Persecution of believers through the view of primary school teachers in socialist Czechoslovakia
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| Year of publication | 2019 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The contribution focuses on everyday situations in which teachers had to comply with the Czechoslovak Communist Party's regulations supporting the atheization of society. It is an issue that has not yet been paid much attention to socialist education research. At the same time, the role of the school, and in particular of its teachers, was very important in this period. Teachers should become a tool to promote socialist ideas. These were to be passed on to future generations, thereby raising "new" individuals sharing the ideas of Marxism-Leninism, including the idea of a society made up of people without any religion. The paper is based mainly on data obtained by authors through oral history interviews. In total, there are 53 interviews with 37 witnesses, who are teachers, but also former headmasters of primary schools in former socialist Czechoslovakia. The oral history method was supplemented with the study of archival materials and period legislation. These sources were studied in several archives of the Czech Republic. These are the National Archive of the Czech Republic, the Archive of the City of Brno and the Moravian Land Archive. The research results, on the one hand, represent teachers as a "political tool" of the ruling Czechoslovak Communist Party, but at the same time reveal their difficult position in carrying out the tasks assigned to them. This stems from the expectation of the ruling regime that teachers will conscientiously and unreservedly follow its instructions, as well as the teachers' efforts to minimize the negative impact on the life of pupils or their parents. |
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