used the language of the people in divine services infused a little of the national spirit into the Bohemian schools. The great bishop of the Unity, John Amos Comenius, began his work as school-teacher in Moravia and from schools of the Brethren he received inspiration for his epochal idea that school education must be based on mother-tongue. Unfortunately the youth of his own nation had to wait centuries for the liberation of its mother-tongue.
After the Hapsburgs had suppressed the revolution and religious reformation, higher education was turned over to the Jesuits. Latin ruled the schools, and a boy who would so forget himself as to speak Czech in school precints was rebuked. During the reign of Maria Theresa education was transferred from the church to the state. Gymnasia received boys at least ten years old and trained them for six years; then there followed a two year course in philosophy to prepare the students for the university. In the 19th century there came to be established the Austrian type of the Latin school, gymnasium with an eight year course; the language of instruction was German regardless of the language of the pupils.
In addition to the gymnasium there were found early in the 19th century so-called real schools, of a practical type. Originally this term signified trade schools with a curriculum of two or three years, resembling in their theoretical branches our present grammar schools. Later four more classes were added giving general education, and thus arose our present type of a secondary school with seven grades and without Latin. Reorganization of all Austrian secondary education was carried out in 1849. This reform was for its period very modern and practical. But later development was held up by constant political controversies which made parliamentary discussion and regulation of schools impossible. All higher education of the various nationalities of the empire was down to its break-up regulated from Vienna; the Poles alone had a certain measure of autonomy in secondary education. From the legal point of view the diets of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia had the right to regulate "real schools", but this remained a paper right. Vienna gave all the nations the same mental food.
In Austrian secondary schools there was a division between the four lower classes and the upper classes. Knowledge obtained in the lower classes in the sphere of history, natural history and physics is gone over once more and broadened in the higher classes. This, method has not proved its efficiency, it wastes time and is clumsy. Secondary schools were placed under such strict control of the state that even private institutions could not afford to vary from the type. Thence the excessive uniformity which is so startling to every stranger, thence lack of experiments and original innovations. Austrian schools in general lacked great leaders. Whereas in 1849 secondary schools were far superior to Prussian schools, gradually they became modeled after German types and German
