Abstract
Obrovská introduces the historical background of Roma students’ education after the Second World War in the Czech context and highlights the ambivalent processes of disappearing ethnic homogeneity in educational settings after the Velvet Revolution, coupled with the continuing segregation of Roma students. Departing from the prevailing research based on either statistical data and official documents, or on the perspectives of parents or teachers, the book instead examines the experiences of those who actually represent the minority in question—Roma students in inter-ethnic educational settings. The chapter presents the main research questions of the study, embeds the study within the ethnographic research concerned with friendships in multi-ethnic schools, while contrasting the principles of the “new sociology of childhood” paradigm with “cultural deficit” approaches.
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Notes
- 1.
The Czech and Moravian Roma were nearly exterminated during the Second World War. In May 1945, only several hundred concentration camp survivors returned out of the original number of 6500 (Nečas 1999). However, the list of Roma inhabitants in the Czech, Moravian, and Silesian territories from 1947 reported nearly 17,000 persons (Davidová 1995). This figure must have already included the Roma who came from Slovakia.
- 2.
In the Czech context, nationality is not synonymous with citizenship; it denotes a chosen affiliation to an ethnic group.
- 3.
Recently, one of interviewers from the research team I currently coordinate reported that one Roma respondent who was interviewed changed her mind when they started to complete the questionnaire and asked to leave the research. The Roma woman explained that she usually has a strange feeling while completing questionnaires because she knows that in the past data on Roma collected by questionnaires were used against the Roma population. This story shows how real the fear and mistrust among some Roma can still be.
- 4.
If we proceed from the classification of ethnic homogeneity as a measure of school segregation, then according to a GAC spol. s r.o. (2015, p. 76) study, 26 percent of children from excluded localities attend schools with a percentage of Roma students up to 20 percent; 20 percent attend schools with a percentage of Roma students between 20 and 40 percent; 19 percent attend schools with a percentage of Roma students between 41 and 60 percent; 13 percent are in schools with a percentage of Roma students between 61 and 80 percent; and finally, 22 percent attend schools with a percentage of Roma students above 80 percent. These numbers show that “only” 22 percent of students attend the most strongly segregated schools; nevertheless, the vast majority is in schools where Roma students are concentrated above 20 percent.
- 5.
Formally, the students of segregated “Roma” schools are educated according to the Framework Educational Program for Basic Education, but the quality of their education is substantially lower than at regular schools. Practical schools teach according to the FEP BE using an annex for the education of students with “light mental handicaps” (LMH), while special schools have their own Framework Educational Program for the Field of Basic Special Schools. All three types of schools work with a reduced curriculum. While the first type does it unofficially, the other two types do it in accordance with their educational programs. In 2016, legislative changes were made (e.g., the LMH annex was cancelled), but I do not reflect on these changes, because the situation of my research preceded them.
- 6.
The estimates of Roma students attending practical schools based on empirical studies range between 28 percent (Česká školní inspekce 2014; Gabal and Čada 2010) and 32–35 percent (Veřejný ochránce práv 2012). These numbers are in absolute disproportion to the estimated percentage of Roma in Czech society.
- 7.
According to the comparative Roma Survey (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights 2012) conducted in 11 EU member states, more than 60 percent of Roma living in the Czech Republic answered yes to the question about whether they had been discriminated against based on ethnicity in the last twelve months. A total of 26 percent of respondents noted discrimination in education. Both numbers are relatively high compared to the values from other European countries.
- 8.
Lišková et al. (2015) point out that the geographic-political space of the Czech lands has undergone a process of substantial change, moving from a “colorful” mixture in the inter-war era, through uniformity in the cold-war period, to a contemporary palette that is slowly, however increasingly, becoming colorful again. Despite the fact that at the end of the 1990s, the Czech Republic reported the largest numbers of immigrants related to the size of its own population in the context of the Central and Eastern European region, the numbers are far from substantial—the proportion of foreigners in Czech society is less than 5 percent. According to the Czech Statistical Office (Český statistický úřad 2016), approximately 4.2 percent of the population are foreigners with a stay of over 12 months.
- 9.
Many scholars (e.g., Araújo 2016; Gay y Blasco 2016) show a correlation between higher numbers of Roma students represented at schools and the phenomenon of “white flight” characterized by the departure of majority (usually white) students to other schools not attended by Roma (or other minority) students.
- 10.
The British schooling system labels students who come from the islands of the Caribbean region as African Caribbean. Sometimes, “West Indians” is used as a synonym; however, the wider meaning of this category can include also the migrants from some Latin American countries (such as Belize, Venezuela, Guyana, etc.).
- 11.
The European comparative project “Ethnic Differences in Education and Diverging Prospects for Urban Youth in an Enlarged Europe” (EDUMIGROM) has focused on the educational aspirations and chances of Roma students in the Czech Republic. For more information, see http://www.edumigrom.eu/.
- 12.
Theories of cultural deficit were popular mainly in the early stages of anthropological research on ethnicity and education, but they have survived until today. In US sociology and anthropology in the 1960s, the prevalent perspectives were the cultural difference approach, the deficiency model, or deficit theory.
- 13.
An alternative explanation for the poor school results of African Americans in the context of the US educational system is offered by Ogbu and Simons (1998). They distinguish between so-called voluntary, autonomous, or migrant minorities and so-called involuntary and non-migrant minorities, based on the school results of their children. While the former often perform well, sometimes even better than majority children (in the Czech context, we can note the performance of the children of the first generation of Vietnamese migrants), the latter have much worse results (in the Czech context, this concerns the Roma). Ogbu and Simons refuse to see the cause of these differences in genetic or linguistic factors. Their explanation concerns socio-cultural adaptation in relation to the majority—especially in how the history of common living among the minority and the majority is viewed and the impact of this perception on school education. When the minority has experienced discrimination, whether at the level of educational policies (segregated education), in the relationship between students and teachers, or in their opportunities to transform educational capital into economic capital, it is highly probable that its members would have a negative self-definition toward the majority educational system.
- 14.
Regarding this, Mac an Ghaill (1993, p. 146) critically reflects upon the initial stages of his research: “My research design implicitly relied on a white norm of classifying black students as problematic.”
- 15.
- 16.
Both the town and the school in which I carried out my research are kept anonymous, in accordance with the principles of social scientific ethics. Also, the names of all participants have been changed.
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Obrovská, J. (2018). Roma Education in Post-socialist Classrooms: Between Segregation and Inclusion. In: Roma Identity and Ritual in the Classroom. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94514-9_1
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