On the Way to European Union. Changes in the Czech Educational System during the last fifteen years
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2004 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Revista Espanola de Educación Comparada |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Field | Pedagogy and education |
| Keywords | Educational policy; Educational system in Czech Republic; Education in European Union |
| Description | The aim of the paper is to describe the changes in the educational system in the Czech Republic that have taken place from the beginning of the 1990s up to the present. The first part includes a brief characterisation of the initial situation typical of the socialist model of education and a specification of those areas that were viewed sceptically or critically after the velvet revolution in 1989, and that have been identified as areas where a change is desirable. Next part of the paper describes the course of changes and reforms of education in subsequent years. Periodisation of reforms is carried out on the basis of a general model that has been created, as one of possible approaches, for post-socialist countries in transformation. Each part of the model, i.e. the corrective reforms, modernization reforms, structural reforms and system reforms, contains an outline of the respective individual changes that took place in the Czech Republic in the course of the last, almost fifteen years, and the changes are critically evaluated. The last part of the paper deals with the outlooks of further development of the Czech educational system in connection with the entry into the European Union, and a conclusion is drawn that it involves mutual convergence of problems caused by global economic and social forces that also leads to mutual convergence of their optimal solutions, namely not only within the EU member states. |