The transition of the Central and Eastern European Countries to democracy and market economy is facing serious challenges. In last year, a several downgrades even in the “new” EU members in Central Europe contributed to the negative trend. It seems that almost all countries of the region experience the problem of “low capacity trap”. Do the school curricula reflect, or even contribute to this problem? In this paper, we will compare both the form and content of several curricula from Western and post-Communist countries. Our focus is on primary history and/or social studies.

Several international trends in curricular policy can be seen in the Western countries: One is typified by Scottish Curriculum for Excellence with its emphasis on generic or transversal skills and (at least apparent) high autonomy of teachers as autonomous agents of change (Priestley & Minty, 2013). Some complementary trends can be seen in the national level curricular documents in Australia or in the United States that bear the features of conservative modernisation (Apple, 2004). Such Western models are highly visible, relatively well described in scientific literature, and assert isomorphic influence worldwide (Baker, 2009; Ramirez & Meyer, 2002). International studies like PISA and TIMSS are yet another source of influence over national curricular policy. Due to global dominance of English in higher education and research, the curricular reforms in the western non-English speaking countries might be under-represented in scientific literature.

In this paper, we present a comparative study of formal (planned) curricula for primary and lower secondary education two groups of countries: Western English speaking countries (Scotland, Australia, USA) and some Central and Eastern European countries (Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, Poland, Estonia). Our main focus is primary history / social studies. However, the form and content of history is compared with science curricula. This study is a part in a broader project focused on curricular borrowing in the post-socialist countries.

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