Abstract

The article presents the activities and selected views of the French educationalist Gaston Mialaret on the centenary of his birthday. He was a long-time professor at Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines at the University of Caen. He combined the taste for empirical research with interest in philosophy. He continued and enriched the concepts of the New Education, especially the lasting importance of simultaneous research on the subsequent stages of child development and the implementation of education based on the assumptions of development pedagogy. He developed proposals for progressive educational reform presented in 1947 in the project “Le plan Langevin-Wallon”. On the background of the analysis of the changing role of education in the contemporary world, Mialaret showed the changing role of pedagogical studies and especially the new role of the teacher as an animator of educational acts and situations. The article emphasises the basic, in Mialaret’s opinion, the importance of the socalled active methods enabling the enrichment of personality at all levels of education and the development of the educational, intellectual, civic and cultural potential of each student.