Libraries as a tool of social-pedagogical ideas lived between 1918-1989

Abstract

Social pedagogy tends to be primarily associated with the education of people from vulnerable target groups or with leisure pedagogy. An essential part of the social pedagogical practice is also the folk education process, which was already linked to the Masaryk ideal of an educated and industrious society before the establishment of independent Czechoslovakia and which was carried out through libraries. After 1948, this ideal was transformed into the idea of the 'new socialist human', in whose formation libraries played a significant role. This study aims to use contemporary literature and archival documents to view libraries as instruments of all-people education through work with the reader. It will show that libraries throughout the period analysed (1918-1989) played the role of important social pedagogical institutions that are unfairly overlooked in disciplinary discourse. They draw on the anthropological discourse of social pedagogical practice. This paper focuses on the search for general structures in library practice, from work with workers and peasants in the form of reading in the fields, mass work with readers, the Fucik badge competition, to discussions with readers. All of this contributed in a fundamental way to the formation of anthropological models associated with socialist man. A certain discontinuity in continuity transformed the humanist ideals of the library of the First Republic.

Keywords

• libraries
• anthropology
• discursive analysis
• mass work with readers
• fučík's badge
• masaryk
• new socialist man
• all people education