Abstract
The aim of this paper is to recall some of Masaryk's ideas, which are associated with the current thinking on education to spirituality. The focus is on the reflections on morality and cultivation of man in the world, and the gradual evaporation of religious experience and sense of tradition.
Masaryk talks about morality of man and the influences which form it rather than about spirituality or religious experience. As a sociologist, he ponders over the differences of life in the countryside and in the city, and he analyzes the impact of diverse environments on the formation of individual value order.
Masaryk views family and school as the key elements of the moral aspects of man. In Masaryk's "pedagogy", a few basic values and principles can be recognized which represent the universal key to finding humanity: truth, mercy and humanism.
All these values are interrelated and refer both to the Czech Reformation and the Enlightenment efforts, and to the New Testament and, to some extent, the Old Testament tradition. The problem of religion in terms of determining the true nature of the Reformation is a lifelong preoccupation for Masaryk.
He realizes that he lives in a period of transition, in a time of a deep religious crisis when the traditional religious attitudes seem to be unsustainable when faced with the modern world. Masaryk considers the religious crisis to be the crisis of culture, too, as European history has been shaped by Christianity in particular.
For him, to reform is not to improve and refine the doctrine but, above all, to change onerself and one's own life in the light of intensive learning about one's cultural heritage and that of it which is still alive and inspirational for the future.