Issue 2025/1
Studies
The Development of Democratic Schools – Assessing the Development of a School Subject during the Transformation Process Using Educational Science Criteria
University of Vienna, Faculty of Philosophy and Education, Department of Education
Abstract: The public education system in the GDR was one of the most strictly regulated sectors of socialist society. Following initial, more democratic aspirations, the educational objective of fostering the ‘socialist citizen’ was declared to be state ideology. This article briefly reconstructs the development of education in East Germany and then uses a specific example to examine how the transition towards a democratic education system was shaped. This transition is not presented as a process of belated modernization; rather, an examination of the development of a school subject in Brandenburg shows that entirely independent approaches were developed here, which sought to provide a response to the specific situation in that federal state. At the same time, however, the analysis of the development of the school subject ‘Life Skills, Ethics and Religious Studies’ (LER) also shows that prescriptive educational ideals and claims to truth could not be fully overcome, nor could the claims to a monopoly that characterized public education in the GDR as well as in the education systems of other people’s republics.
Keywords: Democratic education, educational transformation, East Germany, curriculum development, religious education, Brandenburg, LER.
ISSN: 2989‑3577
Source Type: journal
Document Type: article
Article language: English
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Slovak Reading Primers during the Period of Socialism in Czechoslovakia (1948–1989)
Department of Educational Studies, Faculty of Education, Trnava University in Trnava
Abstract: The paper analyses Slovak primers published during the socialist period in Slovakia between 1948 and 1989. The aim of the study is to identify their ideological, thematic, and didactic characteristics and to highlight their role in the formation of children as a future builder and citizen of socialist society. Attention is paid to recurring thematic motifs, linguistic strategies, and the visual design of the primers. The study employs qualitative content analysis and a comparative approach, to compare primers published in Slovakia during the socialist period. The analysis focuses on the thematic orientation of the texts, the visual design of the illustrations, and the implicit value-laden and ideological messages conveyed through the content of the primers. Particular attention is also given to the method of initial reading instruction applied in the primers and to whether this method changed during the period under review. The results of the analysis indicate that, in addition to their didactic function, primers during the socialist period also served a pronounced ideological function.
Keywords: Primers, socialism, primary education, hidden curriculum, method of initial reading, ideology.
ISSN: 2989‑3577
Source Type: journal
Document Type: article
Article language: English
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From Civic Formation to Ideological Deformation : Civic Education in Czechoslovakia (1945–1960)
Department of Educational Studies, Faculty of Education, Trnava University in Trnava
Abstract: This study examines the ideological transformation of civic education in the Czechoslovak Republic between 1945 and 1953. It focuses primarily on the school subjects of Civic Education and Civics as they were taught in Czechoslovak schools. The aim is to analyse how, against the backdrop of post-war social reconstruction and the subsequent rise of the communist regime, the concept of citizenship in formal education changed, as reflected in curricular documents. Particular attention is paid to the transition from the limited democratic model of civic formation in the years 1945–1947 – which was still rooted in the tradition of the so-called First Republic (1918–1938) – to an ideologically determined model based on the principles of Marxism-Leninism. Methodologically, the study is based on a historical-educational analysis of curricula, legislative documents, contemporary periodicals, and other primary sources. The findings point to a gradual intensification of ideological pressure within the curriculum, which, after 1948, developed into a systematic effort to mould a politically conscious and regime-loyal socialist citizen. Civics became a significant instrument of ideological indoctrination and political propaganda, with its content subordinated to the aims of communist ideology and the construction of a new social order (ideological socialisation). The study also highlights the contradiction between the declared educational objectives and social reality, as well as the consequences that this development had for civic awareness and behaviour among the younger generation.
Keywords: Civics, civic education, curriculum, ideological indoctrination, totalitarianism, Czechoslovakia.
