(Female) Teachers in the Realm of the Soul

Sa？etak The text U carstvu du？e / In the Realm of the Soul (1910) by Jagoda Truhelka includes 27 letters. The author was inspired by her correspondence with Magdalena ？repel, her teacher. This is a kind of an educational epistolary text. It discusses different aspects of life and its values – from everyday life to questions related to aesthetics, arts, morality, etc. The text has retained its educational value until the present. Especially interesting is the author’s claim that education should not be reduced to learning skills and facts, but that it should rather deal with the emotional and spiritual growth of the students. The text offers a rounded approach towards education and the meaning of life. It is easily read, since it uses no ‘heavy’ terminology. Poetic pictures stand side by side with short stories from the everyday life. The aim thereof is to demonstrate the full meaning of the author’s way of thinking, and at the same time, it succeeds in making arguments more convincing. The author’s view was obviously influenced by key pedagogical, psychological and philosophical theories from the beginning of the 20th century. This may be seen at the end of the book, where the bibliography of such books is presented. The objective of this paper is to examine how the author’s views correspond to the attitudes of the students of the Teachers’ College. In a way, this comparison shows the differences between two generations of teachers – differences in their attitudes and values they sustain. For the purposes of the study, we have selected a number of important thoughts (sentences) from the original text that clearly describe the author’s views. Those sentences were organised in a questionnaire for students, in which they were asked to express whether they agreed with each statement