"Civilizing the Gypsy Child": "Gypsy School" as a Colonial Practice in Interwar Czechoslovakia (1918-1938)
Abstract
At the beginning of the 1920s, there was a large debate in central Czechoslovak administration, addressing the so called "Gypsy question". In these discussions, a new administration discourse emerged which demanded to implement modern, "civilized" methods regarding the governance of the allegedly culturally primitive Gypsy population.
Such discourse drew among them new boundaries according to their supposed potential to change. Gypsies who were considered unable to be reformed ("wandering Gypsies") were supposed to be subject to the special police measures.
A different kind of treatment awaited those who had the potential to be reformed, especially children. However, the distinction between these two categories was interconnected with the colonial spatial imagination and the division of Czechoslovakia into three different symbolic spaces: the modern Czech lands in the west, undeveloped Slovak territories and primitive Subcarpathian Ruthenia in the east.
While in the Czech lands a "Gypsy child" could be taken away from his parents, treated as "morally defective" and his potential to reform could be examined by many educational experts, a "Gypsy child" living in the "orientalized" space of Carpathian Ruthenia had more civilizing potential. In this paper, I will focus on development of the "Gypsy school" project and its practical implementation by the Czechoslovak administration.
The project was perceived as a civilizing "experiment" that combined education and hygiene principles. Moreover, I will describe how this unique case from the 1920s turned into a common practice in the Czechoslovak colonial space.
Finally, I will address the question whether this colonial practice could have been somehow related to the enforcement of the Law from 1927 against "Wandering Gypsies".