The article aims to stimulate the debate on the need of improvement of the history education in the Czech Republic. First, it explores the public debates on teaching of communist history that includes some criticism of the quality of history education.
Then it analyses conceptualizations of history education within the national curriculum. The analysis reveals that teachers need more consistent and elaborated system of history education aims and objectives if they are asked to facilitate effective development of pupils' historical thinking.
Therefore, two inspiring concepts of historical literacy and historical thinking that have been developed and tested very recently at German and Canadian schools are reviewed.