Overcoming Dichotomies: Methodology, Theory, and Literature Review

In the scholarly literature, the history of school readiness concepts and related policies has been addressed mostly in the context of the Western world.Footnote ⁶ The recent pioneering studies about Hungary and East Germany mentioned in the introduction have contributed to correcting this imbalance. In their chapter on “the cultural history of readiness,” Marianne N. Bloch and Koeun Kim propose studying “historically embedded discourses” that include “discourses of scientific empiricism, and child development ‘knowledge’ as a base for assessments, regulation, and discipline; … discourses of ‘normality/abnormality,’ inclusion/exclusion, ‘others’: communities and families that are ready for school; those that require governing through intervention to fabricate what is considered normal children, families, and schools.”Footnote ⁷ Expert discourses, largely responsible for producing these categories and understandings in the past, need more research, including perspectives from East-Central Europe. A recent overview of the historiography of education has called for more team-based comparative research, “taking into account innovative tendencies in historical-pedagogical research.”Footnote ⁸

The historiography of education in state-socialist Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East-Central Europe generally has often emphasized a top-down narrative, focusing on the impact of ideology on the education system and school curricula, and has frequently overlooked the role of experts in shaping educational policies. Scholars have argued that communist ideology and the Communist Party in Poland, especially during Stalinism (early 1950s) shaped what was taught at school, and centralization led to top-down developments.Footnote ⁹ Nevertheless, as Joanna Wojdon argues, despite the party’s dominant role, “the relationship between power and education was not a simple one,” as the “ladder of power” comprised agents who attempted to pursue different interests.Footnote ¹⁰ For Czechoslovakia, researchers have understood the emphasis on organized forms of school preparation at the preschool stage during the 1970s normalization period as a simple top-down process meant to reverse the liberalization course of the 1960s, or they have omitted the multiplicity of actors involved in the process of introducing educational measures.Footnote ¹¹

Some research has utilized a bottom-up approach in searching for resistance through acting beyond official policies, exploring the agency of teachers. Jiří Zounek, Michal Šimáně, and Dana Knotová have pointed out that teachers in state-socialist Czechoslovakia employed a strategy of passive resistance to the Communist Party’s pressure in its secularization policies.Footnote ¹² Zsuzsa Millei has not only focused on kindergarten teachers’ agency in state-socialist Hungary but also analyzed it as expertise, concluding that the teachers saw themselves as not being “‘in the service of the state’ but as experts looking after the interests of children to learn so that they [could] become useful members of society.”Footnote ¹³

Scholars have often interpreted educational policies and their introduction in state-socialist East-Central European countries as an oppressive force, something that can be interacted with only in binary terms—through either obedience or resistance. In this article, however, we do not argue for a top-down perspective, nor do we look for resistance against the system. On the contrary, we search for negotiations between the experts and the state in a shared network.

To analyze the evolution and impact of expertise, we rely on concepts developed by the sociology of expertise. The sociology of expertise has emerged from and redefined the sociology of professions. Following Andrew Abbott, who—in his theory of the “system of professions”—defined jurisdiction as “legitimate control of a problem,” we look at which experts had jurisdiction over the issue of school maturity.Footnote ¹⁴ As we trace the emergence of expertise on school maturity (and readiness) in psychology and pedagogy, we encounter jurisdictional struggles between experts advocating different approaches to the problem.Footnote ¹⁵ Drawing on Gil Eyal’s conceptualization of the sociology of expertise, we analyze expertise as a “network linking together agents, devices, concepts, and institutional and spatial arrangements.”Footnote ¹⁶ Seeing expertise as a network allows us to analyze the position and influence of expert knowledge on school maturity. In our comparative case study, this network comprises experts in pedagogy and psychology, school inspectors (Czechoslovakia), an education association (Poland), ministries of education, and pedagogical research institutes.

Utilizing Michel Foucault’s notion of power-knowledge, we understand these networks as parts of a societal matrix producing (and created by) knowledge and power. According to Foucault, “Power produces knowledge . . . . There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations.”Footnote ¹⁷ Power does not result from the choice or decision of an individual subject, nor does it act as a force imposed from the top down; rather, Foucault conceptualizes power as a relationship, a negotiation “exercised from innumerable points”; similarly, we analyze the power relations inside these networks as negotiatory.Footnote ¹⁸

We draw on approaches to historical comparison that integrate entanglements into the comparison, overcoming “the analytical separation of the cases to be compared.”Footnote ¹⁹ Therefore, the comparative approach serves not only the heuristic purpose of “identifying questions and problems that one might miss, neglect or not invent otherwise,” but also an analytical purpose, as “the comparative approach is indispensable for asking and answering causal questions.”Footnote ²⁰ In our analysis of the impact of expertise on policy-making, we were able to identify similar mechanisms of change that allowed us to understand why certain policy changes occurred in each of the case studies.

Similar but Different: Comparing Czechoslovak and Polish Socialist Educational Policies

Czechoslovakia and Poland were neighboring countries and shared a sociopolitical system of state socialism in the postwar period. However, their school systems and the accessibility of early education differed, despite unifying tendencies and the impact of Soviet expertise during the Stalinist period.

