Fundamental Pedagogy Jana Doležalová

Requirements on the formulation of the objectives of education:
- should be easy to understand and unambiguous; 
- verifiable and evaluable; 
- expressed in the educated person’s activities (verbs). 
Should the objectives focus on the development of personality, we have to take 
into account the structure of the goals within their selection and formulation 
which would reflect the basic components of the personality: cognitive, 
connective and emotional.
A wide range of classifications of educational objectives exists. Most frequently, 
they are divided into general (long-term) and specific (short-term). Other 
classifications are based on the age periods, educational system stage, 
educational institutions or scientific sectors. Objectives may also be classified 
according to individual components of education. We speak about vertical and 
horizontal classification of objectives.
 
Current educational outcomes should comprise the so-called key competencies, 
i.e. a complex set of knowledge, skills and attitudes that one needs in various 
spheres of life (profession, education, leisure time, health, social area) and in 
private, public and professional life. The skills include e.g. learning, 
communication, critical thinking, problem solving, handling ICT, etc. These life 
skills are thus part of educational documents which constitute one of the levels 
of objectives of education.
The objectives stipulated in educational documents, i.e. so-called general 
educational programmes for various school stages, have two levels – general 
objectives of education and objectives for educational fields. The two-level 
aspect is also present in the objectives of educational subjects (educational 
fields) on one level and key competences on the second level.
7.2 Content of Education
Objectives of education are achieved through the content of education. The 
content of education is the summary of everything that people should 
specifically master, learn to control or develop in themselves in order to achieve 
the objective of education. In a wider sense, objectives involve pedagogical 
transformation of social and cultural values, i.e. valuable phenomena from the 
area of science, arts and morals.
The process of adaptation of these values is a long-term and complicated one.
The content of education has its own internal structure, represented by:
1. knowledge 
2. skills 

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3. habits 
4. attitudes and values 
5. character and conative qualities 
6. experience. 
These features may be differentiated in all components of education, see 
Subchapter 8.3. 
The objectives and content of education are determined socially and 
historically. Their transformation in individual historical periods is interesting to 
observe. The historical epochs are briefly outlined in Table 1.