Enhancement of constructivist and procedural concepts of good citizenship and civic identity in the Czech educational framework

Abstract

This paper identifies the main flaws, dilemmas and challenges concerning the concept of civic education and teaching democracy in the Czech schooling system after 1989 with a special focus stressed on the urgent need for the application of more pluralist, constructivist and procedural approaches that would enhance the traditional concepts of social science education based on facts and typologies with the help of methods and trends depicting the principle of civic education as a multidimensional and everyday phenomenon. To suggest and analyse possible ways, the study reflects mainly two dominant causes of a low prestige and effectivity of civic education in the Czech Republic; first the implicitly ideological and universalist character of the national curriculum that is not able to accept social values as an issue of permanently flowing and contextually based discourse and second, the prevalence of ethnic attributes in the process of national identification which impedes any relevant efforts to treat collective identity and citizenship in an open pluralist way. Hence, the paper also presents new suggested understanding of the Czech civic education; the one that is based on more interpretative and constructivist pillars and that is self-aware of its own embeddedness, language dependence and procedural character. In this regard, several activities from this new Czech educational project are also analysed with an aim to demonstrate that any innovative initiatives following the abovementioned challenges in the framework of civic education should employ procedural understanding of social reality and thus reflect more radical questions that are linked to the postmodern democratic theory such as the notion of agonist democracy, impact of social networks, reflection of instrumental manipulative behaviour or more unbiased interpretations of human liberty.