In postwar Poland, education quickly became almost entirely monopolized by the state; scholars stress its centralization and full dependence on the policies of the Ministry of Education and the Polish United Workers’ Party.Footnote ²¹ Social pedagogy became a “subject of political and ideological pressures.”Footnote ²² Beginning in the late 1940s, one of the declared goals of the educational system was democratization, understood as the inclusion of peasant and working-class students.Footnote ²³ Securing full access to primary education became a priority; in 1956 compulsory education was extended to nine years, and in 1966 education in primary schools was extended to eight years. The rate of students not fulfilling the compulsory education requirement decreased to 0.8 percent in 1961-62. A new educational law issued in 1961 stressed the right to primary education and described the educational system as general, unified, free of charge, secular, and state-run. The law also stated that kindergartens, early education institutions meant for children aged 3 to 6 or 7, were to prepare children for school.Footnote ²⁴ Nevertheless, access to kindergartens remained low at that time. In 1960, 13.5 percent of children ages three to six attended these institutions, with higher rates in cities (21.3 percent); in 1965, the rates increased to 18.5 percent overall and 32.4 percent in cities.Footnote ²⁵

In Czechoslovakia, a similar postwar democratization and state monopolization of education took place. In 1948, the United Education law came into force and put the education system under state control, unified the Volksschule (obecná škola) and Bürgerschule (měšťanská škola) into a nine-year-long elementary school, and made secondary education compulsory (and free of charge).Footnote ²⁶ This law officially integrated kindergartens into the educational system, after which the number of children attending preschool institutions steadily grew.Footnote ²⁷ In 1950, 26 percent of three- to five-year-olds were attending kindergartens; in 1971, 56 percent of them were. The percentage of this age group attending kindergartens was higher in the Czech part of the federation at 59 percent than in Slovakia.Footnote ²⁸ Meanwhile, the percentage remained lower in Poland, at 36 percent in 1970.

Children in Czechoslovakia started school at age six; Polish children entered school at age seven, similarly to the Soviet Union. Both countries established pedagogical research institutes (Research Institute of Education in Czechoslovakia and Institute of Pedagogy in Poland) as expert outsourcing for the respective education ministries. As we show, their role was essential for expert-state communication.

Setting the Scene: Interwar Expertise, Measures, and Early Postwar (Dis)continuities

In interwar Poland, the topic of school readiness was explored by two experts: social pedagogue Helena Radlińska and psychologist Maria Grzywak-Kaczyńska. They both framed school maturity as an issue of social equality, underlining the role of socio-environmental factors in child development. The first study, conducted in 1929 and evaluating Warsaw’s first-graders, revealed significant differences in their intellectual development. Early diagnosis helped the experts apply school maturity strategies that ranged from placement into kindergarten to organizing individualized corrective activities.Footnote ²⁹ In 1931, Grzywak-Kaczyńska used specially designed tests to evaluate school maturity in a group of children about to start school, assessing their level of intellectual development.Footnote ³⁰ Radlińska, who led research on school success and failure at Wolna Wszechnica Polska (Free Polish University), organized experimental enrollment, helping experts design corrective and preparatory activities. The overarching aim of these activities was to challenge and overcome the usual selection process based on biological and class criteria that led to the postponement of immature children’s schooling with no provision of assistance for them.Footnote ³¹ School maturity was a condition to be achieved through education and a proper environment, so postponing a child’s school entry was not considered a good solution. Radlińska argued that postponement kept the poorest children, who most needed help, out of school.Footnote ³² When schools required more from children than they could achieve, corrective measures served to prevent many of them from failing as students. These pedagogical efforts were among the broader developments of radical pedagogy in Poland at the time.Footnote ³³ None of these solutions were introduced to the Polish school system in the prewar or early postwar period. In 1950, Radlińska lost her position at the University of Łódź because the party-state authorities moved to reject social pedagogy as a discipline and to marginalize psychology.Footnote ³⁴

During the interwar period, experts in Czechoslovakia also addressed corrective and preventive measures as ways to deal with school immaturity and failure. In contrast to Poland, a new—albeit very selective and particular—policy regarding the matter was implemented. In the second half of the 1920s, experts inspired by the German discourse on Schulreife (school maturity) began focusing on school (im)maturity, leading to the first proposals for corrective measures on a local level.Footnote ³⁵ According to research carried out by the Institute of Education of the Capital City of Prague and led by psychologist Cyril Stejskal from 1926 to 1928, 5-19 percent of Prague pupils failed as early as the first grade.Footnote ³⁶ In the following year, Stejskal, as one of the leading members of the expert group known as the Reform Body for the National Education System in Great Prague, established by the Ministry of Education in 1928, coauthored the Framework Proposal for the Adjustment of the Prague Education System.Footnote ³⁷ In the Proposal, the experts suggested establishing “health—social and corrective—educational” preparatory classes for children who reached the “age of school entry, but not yet of school maturity.” Children were to be assessed by the school doctor and put in a class where they would be given special attention, and then, their performance (in most cases) “markedly improved,” transferred to a regular first grade class. For children found to be educationally delayed at a later point in their schooling, the document proposed “C” classes, where they would receive more individualized care; if the children improved, they would be placed back in their respective grade.Footnote ³⁸

None of the corrective measures introduced in the Proposal were put in place. However, in 1930s Czechoslovakia, the interest in the problem expanded beyond the expert field, with the government implementing a different and very selective measure regarding school maturity. In 1937, a regulation took effect ordering the examination of children entering school before the age of six, to be administered by a school doctor or a general practitioner.Footnote ³⁹ Understandably, no corrective measures followed this selective examination, as children entering school a year early and found not mature enough could just wait until they were six and enroll with their age cohort. After World War II, a 1948 school law merely rephrased the regulation of 1937; however, two important concepts were added: “physical” and “mental” maturity.Footnote ⁴⁰

The postwar events upset the continuity of the interwar expert discourse on school maturity; Cyril Stejskal was incarcerated for high treason in 1951 following a political trial, and for decades after that he was not mentioned by name.Footnote ⁴¹

