In our paper, we address the question of what are the obstacles to equal education and we illustrate the discussed issues on examples of Roma families living in excluded localities.

Situation in the Czech Republic

The Czech Republic was accused of unsubstantiated education of Roma children in practical schools at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg in 2007. The current legislation reacts to the lost and the aim of legislation changes is TO support the children with special needs to be educated in mainstream (Decree 27/2016).  Roma children are very often recognised/diagnosed as mild mental handicap or as children with weak social background (School Act 561/2004 Sb). The legislation changes caused hot discussion between two parts of professionals, on the one hand the special educators and on the other hand the representatives of NGO sector, namely EDUin. The majority of the Czech society sees the current changes as unnecessary complications of a well-functioning system which, quoting a special education teacher, “the whole world envied us” (June 2016).

The key topic

The limits which become obstacles to inclusions are the key topic of our presentation, we resolve two perspectives, parental and institution´s one. 

1) The first question is the identity of a child based on the teacher-pupil-parent interaction. How do the children cope with the change occurring when they enter the school institution? What are the expectations posed by school culture and by school institution?

2) The second question is how the Czech school reacts to the integration, inclusion, bluntly said, when the Roma pupils attend the certain school in huge amount.

School culture

The school culture, however, consists also of a hidden curriculum, for which it is not possible to prepare beforehand. This hidden curriculum consists of THE nest survival strategies of individual actors at school (Kučera 1992, Woods 1986).

The hidden curriculum is created by the mutual interactions among the actors involved and mainly through the social learning. It is therefore not produced only by the internal institution of the school and by the educational system, but also by the contributions of the individual actors. Therefore for example the evaluation of others, the social status identifying and the school expectation come out from the family background. The external social norms are reflected in the schools.

Since 2008, our research team – Bittnerová, Doubek, Levínská - have been conducting ethnographic research in a region with a high number of excluded rural localities populated mainly by Roma. We focused primarily on the cadastral area of Alfa, a town with the population of around 3,100, but due to the links and relationships to public authorities, networks, and NGOs we monitored the situation in the entire larger region Kappa. Our research is based on qualitative methods, but we also take into account the published quantitative analyses. We have done the broad interviews with members of minority, with Roma parents, school children and young people attending secondary school. We have spoken to the specialists of helping professions – social workers, teachers and to regional integration coordinator .Our aim was to map the net of social help and to describe the interaction among clients and helpers. We have provided participant observations during the summer holidays and have followed the town websites and other information resources. Our paper, which deals with the topic of inclusion, is based on the results of our research work focusing on the topics of education and helping professions, as well as on the research performed by other fellow researchers and by our students. We investigated mainly the limits of inclusion and explored the obstacles identified by the analysis of the set of all available data. Our approach is based on cognitive anthropology and we interpret our data in accordance with the schemata theory, which understands schemata as patterns of thinking by which meanings are created in the mind. We understand schemata as the dynamics of mind; they are idiosyncratic and shared (Lakoff 1990, Shore 1996, Strauss and Quinn 2001). The present paper is based on the following research projects supported by the Czech Science Foundation (GACR) 2012–2015 “Decision-making processes of helping professions in the area of intercultural relationship”, (Reg. No. P407/12/0547); 2008–2010 “Function of Cultural Models in Education”, (Reg. No. 406/08/0805); 2005–2007 “Education and Its Value from Roma Perspective: Education as Seen by Roma Mothers”, (Reg. No. 406/05/P560).

We have found up several parental strategies how to cope with stigmatized situations (when Roma people and their children are stigmatized). The main task for parents is to keep care of a child who has been recognised by the teacher as a pupil. We and our researches colleagues have noticed teacher´s bias to deal with Roma child as she/he has not been real pupil with knowledge abilities. The parents who are interested in school success of their children have developed following strategies: a) The school must be kept under the control and not allow to slacken in its acceptance of the child. b) Turn escalated situation into a joke, show how the misunderstanding happened and try to soften rough edges in a conflict situation. c) Parents cooperate with the institution, but they demand exceptions. These are parents who are able to be less affective during communicating with the majority. The current legislation and economy support pushing the schools to change their attitudes to Roma children. Hence the increasing amount of Roma children the phenomenon “white flight” rose up. The local school had the economic reason to start so called inclusion strategy of school organization, despite the institution has stood the inner segregated and the pupils from majority were leaving. From the other locality new strategy arose to space out the Roma children equally over all schools there, there is rather impossible to attend the school without minority children. The main problem we see in everyday interaction spoiled by prejudices among teachers and pupils. In teacher´s discourse the school is the egalitarian institution, but we can see that school is the mirror of the wide society with whole prejudices as among pupils as teacher´s group. The school should be much more intensive in developing the critical and civic thinking.

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