Abstract
The paper deals with the issue of a school institution in pupils' navigation through social landscape; it describes the influence of the hidden curriculum and teachers' practice on the self-identification of vocational school pupils. The hidden curriculum is not explicitly taught; it is an unwritten curriculum transmitted in school through social actors' interactions and internalising social norms and values.
In my work, I aim to show the structures of formal education in the Czech Republic leading to low social mobility, non-use of the potential of an individual in society and creation of a "working class" with injured dignity (Sennett and Cobb1993) and at the same time the constant threat of 'burnout' of their teachers. This school ethnography of the vocational education class describes the passage of pupils with low educational ambitions through VET and their teachers, who fail in their role as navigators of a smooth and safe passage through the social landscape of adolescence.