There had been a complete lack of teacher training in Liberec since 1964, when the Pedagogical Institute was abolished. This meant there were not enough qualified teachers in the region. Thus, the creation of a new institution to provide teacher training was a foregone conclusion. The founding charter was signed at the meeting of the Academic Senate of the College of Engineering and Textiles of VŠST on 10 July 1990. The first dean of the then Faculty of Education was the mathematician doc. Václav Pecina.
The faculty may well be the youngest faculty of education in the Czech Republic, but Liberec’s tradition of training teachers goes back more than two hundred years. Based on the new Higher Education Act of 1990, universities gained the power to decide independently about setting up new faculties. Therefore, it was only natural that the then University of Mechanical and Textile Engineering also considered tying in to the Liberec region’s long tradition of teacher training.
By the spring of 1990, there were proposals promoting a faculty that had yet to be officially confirmed. The main arguments for setting up the Faculty of Education that appeared in the proposal were the needs of primary education in the Liberec region, which, at that time, was part of the North Bohemian Region administered in Ústí nad Labem. An analysis by the then Department of Education of the Liberec District indicated a lack of primary school teachers.
The Academic Senate began its activities at the university at the start of 1990, It discussed and approved the proposal to set up a Faculty of Education on 10 July 1990.
The then President of the Academic Senate, David Lukáš, signed the Faculty’s founding charter on the same day. Moreover, the first Dean of the Faculty, Václav Pecina, was elected at this meeting of the Academic Senate.
