Bielsko: The Education Centre for Industrial Production between Austrian Silesia and Galicia at the Turn of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

22 Introduction The submitted study deals with the issue of education for industrial production in the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, an issue which has been, mainly by Czech historians, refl ected only minimally.1 In the period under consideration the modernization processes, already underway, were becoming more intense, signifi cantly infl uencing the form of the professional training of workers for both small-scale production and the centralised forms of mass production. What seems especially signifi cant are the eff ects of the Industrial Revolution (the introduction and spreading of new technologies, the innovation in working procedures, the secondarization of the economy, etc.), the changes in the demand for certain commodities and workforces, increased due to the liberalization of the market and the improvement of transportation possibilities, and the more precise legislation regulating economic life and social transformations. The new – modern – society that was developing did not only have a new structure, but also other possibilities, ambitions and principles of functioning. It was precisely in this period that, according to Fritz Ringer, the relation between a part of the educational sector and the economic sphere was introduced, while certain forms of science and technical education were becoming at least one of the causes of further economic growth.2 All those involved were to adapt to the new conditions: employers, workforces and even the state, which had been, until