Diversification of Expertise: Research and Criticism

The late 1950s and 1960s saw the revival and intensive development of expertise on school maturity. Political liberalization brought a relaxation of ideological pressure in the pedagogical sciences and allowed for a more intensive transnational exchange. Barbara Wagner argued that the 1960s were “the most calm decade” in education in postwar Poland.Footnote ⁴² New groups of experts emerged, engaging in research projects and designing policy measures. In Poland, experts developed experimental early enrollment programs, drawing on the interwar experience and the idea of an “equal start.” They closely followed recent foreign (both Western and Soviet) literature. At that stage, the network embraced local education authorities, teachers, and experts from the Institute of Pedagogy. In 1950s Czechoslovakia, pedagogy experts supported USSR-inspired and purely educational measures on the transition from kindergarten to elementary school. Conversely, psychologists in the early 1960s, reviving the notion of school maturity and utilizing foreign (often Western) sources, argued against the state policies of early school entry and insufficient school maturity assessment; they employed a psychological-developmental perspective rather than one that was only educationally focused.Footnote ⁴³ A disciplinary diversification of expertise and boom in the number of experts, characteristic of the period, generated new networks and triggered criticism and demands for action.

The growing interest in school readiness in the two countries in this period relates to other, broader trends. In 1961, UNESCO issued recommendations for education ministries concerning preschool education. As the 1969 UNESCO Yearbook stated, “Interest in pre-primary schooling has increased in European States, with measures taken to expand provisions in the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Spain, USSR and UK. While pre-primary classes are seen as a means of meeting the needs of culturally deprived children, in most countries such steps are designed to raise primary school standards in general by improving the readiness of children for formal instruction.”Footnote ⁴⁴ As participants in these broader international conversations, experts in Poland and Czechoslovakia engaged in designing measures to address the problem of school maturity.

In Poland, the discussion about school maturity reemerged in the early 1960s. Articles published by various experts, including Grzywak-Kaczyńska, thoroughly cited interwar experiences, highlighting the egalitarian approach of prewar leftist pedagogy: “Enrollment organized by professor Radlińska was a way to oppose biological (ill and disabled children), mental (mentally disabled children) and social (working-class) selection that led to the postponement of school entry because of immaturity, without providing those children any assistance.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Expertise on school maturity developed within the fields of pedagogy, psychology, and mental hygiene; activist circles; and institutions such as the Institute of Pedagogy and the Friends of Children Society (Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Dzieci, or TPD).Footnote ⁴⁶ TPD, a large institution that ran its own schools, counseling centers, and other entities devoted to childcare and education, had a dense local structure and experts engaged in work on the ground.

Polish experts understood school maturity as being multidimensional. Stefan Szuman defined it as “the achievement of a level of physical, psychological, and social development that makes the child sensitive to teaching and education.”Footnote ⁴⁷ He called for more research and advocated the introduction of preparatory classes. In his analysis and that of others, failing to address school immaturity had serious consequences. Grzywak-Kaczyńska framed this risk primarily in terms of the child’s psychological well-being. School immaturity led to school failure and dropping out of school, “which has administrative and economic consequences for the country,” and “a hundred times more important is the detrimental impact on the child’s psychological development,” as immature children lacked self-esteem and were humiliated by the school system.Footnote ⁴⁸ Polish experts unanimously argued that pedagogical intervention could help children achieve school maturity. Pedagogues stressed the possibility of improving school readiness through special preparation programs run as part of kindergarten education or separately as preparatory classes.Footnote ⁴⁹ Owing to the relatively low accessibility of kindergartens, especially in the countryside, preparatory classes seemed more feasible.

Measures to assess and prevent school immaturity were introduced locally throughout the 1960s. Local initiatives operated within the scope of “experiments in education,” a practice officially recognized by the Ministry of Education in 1959.Footnote ⁵⁰ The first to introduce early enrollment was the large and working-class city of Łódź in 1959, where teachers at one elementary school organized early enrollment and “kindergarten groups” for the children they found were not ready for school (around 30 percent); the aim was to prevent students from repeating a grade. The teachers followed the literature on the topic, including Radlińska’s research during the interwar years. They also benefited from consultations with experts from the Institute of Pedagogy.Footnote ⁵¹ Łódź was followed by Warsaw, where school maturity assessments were coordinated first at the Institute of Pedagogy and later the local branch of the TPD. The TPD, engaged in helping disadvantaged children, “in line with its previous progressive tradition,” petitioned the local education authorities to expand early enrollment as a preventive measure. Consequently, in 1964, the Warsaw School District recommended that schools organize early enrollment.Footnote ⁵² School maturity assessment was swiftly expanded to include a psychological component designed by the TPD, and the organization prepared materials for teachers for compensatory activities. They drew on the experience of TPD’s “socio-educational” counseling centers that served children with developmental problems and six-year-olds whose parents wanted their children to begin their schooling earlier.Footnote ⁵³ Early enrollment was usually organized in January so that children diagnosed as immature would have the time to attend preparatory classes. “Early enrollment secured a more or less equal start,” the experts reported in their evaluation of the experiment results.Footnote ⁵⁴ Pedagogical experiments were organized in several more Polish cities in the 1960s, yet early enrollment was not introduced nationwide. The conversation between experts and practitioners, including local school administrators, the Institute of Pedagogy, and the TPD, did not include the central levels of state administration or the Communist Party until the late 1960s.

