Abstract
This chapter shall shed some light on the processes of curriculum making in post-socialist context, particularly on the role of Communist heritage as cultural and institutional/structural constraints conditioning (and sometimes also enabling) some key actors: academic elites, governmental bureaucracy, and teachers. The dominant focus of analysis is on macro (national) and mezzo (school) levels and their interaction.
David Graeber's concept of interpretive labor is used to analyse the relationship between the macro and mezzo levels. The macro level processes are studied by analysis of policy documents.
For the school level, results of longitudinal multiple case study of five schools during the curricular reform are used. In the Czech Republic, from the very first days of the Velvet Revolution (November 1989), citizens and some teachers were demanding profound changes in the Czech school system.
But the community of educational experts lacked the necessary capacity and were overloaded by the tasks related to the higher education reform. A model for the radical curricular reform emerged from an unexpected source - from The National Institute of Public Health.
In the early 1990s, a small group of health psychologists, using the Scottish project Healthy School and know-how of the World Health Organization, developed a detailed model programme for comprehensive and radical change of individual school organisations and their everyday life. The Social Democrat government (1998-2006) decided to up-scale the successful model that enabled to change the school climate in some schools that voluntarily participated in Healthy School network.
Now all schools had to develop their school curriculum using the new national framework based on the idea of key competences. The accession of the Czechia to the European Union provided necessary funds for implementation of this plan.
The analysis of key policy documents paving way of the curriculum reform, however, shows the chain of U-turns and broken promises. There are three main disparities between the original intention and the final reform legislative: (1) it was intended that the SBCD would be a voluntary but it is now mandatory for all schools; (2) the government at the beginning promised that the schools would be provided with sample model curricula but they have never been written; (3) the plan for monitoring of the reform outcomes was abandoned due to resistance of some stakeholders.
One of key reasons of this implementation failure was probably the lack of necessary capacity of key actors, in this case the politicians, governmental bureaucrats, and educational experts. We can see the imposed curricular autonomy as an example of structural violence, as the "interpretive labour" forcing the teachers as subordinates do the work of understanding how the broad ideas of "new curriculum" shall be interpreted in the detailed plans and in individual lessons to please those in the position of power (in this case the school inspection in the first place).