A look beyond labels for equal education: the presence of racial discrimination against Roma in the Czech school system can be properly addressed through a careful race-blind reform of multicultural education that teaches students to reject stereotypes.

Despite prior attempts at school reform, racial discrimination remains rampant in Czech classrooms. Roma children are forced into substandard separate schools and if kept in regular classrooms, are often treated as inferior to their Czech peers. Persistent negative Roma stereotypes in the Czech Republic fuel these actions, which bring the Roma into a vicious cycle of dead-end schools, poverty, and crime.

If schools fail to properly educate Roma children, there is little hope for their social mobility. But if schools fail to educate Czech society and teach tolerance towards all ethnic minorities, there is little hope for any governmental policy reform to be successful. Education remains a vital socializing institution, and discrimination against Roma can improve through a careful, race and culture-blind reform of education in the Czech classroom. While the results may not be immediate, the effective and nuanced introduction of "Transcultural" education will help the Czech Republic become more tolerant towards the Roma community.

A Brief History of Roma in the Czech Republic

The Roma have, in fact, experienced prejudice for centuries within the Czech Republic. Since their arrival in the CR in the 15th century, they have faced waves of discrimination laws, poverty, and anti-Roma sentiment.

In 1547, Prague's Roma population was exiled after receiving blame for a fire which broke out in the city; in 1697, killing a Roma was not a crime; in 1710, Joseph I issued a decree to hang all Roma men. While such outright discrimination against the Roma ceased under Austrian Empress Maria Theresa, the Empress set in place a policy that remains the root of the problem today: socialization. In attempting to assimilate the Roma, Maria Theresa weakened their distinct culture. She sought to settle the nomadic Roma people quickly and perhaps insensitively. Nomadic life was forbidden, the Roma language was banned, and children were taken to non-Roma families for re-education.

World War II brought the harshest period of Roma discrimination. Almost all of the original Czech Roma population perished in Nazi concentration camps. But the Czech Roma population grew under communism when the state brought Roma from rural Slovakia to perform unskilled labor. An echo of Maria Theresa's pitfalls, the insensitive dissolution of Roma culture into Czech culture crippled the Roma identity.

These past efforts to socialize the Roma into what is seen as the authentic Czech culture have led to their social exclusion and subjugation. They live a life of cultural stagnation. The majority of the Roma community now live in a perpetual state of poverty and crime, paired with both direct and underlying discrimination from Czech society.

The present insensitivity towards Roma culture characterizes laws that both hinder and advocate their liberties. Most governmental measures foster animosity among Czechs, many of whom view the Roma culture as degenerate. While the state has recognized the Roma's struggle and has implemented policy support such as public school reform, this support fails to address the real issue--how to integrate the Roma into Czech culture without seeking complete assimilation or exclusion.

The Current State of the Czech Classroom

On the 13th of November 2007, the European Court of Human Rights highlighted this exact problem. They declared that the Czech state continues to practice policies of exclusion against its Roma minority and specifically this minority's children. Eighteen students from the Moravian region of Ostrava, a town 60 miles from Prague, initially challenged the Czech state in 2000. They stood as voices for the Roma children who were sent, solely based on their Roma origin, to remedial schools for children with mental disabilities. The process of segregating Roma children in separate remedial schools has been a fixture of the Czech school system since its existence. The Court found that the tests used to label children as "mentally inferior" were insufficient, given with haste, and culturally biased. The court declared in its decision that, "in 1999 Roma pupils made up between 80 and 90 percent of the total number of pupils in some special schools and that in 2004 'large numbers' of Roma children were still being placed in special schools."

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The case was a landmark victory for Roma and the NGOs fighting their cause. In addition, during the case's seven-year fight, the Czech Education Act of 2004 supposedly eliminated these special schools and replaced them with "practical" schools. The "practical" schools were meant for students who were not meeting the achievement levels of their peers in the regular school system. However, a year after the ruling and four years after the law became effective, a coalition of European Roma Rights NGOs said that little had changed. Tomas Nikolai, child psychologist and Intercultural Education Coordinator for the largest Czech NGO People In Need, says, "there is not a big difference between the current situation and the old school reform. Just the labels are different. The 'practical' schools are the same. The Roma children are in this separate school, and the others are in the normal schools."

The Czech government has failed to end the segregation of Roma children. Roma children remain the majority in these former remedial schools. According to research conducted in 2008 by the European Roma Rights Centre and the Roma Education Fund, Roma children represent more than half of the student population in 74 percent of the "practical" schools visited by researchers. These "practical" schools continue to provide a substandard curriculum and inadequate support for its disadvantaged students. These schools do not cultivate the tools necessary to break the cycle of poverty many Roma children are born into.

Dana Moree, an expert on multicultural education at the Faculty of Humanities at Charles University, believes the segregation is deeply rooted. The direct discrimination in schools is just the top of it. "When the whole society thinks that the Roma are a problem, then Roma children in schools are going to be looked on as a problem," she explains in an interview in early March. Nikolai agrees. "The separation is not only in schools. It is in real life," he says.

The Czech government should seek to end this history-long prejudice. Czech society must be taught tolerance towards the Roma culture and all ethnic minorities. Sensitivity to unique aspects of culture must be cultivated. Aid for Roma families must go beyond welfare programs that further estrange the Roma from Czech society. Neither cultural assimilation nor exclusion is the answer. The answer lies, however, in a race-blind reform of the Czech school system.

A Blinding Spotlight on Culture

Multicultural education was introduced into the Czech school system through curriculum reform under the new Education Act of 2004--the largest official school reform since the initial changes following the 1989 Velvet Revolution. But its introduction has been largely ineffective. While meant to promote cultural understanding and tolerance, the act's vague terminology has induced teachers to respond to the new curricula in an ad hoc manner.

