The author analyses the organization of selected nursery schools and their interactive patterns with the assistance of ethnological concept of rituals of transition. Two types of nursery schools were chosen for this purpose - the alternative model of initial schooling represented by approach of Maria Montessori and the common public nursery school. The author describes the Montessori-preschool as a place of sacral ritual practices which correspond to transitional schema of A. van Gennep and V. Turner. The common public nursery school can be also understood as organization based on rituals of transition, but its rituals are symbolically reduced and meet more profane purposes. These propositions are demonstrated with the assistance of conceptual and field data (resulting from school ethnography). The significant symbolic divergence of transitional schéma in both organizations is in contrast to similar formative effects on children. The common implicit aim of these schemas seems to be the effective conformization of behavior, which Montessori calls “joyful obedience”.
In the 1830s, thanks to the highest representatives of the land administration and the estate community, the first nursery schools were established in the Czech lands to offer day care to pre-school children, especially from working-class families. The article analyses the ways of representation of these institutions in public space using the example of nursery schools in Prague (Na Hrádku), Mladá Boleslav and Česká Lípa: the argumentation strategies in their establishment and subsequent evaluation of activities in the first years of their existence. Special attention is paid to the comparison of the nursery schools with the Czech and German languages of instruction and their legitimation motivated by charitable assistance or national agitation and differences in the content of the curriculum.