In Czechoslovakia, as in Poland, the notion of school maturity attracted the attention of the experts again in the early 1960s. Foreshadowing this revival was a new emphasis in the 1950s on the transition period between kindergarten education and elementary school learning, both on the state level and in the expert discourse. Experts in the field of pedagogy, school inspectors, and teachers continuously stressed the importance of the issue.Footnote ⁵⁵ This followed the implementation of two measures in 1953: those establishing the kindergarten curriculum and a new school law. According to Miroslava Jírová—a member of the Research Institute of Education in Prague (Výzkumný ústav pedagogický)—no real advancement was possible until after 1953, when the first-ever curriculum for kindergartens in Czechoslovakia was introduced.Footnote ⁵⁶ Only then was it feasible to systematically ready the eldest children in kindergartens for school, instilling in them “such knowledge, such skills and habits … that the process of transition to elementary school was made easier,” and helping to ensure their further educational success.Footnote ⁵⁷ Experts also responded positively to the 1953 school law, which officially conceptualized the first year of elementary school as a “preparatory grade.”Footnote ⁵⁸ According to the Minister of Education, this conception of the first grade, based on “experiences from the USSR,” where the age of school entry was set at seven, would ensure a “continuous transition between play and systematic school work.”Footnote ⁵⁹ The pedagogy experts agreed to this “USSR-inspired” measure quite enthusiastically; Jírová even regarded the age between six and seven to be a part of preschool stage, for “only a seven-year-old had the capacity for regular and methodical schoolwork.”Footnote ⁶⁰ In this period, changes made to both kindergartens and the first grade of elementary school were to contribute to a child’s school readiness.

The notion of school maturity reemerged in the early 1960s as psychological discourse in Czechoslovakia had rebounded beginning in 1957.Footnote ⁶¹ Several psychologists and a pediatrician joined the quest to smooth children’s transition to elementary education, as school maturity became an issue needing increased attention and “the coordinated care of doctors, pedagogues, and psychologists.”Footnote ⁶² This time, the experts were at odds with the state, criticizing the ever-changing minimum age of early school entry (that is, school entry before the age of six), a fluctuation based solely on the size of a birth cohort or national occupancy rate of the school classroom.Footnote ⁶³ They also scrutinized the lack of psychological evaluation for school maturity in five-year-olds’ pediatric examinations. The research led to an array of suggested solutions, the most direct being a reduction in the number of five-year-olds entering school and rigorous assessment of the rest.

Despite Czechoslovakia undergoing liberalization following the end of Stalinism, the 1960s research still did not refer to interwar experts by name. However, a certain level of continuity remained, as Cyril Stejskal had taught psychologists Zdeněk Matějček and Josef Langmeier in the second half of the 1940s; and in 2001, Langmeier referred to Stejskal as a “great influence.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Matějček and Langmeier were the first psychologists to bring renewed attention to the concept of school maturity in Czechoslovakia, warning against sending children to school too early and advocating for a more complex assessment. In 1961, based on the data collected since 1954 in Prague’s psychiatric counseling center for children and youth, Matějček examined school immaturity as one of the possible causes of school failure in pupils who were later placed in special schools despite having standard intelligence.Footnote ⁶⁵ A year later, he discovered a strong positive correlation between school failure, school immaturity, and intelligence—the greater their intelligence, the more likely the pupils failing in various ways had been younger than 6.7 years when they entered school. As there was no school maturity testing for the children, the crucial predictor of school (im)maturity in both of Matějček’s articles was only their age at school entry. Since Matějček considered the issue to be psychological, rather than psychiatric, he proposed a shift in jurisdiction: in the future, these cases should be assessed by a specialized psychological service addressing the needs of the education system, rather than by a medical doctor or psychiatric counselor, as had been the case thus far.Footnote ⁶⁶

In 1961, Langmeier sought to identify which criteria could predict school maturity, determining that physical attributes (i.e., weight and height) were not significant predictors and that the most predictive factor was age. Individual differences between the pupils also played a role, as success in the drawing portion of tests correlated with good school results. Environmental aspects mattered as well, as children coming from stimulating family environments were less likely to be immature. According to Langmeier, here citing German and American experts, all these causes of school immaturity could be mitigated through a broad spectrum of measures.Footnote ⁶⁷ He thought it necessary to stop the constant procedural changes in granting school entry dispensations to children under six based on birth cohort size and classroom occupancy—six years should be the minimum school entry age. To address individual differences, selective testing of under-six-year-olds would not suffice; Langmeier recommended across-the-board school maturity assessment of all five-year-old children about to start school when they undergo the already established mandatory medical examinations. If there were any doubts about their school maturity, children would then be closely assessed by a pediatrician and a psychologist. Langmeier addressed the educational side of things as well: both school and kindergarten teachers should be included in the assessment process during enrollment; six-year-old children who have not reached school maturity should postpone school entry and spend a year in kindergarten, and larger kindergartens should set up special preparatory classes.Footnote ⁶⁸

Langmeier’s suggestions for preventive and corrective school maturity measures were followed by psychologist Jaroslav Jirásek’s research. In 1966, Jirásek, stressing across-the-board assessment and the need to recognize the individual developmental pace of each child, introduced the Orientation Graphic Test, which he had started developing in the early 1960s as a modified version of the school maturity test developed by Arthur Kern (a West German pedagogy expert), designed for conducting time-efficient evaluations at the pediatrician’s office.Footnote ⁶⁹ Langmeier and Jirásek both agreed that physical attributes such as height and weight had little correlation with school maturity; a simple pediatric evaluation would therefore not suffice in determining whether a child was ready for school.Footnote ⁷⁰ Surprisingly, physicians were not necessarily against this approach even though it questioned the jurisdiction of medicine over school maturity; instead, they saw psychological testing at the pediatrician’s office as a space for collaboration between medicine and psychology. One physician with such a perspective was pediatrician Jaroslav Kotulán, who in 1966 found that a child’s level of physical development did not affect school maturity, concluding that maturity had to be assessed using a psychological test.Footnote ⁷¹

