Construction of history of education

The purpose of my presentation is to introduce you the topic of my dissertation thesis. I will not present the results of empirical research that are supposed to be together with its interpretation the finale of my dissertation thesis, but on the contrary I will present the theoretical data according to which I decided build up my dissertation work.

Therefore my whole presentation should be taken as an introduction of dissertation.

My dissertation thesis is focused on the problems of history of transformation of educational goals and their social functioning. My considerations about the meaning of history of pedagogy in confrontation with the ideas of postmodernism led me to this issue.

I decided to focus on the problematic area of historical changes of educational aims, because just through past time changes of educational aims in their whole context is possible to understand the pedagogy development during postmodern conception. To comprehend fully the meaning of historically given educational aim, we must start from knowledge methods characteristic for the given time period, then it is necessary to research the conception of a child and childhood through the time and the whole reflection of present time. After that it will be possible to ascertain patterns of declared educational aims within school reforms and we have to confront these aims in terms of their functionality in regard to given social reality. A with respect to this matter as being very extensive I will only focus on chosen periods of Czech history of pedagogy. The crucial factor is the crossing education and its institutions from the private sphere to the public sphere, in fact to the state sphere which will be the real beginning of my work.

The main aim of my work is not to destroy existing approach and attack more extensive erudite works of experts of history of pedagogy. The aim of my work is to offer some different and alternative view to historical changes of education, to try to add some new dimensions to already existing understanding pedagogy.