To read like a Bataman: reader education in Bat’a’s Zlín
Summary: The text focuses on various aspects of education for reading in interwar Baťa’s Zlín. In its time, it represented a model embodiment of values associated with industrial modernity, which also de- termined its cultural policy. Through the mouth of its founder, Tomáš Baťa, and then his successor, Jan Antonín Baťa, the Zlín system formulated the idea of adequate reading for factory employees, promoting in it the qualities required of every Bataman. The article thus concentrates on the vision of a proper Baťa reading based, among other things, on the personal tastes of the two shoemakers and on the efforts to promote and enforce this vision among adult workers as well as among industrial youth and children through school education.
Keywords: Baťa’s Zlín 1918–1939, Tomáš Baťa, Jan Antonín Baťa, modernity, education for reading
