The history of pedagogy, regardless of its relatively short history, brings with it a multitude of messages, knowledge and ideas of pedagogues who marked, each in their own way, the direction of progress of pedagogy as a science. These components are the subject of this work. At the beginning of this thesis there is a historical overview of pedagogy, from the first communities up to the modern period in which we are currently living, followed by descriptions of the pedagogical influence of some of the most important people who created the foundations of the further development of science: Socrates, Jan Amos Komensky, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, John Dewey and Maria Montessori. The main messages of those pedagogues are summerized and described in the following chapter, and are related to dialogue, learning from simpler to more complex, accordance of cognitive, affective and psychomotor development of students, experiential learning and a positive learning environment and atmosphere. The last part of the thesis is reserved for the description of empirical research, the goal of which is to determine whether and to what extent these key ideas of the mentioned pedagogues are present in contemporary schools in the Republic of Croatia. 80 primary school teachers took part in the research through an anonymous Google Forms questionnaire, which consisted of questions about the importance and frequency of applying ideas and specifying key teaching situations from practice in which they are visible. The results of the research show that teachers consider each of the listed components to be very important, with dialogue being the most important and experiential learning the least necessary. In terms of frequency, teachers pay the most attention to providing a positive learning environment and atmosphere, while again the least to experiential learning. The research confirmed that there is little connection in the opinion about the importance of using experiential learning among teachers who work in larger schools (more than 700 students) and those who work in smaller ones (less than 400 students). Likewise, a difference in the frequency of application of experiential learning was concluded between teachers with more than 20 years of work experience and those with less than 10.