From the late 1950s, in both countries, experts were concerned about similar issues: the psychological and social components of school maturity, the development of assessment methods, and the means of dealing with school maturity. They were also transnationally connected. In 1962, an international seminar bringing together preschool education experts from state-socialist countries took place in Prague. As Polish participants reported, the experts discussed the conceptualization of school maturity and how to best prepare children for school. One of the leading Czechoslovak experts, Ludmila Bělinová, underlined that school maturity is “a result of education more than the natural development process.” Bělinová was a major expert advocating the use of the term school readiness rather than school maturity (we address this issue in the next section); Polish experts, however, did not engage in this distinction and used “school maturity” throughout their report. Experts gathered at the seminar believed that the approach to school readiness should be comprehensive and not focus exclusively on cognitive skills. While Polish experts fully shared those views with Czechoslovak experts, they asserted that “specific traditions” and national contexts were crucial for designing solutions. They recognized that in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and East Germany, “school begins at six,” while in the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, and Romania, it begins at seven. They also observed that Czechoslovakia had “long traditions of kindergarten education.” These perceived differences made Polish experts more focused on solutions that in their understanding fit the specific Polish context. They realistically assumed that they could not rely on kindergarten as the only educational institution to prepare children for school.Footnote ⁷²

The differences in expert diagnoses and proposed solutions, therefore, reflected institutional variations in the education systems: greater accessibility to kindergartens and school-maturity measures already in place in Czechoslovakia, and the higher school entry age in Poland. Moreover, compared with Czechoslovakia (as discussed in further detail below), the discrepancies between experts in Poland were not so visible. What was similar was that in the 1960s, this expertise, although developed more freely than before, did not have much impact on central policy-making. New networks emerged, but they did not involve state authorities, and measures proposed by experts were not introduced nationwide.

Effective Networking and Measures Implemented: The Late 1960s to the Early 1970s

Toward the end of the 1960s, experts started to pressure the state to implement measures designed to prevent problems caused by the lack of school readiness, leading to the adoption of solutions at the central level. A critical shift occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This section explains how networks consisting of physical nodes in the power-knowledge matrix affected the implemented measures. The pedagogical institutes and experts linked to them played a crucial role. In Czechoslovakia, measures put into action by the Ministry of Education reflected the school readiness approach promoted by pedagogues, marginalizing psychological testing in the education sphere. In Poland, early enrollment was introduced nationwide, yet experts’ efforts to lower the school entry age were curtailed.

In Poland, increasing expert interest in school maturity did not reach the level of national discussion until the late 1960s, following the research conducted by pedagogue Barbara Wilgocka-Okoń, through the support of the Institute of Pedagogy. In 1966, the Institute’s Research Council discussed the need to study school maturity.Footnote ⁷³ In her writings, Wilgocka-Okoń argued that new comprehensive research was needed to “secure a good start for every child” and “reconsider the issue of six-year-olds.”Footnote ⁷⁴ She drew on contemporary research by German, Swedish, and Soviet experts. Experts took up the question of an earlier school start in response to pressure from parents willing to put their six-year-old children in school. In the 1960s, this was possible as long as the families attended a psycho-pedagogical counseling center. Wilgocka-Okoń sought to evaluate the school readiness of six-year-olds. The second aim of her research was to design a school readiness test that could be universally applied to school maturity assessment; the interest in school maturity testing in Poland emerged at a similar time as in Czechoslovakia (Jirásek’s Orientation Graphic Test, covered above). Following the thinking of previous experts, Wilgocka-Okoń wanted to thoroughly assess the relationship between school readiness and children’s “living conditions.”Footnote ⁷⁵ She and her team studied school maturity in over a thousand six- and seven-year-old children from ninety-one school districts, through direct observation and by administering a questionnaire and test focused on intellectual tasks.

The results showed considerable variation by children’s age and background. Even the oldest rural children in the study group scored poorer results than urban six-year-olds, showing that “environmental influence and developmental stimuli are of great importance.” Nevertheless, experts argued that “planned educational influence exerted by preschool education institutions can mitigate these differences.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Furthermore, the impact of kindergarten education on intellectual development proved more significant for rural children. In the second part of the study, carried out six months later, experts found that school success was connected to maturity. Being unprepared for school led to school failure. The conclusions from the study were commented on in pedagogical journals, and the test became popular among schools in 1969-1971.Footnote ⁷⁷

The inspiration for Wilgocka-Okoń’s study did not come from above, although she worked at the Institute of Pedagogy, which was closely linked to the Ministry of Education. The Institute of Pedagogy, founded in 1950 as an expert institution to support the Ministry of Education, carried out the study as part of its research agenda independent of any direct orders. Wilgocka-Okoń’s study was inspired by ongoing debates and experimental programs. Following official protocol, the Institute’s research agenda was proposed by the director, accepted by the Scientific Council, and approved by the Ministry. However, a report on its activities in 1967 concluded that the collaboration between the Institute and the Ministry was not “sufficiently specified and coordinated.” The Ministry tasked the Institute with urgent matters; it was not interested in the results of “more serious research” conducted by the Institute on its own initiative. “One of the striking examples is the information in the press and radio about starting school at six [years of age], to the astonishment of the Institute, which had already started serious research about school maturity in Polish children,” the report claimed.Footnote ⁷⁸ As a solution, the report suggested compiling a list of issues crucial from the perspective of “rational educational policy,” and to “integrate these issues into the long-term plan of the activities of our institution.” The experts felt that the Ministry was not interested in using the knowledge they had produced to shape state policies.

