Technikatörténeti szemle 23. (1997-98)

TANULMÁNYOK - Efmertová, Marcela: Major Anniversaries of Prague’s Czech Technical University and its Support from the Secondary School System in the Past

ce of a supervisor paid from state subsidies. Particularly hard working students were also eligible to earn scholarships. Each school year was concluded with demanding examinations. Professors were expected to meet at consultative gatherings twice a month to discuss pedagogic and scientific issues. Once a year, their meetings were to elect the school's headmaster and his secretary. The staff was to meet in public at least once a year to review teachers' scientific papers, best student works and to publish accounting reports on the' polytechnic's expenses. Just like Ecole polytechnique in Paris, the Prague school was to publish its own scientific magazine. Gerstner listed what he saw as the chief advantages of such a project: 1. The school would train teachers of technical subjects. 2. The school would assume supervision of lower (secondary) schools which had to be established. 3. The school's entire activities would be focused on industrial practice. 4. For government purposes the school would prepare expert opinion on technical projects. 5. The school would train technically educated people for civil service, especially cameral and mining services and for practical disciplines. 6. The Polytechnic did not rule out the training of soldiers who wanted to serve in the Army's general staff. Gerstner's ambitious and, for its time, broadly conceived plan had been appreciated by the Court Study Commission but due to the agitated times during the Napoleonic wars, which placed a heavy financial burden on Austria, it was not eventually implemented. The second proposal for the establishment of the Polytechnic was submitted in 1803, three years after the death of the headmaster of the Estates' Engineering School in Prague Herget. Since the post of the headmaster and professor at the Engineering School became vacant, Count Rottenhan, the Chairman of the Court Study Commission, proposed to Emperor Franz I to appoint F. J. Gerstner to that post. At the same time, Count Rottenhan emphasized that Gerstner's original project to set up a polytechnic, conceived as an allAustrian institution, should be modified to suit the specific needs of the Czech lands and its institutions, and called on the emperor to charge the Czech estates "whose willingness to support useful public enterprises enhancing the fame of the kingdom is well known"

17 with the task of setting up the polytechnic. Gerstner's modified and considerably truncated proposal to set up a polytechnic was eventually approved by the Imperial and Royel Court Office The all-Austrian polytechnical institute based on the French model couid not be built immediately due to several reasons, of which the following three see-