Civic learning in Czech educational debate: Changes of the concept in the 20th century between educational sciences and school practice

Abstract

Highlights:

- Civic education in interwar democratic Czechoslovakia as a way to civic emancipation and worldview tolerance.

- Active methods of civic education in education - the example of interwar Czechoslovakia.

- Political instrumentalisation and ideologization of civic education: the example of communist Czechoslovakia.

- 1968 and the Prague Spring: changes and breakdowns of the reform model of civic education in Czechoslovakia.

- Civic education in totalitarian systems: educational goals, curriculum, teaching methods, role of the teacher, extra-curricular education.

Purpose: The aim of this study is to reconstruct the development of civic learning within Czech debate during two periods: 1. the interwar period; 2. the communist era in Czechoslovakia.

Design and approach: The study is based on printed materials related to educational policy –laws, educational programmes, curriculum documents and teaching journals. Using a text-analytical and hermeneutic approach, it reconstructs the direction and “power of discourse” within educational policy concerning civic learning in Czech debate in the 20th century.

Findings: The first part of the study reconstructs the formation of the concept of civic learning seeking to link the national and cosmopolitan models of coexistence (the curriculum of civic learning, civic learning in the wider school life, the didactic concept of teaching and the implementation of active forms of teaching civic studies and education). The second part of the study analyses both the changes and stability (macrodidactic and microdidactic levels; curricular and methodological levels) of the ideological Marxist orientation of civic learning (as a school subject and as school life) in communist Czechoslovakia.

Research limitations: The report is based on the analysis of educational policy documents, i.e. primary sources of the “official” educational debate, only partially taking into account the levels of actors (teachers, pupils, parents), “transfer” and implementation from the political curriculum level (macrodidactic level) to the level of implementation of objectives and contents in teaching (microdidactic level).