According to research done by Moree, the Education Act did not sufficiently prepare or motivate teachers to implement the required multicultural curricular changes. The government did not provide extra compensation or training for teachers who now had to devise new curricula. In addition, a "bottom-up" approach was implemented, which allowed each school to decide how they wished to teach "multiculturalism."

As a result and despite the act, issues of discrimination are left truly unaddressed. The influence education can bring towards ethnic tolerance has gone untapped. Many of the old and culturally insensitive teaching methods persist such as an approach known as the "cultural standard" model. According to this model explained by Moree, teachers follow general "cultural standards" which only stereotype groups and further ostracize one culture from another. This approach deepens the separation between Roma and Czech children and does nothing to lessen the tension between minority groups and the Czech majority.

The following situation illuminates the "cultural standard" model: During the holiday season, a primary school may unintentionally disrespect the diversity of cultures by asking a Roma child to describe how he or she celebrates Christmas or by asking a Vietnamese student how he or she decorates the family tree. These questions assume cultural homogeneity and create further feelings of alienation.

A Multicultural Approach without Culture

The current Education Ministry has addressed this issue and is finally working towards a more appropriate school reform. Representing the Faculty of Humanities at Charles University, Moree is part of the movement on the Ministry of Education's counseling board to instill an individualized, stereotype-free approach to multicultural education in the Czech school system.

Moree and a number of NGOs wish to revolutionize the fundamental way culture is taught. They believe that teachers should receive training for a "Transcultural" model that caters to the personality of each child. Teachers would leave behind assumed cultural stereotypes and approach their students as individuals, not as representatives of their culture.

Followers of the transcultural model understand that all students are equal in their unique intersections of culture. "The individual person is in the middle of this approach. Culture is something that is influenced throughout your entire life--small place, big city, where you live, hobbies you have. You can be policeman or an anarchist who speak the same language, but you can have different cultures," Moree says.

Moree and her colleagues created the website Czechkid.cz to illustrate this approach to cultural differences. The website--currently receiving around 9,000 hits a month--is an online interactive teaching tool for both teachers and students. On its home page, ten children are shown together in a park. The nationalities vary from Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Slovakian, Czech, Iraqi, Roma, "Czecho-Western" (a child born to a Czech mother and a Dutch father) and an Afro-Czech (a child born to a Czech mother and African father).

The website highlights discrimination in the Czech Republic by conveying concrete stories and situations from the lives of these ordinary though culturally different children. The website portrays how each child's uniqueness undermines the cultural stereotypes that exist in Czech society.

Nikolai with People In Need is working with a similar approach called "Intercultural education." The program provides courses, materials, techniques, and support aimed at training teachers to adopt this reform of multicultural education. "Our concept of Intercultural education is different from others in the Czech Republic, mainly from the schools. We want to teach that intercultural education starts from the personality of each child. We don't see the difference between Roma and Czech children. They are all equal. We don't want to speak about typical Roma or Czech children, which is the way many schools do," he says.

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Graficka 13, a primary and secondary school in Prague, exemplifies this student-centered approach. The school is 85 percent Roma, but prides itself in its academic excellence. The school's detailed attention to their students is clear. The hallways are covered in student art projects and murals. There are scribbles of (school-sanctioned) graffiti under a sign that says "Voices of the People." Graficka even holds special "aesthetic" classes for students who show specific talent in the arts. Various after-school programs meet the students' interests such as dancing and singing. Each child is viewed, taught, and cultivated as an individual with a unique background, not just as a Roma, a Ukrainian, or a Czech.

A Czech English teacher at Graficka, Jarka Koukolova has worked at the school for two years now; during this time, she has seen other teachers only last a couple months. One left after her first day, allegedly due to her inability to work with Roma children. But Koukolova does not ascribe negative Roma stereotypes to her students. "You have to be friends with each of your students so that they come to you for help or with their problems. You are their teacher. It gives me great satisfaction to help them," she says.

This individualized approach to education must reach all Czech teachers and schools. A child must not be viewed and understood simply as a Roma, but as friend, a skateboarder, a painter, or a musician. This sensitive reform to education can revolutionize Czech attitudes towards the Roma by encouraging tolerance and their successful integration into the Czech Republic.

Suggested Reading

Council of Europe, ed. Education of Roma Children in Europe: Texts and Activities of the Council of Europe Concerning Education. (Council of Europe, 2006).

Moree, Dana. How Teachers Cope with Social and Educational Transformation. (EMAN, 2008).

Unesco. Education for all by 2015: Will We Make It? (Oxford University Press US, 2007).

Ringold, Dena, Mitchell Alexander Orenstein, and Erika Wilkens. Roma in an Expanding Europe: Breaking the Poverty Cycle. (World Bank Publications, 2005).

Zouev, Aledandre and Peter Ustinov. Generation in Jeopardy: Children in Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. (M.E. Sharpe, 1999).

Michelle Favin is a Journalism student at New York University in the United States.

Population Breakdown
for Minority Groups Living in the CR

                1991 Census    2001 Census
                  Total:         Total:

Minority        10,302,215     10,230,060
Slovaks            314,877        193,190
Poles              59,383         51,968
Germans            48,556         39,106
Roma               32,903         11,746 *
Magyars            19,932         14,672
Ukrainians          8,220         22,112
Vietnamese           421          17,462

* The real number of Roma living in the Czech Republic is estimated to
be 220,000. Most of the Roma living in the Czech Republic choose to
identify as "Czech" when filling in the census forms.