The Supervision of Schools and the Language of the Czechoslovak Administration. On the Example of School Committees in the Bilingual Moravia.

Based primarily on printed sources this study examines the building process of educational sector in the first years of Czechoslovakia, with a special emphasis on the issue of the supervisory bodies. Especially primary schools were considered by the so-called nationalist activists, both before and after 1918, strategic for building of the national education. School boards and then school committees played besides others an important role in the school enrolment, a key factor in the rise or fall of individual schools and language communities. Therefore, the process of creation of the school committees in the year 1921 is researched in particular. After the dissolution of the monarchy, a new organization of the school authorities and schools went hand in hand with a new language of the Czechoslovak administration. New laws, role of school boards and later committees, communication between them and teachers from primary schools are researched as well. Through the stenographic records of the Czechoslovak National Assembly and through other sources, the aforementioned points are analysed, on the example of the ethnically or linguistically mixed area of the former Crown land Moravia. The interests of the Czech nationalist activists clashed there with interests of the German nationalist activists. The Czech and German district school boards, as the supervision authorities, were abolished and new school committees were to be established instead. In the linguistically mixed regions they remained separated, which brought political disputes. At the same time, the daily agenda of schools, teachers and pupils' demands could not be hindered. Ministry of Education and National Enlightenment called for speeding up the administrative steps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]