Abstract
Josef Wünsch made a long journey from being an enthusiast for the ancient world - which, in the schools, was held in high esteem and viewed as an ideal worthy to imitate still in the 1860s - to adopting an ambivalent position or even love-hate relationship. This further resulted in his breakup with the frozen image of Antiquity and involvement with the living present.
This change might have been triggered by a dispute with one of his university professors, the type of schooling practiced at the time he started his studies, the reiterating controversy about the (un)usefulness of the knowledge of ancient languages, or his perception of the changing reality as contrasted to the old-fashioned education system. His decision was certainly backed up by industrial, societal, and scientific developments: industrialisation of the Czech lands, the country's emerging spirit of national patriotism, formation of new philosophies and disciplines, such as psychology and sociology, and the imminent separation of the school subject of history from that of geography.