However, the findings from Wilgocka-Okoń’s study on school maturity did affect the Ministry and policy-making. A special committee at the Ministry dealt with the conclusions from the study. Archival documents of that committee are not in the Ministry of Education collection, but other sources indicate that, following the committee’s opinion,Footnote ⁷⁹ the Ministry issued an ordinance and instructions “on the organization of enrollment for the first grade of primary school” in August 1971.Footnote ⁸⁰ The ordinance obliged all schools in the country to coordinate early enrollment and require a doctor and a teacher to conduct psychological-pedagogical assessments of the children’s school maturity. Schools were to use assessments approved by the Ministry: either the method designed by Wilgocka-Okoń, or one by another expert, Alina Szemińska, who in 1969 had published a book on school maturity summarizing the experiences of experimental early enrollment.Footnote ⁸¹ According to the ordinance, schools were to organize six-month-long preschool preparation for children who were not ready for school. The instructions detailed that the kindergarten center, opened in either schools or kindergartens, should provide a nine-hour-long weekly preparatory program. With the 1971 ordinance, experimental programs that had been developed by experts became a nationwide norm.

The conclusions from Wilgocka-Okoń’s study also triggered a more extensive discussion on the school entry age that involved the country’s highest authorities, namely the leadership of the PUWP, and generated debates in the daily press. Wilgocka-Okoń argued that lowering the school entry age to 6.5 years would allow the school system to improve school maturity and secure a more equal start, a conclusion that led the Ministry to propose lowering the school entry age.Footnote ⁸² In March 1970, one of the party leaders, a Politburo member and secretary responsible for education, Józef Tejchma, left a handwritten note for the first secretary, Władysław Gomułka, addressing the issue of an earlier school start. He stated, “There is a need to take a stand toward the proposal of the Ministry of Education to lower the age of compulsory school attendance,” and asked whether the issue should be brought to a meeting of the Politburo.Footnote ⁸³ “The arguments are serious, and I cannot just reject them,” he argued. He attached a note summarizing these arguments and the situation regarding early education in Poland, presumably prepared by the PUWP’s Department of Science and Education. Notably, the document did not mention school maturity or related problems, focusing instead on gradually introducing six-year-olds to school in coming years. Experts, the document argued, agreed that an earlier school start was possible owing to accelerated physical and psychological development in children and because children in many countries start school at six. An additional argument concerned Poland’s changing demographics (declining birth rates), which were making primary schools less and less populated. The enrollment of six-year-olds in schools would also improve the accessibility of kindergartens for “children of working mothers.” Although this proposal drew on some conclusions from the research on school maturity, it somehow distorted the experts’ main ideas, because six-year-olds would be admitted to the first grade together with older children. This example shows the complexity of the state’s and the party authorities’ reception of educational expertise. These authorities clearly took expert opinions seriously, but something important got “lost in translation”: the problem of school immaturity disappeared from view.

Gomułka did not make a decision before December, when he lost power, but the issue of school entry age did not fade from the new party leadership’s attention. The discussion on lowering the school entry age was included in the pre-Party Congress debate in the fall of 1971, engendering intensive exchanges in the press and between experts and state authorities. By including in the program the question, “Should children start school education at six or seven years of age?,” the party moved the conversation about school maturity from an expert-state to an expert-people-state framework. A typical “pre-congress discussion” encouraged experts, institutions, and ordinary people to voice their opinions. For example, the Teachers’ Union supported the idea of an earlier school start; the union’s newspaper demanded that kindergarten education should be universally provided “not only for social reasons (women’s employment)” but “to equalize school maturity levels.”Footnote ⁸⁴ “Six-Year-Olds at School? Scientists Say Yes,” read the headline of a popular evening daily. In the party daily People’s Tribune, expert voices, including that of Wilgocka-Okoń, were counter-balanced by letters from readers and mothers, primarily worried about sending children to school earlier.Footnote ⁸⁵ These voices were increasingly critical of the measure. Contrary to expert expectations, the earlier school start was not eventually approved.

However, the 1971 Party Congress did not mark the end of the discussion. It continued in the Expert Committee for the Elaboration of a Report on the State of Education in Poland, led by a well-known sociologist, Jan Szczepański, and appointed by the Minister of Education, upon an initiative launched by the Politburo in January 1971. This high-ranking committee, bringing together pedagogues and economists, had to consider kindergarten education and school entry age among other issues related to the whole educational system.Footnote ⁸⁶ A four-hundred-page final report came out in 1973 with a diagnosis that there was no equal start and that the state should make kindergarten education accessible, and if that was not possible, the school entry age should be lowered.Footnote ⁸⁷ They reiterated the initial argument about equality that experts on school maturity had already raised. The PUWP explicitly expressed the same argument in its official statements, arguing that education should secure an equal start for all children and that letting the school system produce “social selection” was “contrary to our regime’s principles.” Nevertheless, the experts’ demands were met only partially, and the state introduced changes to the system very slowly. The school entry age ultimately was not lowered.

Why did the state and party not listen to experts regarding the school entry age? It seems that people’s opinions mattered, and ordinary people were skeptical about such a change. A Central Committee document mentions this explicitly: the party would decide after reviewing “scientific premises” and listening to “public opinion.” Ironically, research findings pointing to the high incidence of school immaturity were also used to argue against lowering the school entry age; according to the argument, if many children were too immature to start school, lowering the school entry age would worsen things.Footnote ⁸⁸ Letters from readers also suggested that “public opinion” was concerned about “overburdening six-year-olds” with school requirements.Footnote ⁸⁹ This case shows how, within a strictly state-socialist framework of “pre-congress” discussion, resistance from below could have had an impact on policies, expanding the networking of expertise beyond the expert-state conversation. The network fostered by this situation was vast, with many diverse agents. Expert and state insights mattered, but so did the public opinions of the readers, and within the matrix that produced power and knowledge, even an abstract agent, such as misinterpretation, played a crucial role. Public actions and opinions could cut both ways. In the 1960s, experts drew on parents’ willingness to place their six-year-olds in school, but when the school-maturity argument on lowering the school entry age disappeared from the official discussion as a result of misinterpretation, the readers rose against the measure, probably contributing to the failure of this policy. This case is also similar to the parental protests in Hungary and East Germany, although the protests’ frameworks, the actors, and the types of policy they addressed varied. What these protests all indicated, however, was the importance of bottom-up activities performed by actors outside of expertise.

