From Stalinism to the Prague Spring—Education in Complicated Times

This chapter presents the history of Czechoslovakia from the end of World War II to the end of the 1960s. The postwar years were associated with hopes for a free life and the general development of the country. These hopes were extinguished in 1948 when the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (Komunistická strana Československa, KSČ) fully assumed power and started building a socialist (totalitarian) state and a satellite of the Soviet Union. The next part of the chapter describes Czechoslovakia in the 1960s when the regime relaxed and changes took place in many aspects of life. The reforms culminated in the ‘Prague Spring’, which ended with the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops in 1968. In the field of education and in the school system, the ‘Sovietization’ of education occurred in the 1950s, which resulted in many deformations and unprepared reforms aimed at bringing the school system closer to that of the Soviet Union. The chapter describes laws as well as ideological influences in the school system, including the specific impacts of the interventions into the school system and into the lives of teachers and students. In the 1960s, teachers regained more freedom for their work. This period was brought to an end after 1968, when staffing purges took place in schools and the onset of normalization in schools was once again accompanied by ideological pressure.