This study on Alois Klar (1763-1833) focuses mainly on his achievements as a pedagogue and his work for the visually impaired. Methodologically, it draws on Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Michel Foucault, enabling us to view the evolution of social care as a concomitant of the emerging modern state and integral to its structure. The study presents an analysis of the beginnings of Klar’s Prague institute for the visually impaired against a background of rapid changes in medicine, the scope of the state, and educational thinking. At a time of compulsory school attendance and new approaches to education, when the state demanded the active participation of its subjects/citizens in propagating its aims and the values of society as a whole, the blind and partially sighted were given access to a full and systematic education. We also present data concerning Klar’s educational work and thinking (he taught in Litoměřice and at Prague University), and examine the internal workings of the newly established institute - one of the first of its kind in Europe - and its contacts with the medical discourse of the emerging science of ophthalmology., Marek Fapšo., and Obsahuje bibliografické odkazy