The final decision dissatisfied the experts. Wilgocka-Okoń argued in 1981 that it was a mistake with very negative consequences. In the late 1970s, the education of six-year-olds was made universal practice, and a curriculum was introduced. That curriculum, the expert argued, stressed intellectual skills and therefore introduced elements of school instruction, distorting “the goals of kindergarten education.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Again, this approach disadvantaged rural children who primarily did not attend full-time kindergartens.Footnote ⁹¹ In the 1980s, it became compulsory for six-year-olds to complete a preschool year, yet the school entry age remained at seven.Footnote ⁹²

In Czechoslovakia during the 1950s and 1960s, pedagogy experts tended to speak of school readiness more often and were interested in preparing children for school through education, whereas psychologists in the 1960s mostly took up the term school maturity and saw psychological testing and preventing overly early school starts as the main solutions for the school failure problem.Footnote ⁹³ In the late 1960s, this division grew into an open debate between the experts favoring the educational viewpoint (typically linked to pedagogical institutions) and those seeing the issue as more of a developmental problem (often psychologists and pediatricians). In 1967, Ludmila Bělinová and Miroslava Jírová, pedagogical experts at the Research Institute of Education in Prague, challenged the biological perspective “often held by pediatricians and psychologists.” According to them, understanding school maturity as a state reached by physiological maturation was not sufficient. Therefore, many pedagogues started to favor the notion of school readiness (školní připravenost) instead, a term implying a need for “readying” (or preparation) during the preschool period.Footnote ⁹⁴

The same year, Langmeier reacted to the criticism from the pedagogy experts, stating that although these pedagogues considered the “deliberate preparation of a child for future tasks” to “determine their later school success or failure” and therefore preferred school readiness to school maturity, the complexity of the situation required the “original term” to stay. In his opinion, school maturity was not only the result of a biological maturing process but also the product of an individual’s entire preceding experience, an outcome of both endogenous and exogenous factors. Even the biological aspect alone had merit, as it served as a requirement for effective learning.Footnote ⁹⁵

1969 saw the dissemination of the school readiness approach into a textbook for future teachers, A Child’s Readiness for School. Its author, psychologist Vadim Ščepichin, referred to both Langmeier and Jirásek, stating that these two experts stressed the importance of not admitting children younger than six to school, because in their understanding school maturity was an age-dependent developmental stage.Footnote ⁹⁶ Ščepichin saw this biological state exclusively as a precondition of school readiness and defined the latter as a “child’s ability to successfully fulfill the demands placed on them by the school.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Therefore, for the experts highlighting the educational approach, the notion of school readiness made more sense than that of school maturity.

Even more importantly, the school-readiness approach as a means for preventing school failure was dominant in the Ministry of Education, determining measures put in effect in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As early as 1960, a draft ministerial report on kindergartens had discussed the issue of preparing children for school; although pupils who had attended kindergarten were considered already better prepared than those who received no formal preschool education, the curriculum for kindergartens was to be modified to ready them even more thoroughly.Footnote ⁹⁸ Because the Research Institute of Education in Prague itself was founded as a principal research facility of the Ministry of Education, a close relationship existed between expert findings and implemented measures.Footnote ⁹⁹ Moreover, experts from the Institute (as well as the Ministry) trained the school inspectors, determined which questions were asked during examinations, and influenced the selection of topics for qualification essays; from at least 1967 on, these featured the topic of school readiness.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In turn, the School Inspectorate would offer reports on school readiness to the Ministry and propose necessary measures.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Besides the growing emphasis on preparing children for school in kindergartens, the Ministry of Education implemented two new regulations intended to address the issue: compensatory classes and preparatory departments. From 1966-1967 to 1968-1969, the School Inspectorate in the South Moravian Region, led by František Smolka, conducted research on compensatory classes in five schools.Footnote ¹⁰² The experiment was a success: while according to the estimates, at least half of the pupils assigned to compensatory classes would fail in regular classroom conditions, in the academic year 1968-1969, just 5.3 percent of these children failed to pass in the compensatory grades one through four – a figure close to the 3.3 percent of the pupil population in the South Moravian Region in regular grades one through five in the same year. Although the research also included school maturity assessment (which Smolka considered crucial to quickly and reliably identify the immature children entering school, so that the first grade of compensatory class could be opened for them as early as possible), in a 1969 regulation, the Ministry of Education only implemented the educational part of the study—the compensatory classes themselves.Footnote ¹⁰³ These classes, running parallel to first to fourth regular grades in elementary schools, were intended for all the pupils deemed temporarily “delayed” but intellectually “normal,” allowing them to catch up. Their education was still based on the regular curriculum, but there were fewer pupils and they were given special attention.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Once they passed the compensatory class, the pupils were placed back into their respective normal classes.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ At the turn of the 1970s, Czechoslovakia was not alone in instituting such measures; in Hungary, similar corrective classes were implemented in 1970.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