ISSN: 2989‑3577
Source Type: journal
Document Type: article
Article language: English
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Taboo Themes in Czech Literary Works Relevant to Young Readers Before and After 1989 : A Comparative Study
Department of Czech Language and Literature,
Faculty of Education, Palacký University Olomouc
Abstract: This study examines how selected taboo or socially sensitive themes are represented in Czech/Czechoslovak literary works addressed to young readers or structured around child and adolescent perspectives before and after 1989. It focuses on three thematic pairs: family absence and dysfunction; Jewish persecution and wartime moral responsibility; and chronic illness and neurodevelopmental difference. The research corpus consists of six purposively selected works, three published before 1989 and three after the political transformation. The study uses qualitative comparative literary analysis based on structured close reading. The works are compared according to narrative perspective, the agency attributed to child or adolescent characters, the explicitness of the sensitive theme, the location of responsibility, and the form of narrative closure. Within the selected corpus, the pre-1989 works more frequently mediate childhood vulnerability through collective, institutional, indirect, or stabilising narrative patterns. The post-1989 works tend to allow greater thematic explicitness and more sustained attention to individual experience, relational conflict, and consequences that resist simple resolution. These findings do not support a straightforward opposition between censored and free literature. Instead, they demonstrate how changing political, cultural, and literary conditions influence the ways in which sensitive experiences are narrated. The study also identifies possibilities for using comparative reading to support historical literacy, ethical reflection, and inclusive education.
Keywords: Czech literature and young readers, socially sensitive themes, state-socialist cultural control, family dysfunction, antisemitism, disability representation.
ISSN: 2989‑3577
Source Type: journal
Document Type: article
Article language: English
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Ladislav Hanus as the “Slovak Guardini” : Organic Pluralism as an Experience-Based Response to Totalitarianism
Department of Educational Studies, Faculty of Education, Trnava University in Trnava
Abstract: Ladislav Hanus (1907–1994) ranks among the most original yet internationally overlooked Central European philosophers of the twentieth century. Although frequently described as the “Slovak Guardini” because of his intellectual indebtedness to Romano Guardini, Hanus developed a distinctive political and cultural philosophy that cannot be reduced to Guardini’s personalism. This article argues that Hanus’s concept of organic pluralism emerged as an experience-based philosophical response to totalitarianism rather than as a purely theoretical model of political order. Drawing on Hanus’s unpublished and samizdat writings, especially The Principle of Pluralism (1967), the article reconstructs his critique of totalitarian monism and radical individualism as two opposing anthropological distortions. It further demonstrates that Hanus understood pluralism not merely as institutional diversity but as an ethical and anthropological principle grounded in the dignity of the human person and realised through dialogue. Finally, the article argues that Hanus’s reflections point beyond political philosophy towards a philosophy of education, in which dialogue becomes the formative practice through which persons capable of sustaining a genuinely pluralistic society are educated.
Keywords: Ladislav Hanus, organic pluralism, dialogue, philosophy of education, personalism, totalitarianism.
ISSN: 2989‑3577
Source Type: journal
Document Type: article
Article language: English
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Do We Need Democracy in Schools? A Historical Analysis of a Political Debate in 1985 Socialist Hungary
Institute of Education Science, Faculty of Humanities, University of Pannonia, Hungary
Abstract: 1985 marked a significant year in Hungarian education history. A new public education law was issued, allowing more freedom, autonomy, and alternative forms of schooling than before. This transformation was parallel with the changing geopolitical landscape of glasnost (transparent policy) and perestroika (restructuring economics and politics) under Gorbachev’s Soviet Union. The Hungarian political leadership initiated many debates to establish its legitimacy amid the crisis of socialism, seeking the support it needed from society for the unavoidable reform of the system. One proposal concerned developing democracy and autonomy in schools: in May 1985, the National Pedagogical Institute held several meetings outside Budapest with teachers, school instructors, and principals from kindergartens and elementary and secondary schools. The Ministry of Culture started this process earlier in the first years of the 1980s, under the slogan of modernizing educational management; the economic, educational, and political reform plans intertwined with each other in these years, and the topic of this study (Az intézményi önállóság és a munkahelyi demokratizmus fejlesztése, in English: Developing institutional autonomy and workplace democracy) is just one of these flourishing debates. Professor Gábor Halász, a key figure among contemporary educational experts who participated in the preparation work, has preserved the debate minutes in a private archive; thanks to his generosity, I have access to these valuable documents. I will present the non-public debate results by contrasting them with public pedagogical media discourse from the same year, using the keywords ‘school’ and ‘democracy.’
Keywords: Socialist democracy, school autonomy, democratism, institutional independence, efficiency, ideology.
ISSN: 2989‑3577
Source Type: journal
Document Type: article
Article language: English
Paper fulltext: download article