Education Ministry project to "abolish" national curriculum is underway
While Czech school children are very good at memorising facts and have fairly wide general knowledge, they tend to lag behind their peers from Western Europe as far as reasoning, communication skills or functional literacy are concerned. Experts say it is the heritage of the communist-era education system when the aim was to teach children detailed knowledge but not skills or problem solving. Is there a chance things will change soon?
Until 1989, the centrally prescribed curriculum was binding for all schools in the country. It stipulated the number of hours per subject per week, and teachers even knew the precise week of the school year in which they were supposed to go over a certain chapter in a textbook. Textbooks were filled with facts but completely lacking in problem solving tasks. After the fall of communism, schools were given more freedom as to what and how they wanted to teach. Some have welcomed the more liberal approach, such as the one in Vodickova Street in Prague where Hana Kotikova teaches English.
"I create my own teaching programme because the pupils here are very different and I must create every lesson on such a level which would correspond with their knowledge and their abilities."
The autonomy of individual schools is to be extended even more as the national curriculum should be abolished completely in a few years' time. Schools will only follow a general outline issued by the Education Ministry and the rest will be left up to them. Jan Tupy is the deputy head of the Education Research Institute which is currently working on the new project.
"At the moment fifty-four schools around the country are testing out their own programmes, based on a state-issued outline. During this school year these schools will develop their individual curricula and afterwards present their comments or objections to the state outline for us to do some fine-tuning."
It will take another 3 to 4 years before the new system is fully functional at all primary schools and, it is hoped that it really will help children to learn to reflect and question, rather than just memorise.