A study on “preparatory afternoons” (later known as “preparatory departments”) was conducted in the Chomutov Region in 1968-1969 and featured a true bottom-up development: kindergarten teachers initiated the experiment, two leading experts from the Research Institute of Education—Miroslava Jírová and Ludmila Bělinová—executed it, and the suggested measures were then implemented by the Ministry.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Both Jírová and Bělinová were, no doubt, very influential. Jírová served as the head of the research group on preschool education at the Research Institute, and Bělinová led a department focused on kindergartens.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ They both specialized in preschool education and school readiness, were avid proponents of the latter concept, and collaborated with the Ministry of Education on the issue.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ According to the daily press, the Research Institute of Education tested the preparatory departments for several years around the country, after which the Ministry of Education put a new regulation into effect based on the experts’ findings and recommendations.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The School Inspectorate also had a say in the matter; in 1971, a report from a meeting of regional school inspectors for kindergartens described school readiness as a “main task” and stated that both kindergarten education and future preparatory departments needed to be employed to address this issue.Footnote ¹¹¹ In 1972, the preparatory departments were implemented.Footnote ¹¹² These special classes provided by the kindergartens were designed to prepare children who could not attend the actual kindergarten class for school: during the final preschool semester, at least once a week for two or three hours, children would attend class, following a curriculum based on the regular kindergarten’s, but with children receiving more individual care.Footnote ¹¹³ A similar measure, a six-month preschool preparation program for children deemed unready for school, was adopted in Poland in 1971 (see above).

Compensatory classes implemented in 1969 and preparatory departments put in place in 1972 were pedagogic measures in line with the concept of school readiness, popular among the experts who favored the educational approach. This network included experts (mostly but not exclusively pedagogues) working for various institutions concerned with education, most importantly the two entities closest to the Ministry of Education, the Research Institute of Education (Jírová and Bělinová) and the School Inspectorate (Smolka), but also the Regional Institute of Education in Prague (Opravilová and Mašindová) and the Institute of Teacher Education at Charles University (Ščepichin). On the other hand, the experts who preferred the developmental-psychological approach and the notion of school maturity operated outside of these structures: Matějček was an employee of the Child and Youth Psychiatry Department Research Institute of National Health in Prague, Langmeier worked at the Department of Pediatrics in Havlíčkův Brod, and Jirásek was with the Psychological Laboratory of the Medical Faculty of Hygiene at Charles University.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The distinction between the two networks and their respective approaches was not entirely clear-cut in terms of the measures the experts supported; Smolka was in favor of psychological school maturity assessment, Langmeier recommended preparatory classes, and Jirásek led research on corrective practices for immature children based on the East-German model of “fun afternoons,” which in essence was very similar to the concept of preparatory departments.Footnote ¹¹⁵ However, the divide is clear when looking at the general aim of these networks. The members of the education network favored pedagogical corrective measures dealing with school unreadiness, which they saw mainly as socially constructed and malleable. Conversely, the experts who preferred the notion of school maturity and understood it as a psychological developmental stage proposed psychological school maturity testing and avoiding early school entry (before the child's sixth birthday)—measures based on prevention rather than correction.

Although the Ministry of Health in the early 1970s mandated that pediatricians assess both the “physical and mental development and health of children” before they entered school, the pediatricians independently chose to use the psychological Orientation Graphic Test to make the assessment—the state (in this case the Ministry of Education) did not implement this type of psychological school maturity testing until 1979 and 1980, when regulations on selective assessment in district pedagogical-psychological counseling centers were put in place.Footnote ¹¹⁶ This only happened after the concept of school maturity had fully permeated the vernacular of the ministerial documents.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Even so, the text of the 1980 regulation described the assessment of “school readiness,” not the testing of school maturity.

The concepts of school readiness and school maturity were products of specific power-knowledge relations that changed over time and enabled different ideas to be regarded as scientific, true, valid, and even worthy of implementation. The key components of the school-readiness concept had emerged in the 1950s, and the state put measures based on them into effect while pedagogy experts stayed in a reactive position, responding (positively) to these policies in their research publications. In turn, in the mid-to-late 1960s, the position of these experts changed into one of initiative: they offered school-readiness measures, and the state sanctioned them, implementing them in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This time, it was the experts who acted and the state that reacted. The concept of school maturity was also subject to developments in the power-knowledge matrix: it could only be reconceived as a valid scientific theory when the political climate changed because of political liberalization in the late 1950s and 1960s. This return to the psychological and individual, as opposed to the socially conditioned and mass, made it conceivable that every child could mature at a different pace, and this case-by-case development could not be changed just by simple educational across-the-board state measures typical of the 1950s. At the Ministry of Education level, school readiness became a more successful approach than school maturity not only because of the physical nature of the networks linking together educational experts and the state in concrete institutions but also because of some of the intangible components of the power-knowledge matrix: the concept of school readiness gave the state an opportunity to actively “better” its citizens on a mass scale, as opposed to the notion of school maturity, which relied on the individual pace of every child’s development and allowed for only limited state interference and correction.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Czechoslovakia and Poland introduced measures to deal with children’s lack of readiness for school. Despite differences in early education in the two countries, the measures introduced were similarly understood as educational and preparational. Expertise developed in response to specific problems and measures already in place. Compared with Czechoslovakia, there were no competing networks in Poland nor approaches to school maturity/school readiness. In fact, while Polish experts used school maturity as a term in their publications, their understanding of it aligned more with readiness, and they also used the term readiness in their international communications.Footnote ¹¹⁸ What was similar was the mechanism of change. Pedagogues linked to the Ministry of Education through the activity of pedagogical research institutes influenced state policies. These institutes, although designed to respond to the needs of the ministries of education, in practice served as a channel of expert influence. When these institutes engaged in researching school maturity and preventive measures, the expert agenda’s reach extended to the highest level of education administration.