Two Worlds, One State - Minority Schools as a Space for Controlling the Borders between the Self and "the Other"
Abstract
The issue of school inspection in interwar democratic Czechoslovakia can be interpreted and reconstructed on many levels. One of them is the role of the school inspectorate in the development of national identity and the co-existence of individual nationalities in multinational Czechoslovakia. The chapter focuses on the relationship of the inspectorate to the national issue. The chapter focuses on the reconstruction of the supervision of state-appointed inspectors of so-called minority schools in interwar Czechoslovakia. On the one hand, the aim is to point out that inspectors of minority schools represent the state in external supervision of the fulfillment of the right to education in the mother tongue, as well as in controlling the "national life" of these schools. Their role can be interpreted both with regard to the constitutional right (valid in the Habsburg Empire and in the Republic of Czechoslovakia) to education in the mother tongue, as well as with regard to the goals of national rivalry, which developed due to the work of the so-called national protection school institutions both on the Czech and German sides in the Habsburg Empire at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Its undemocratic values were transformed in a certain form into the everyday life of minority schools in interwar Czechoslovakia. On the other hand, it is necessary to ask to what extent the parents of pupils attending minority schools internalized or loyally accepted national protection rhetoric. The inspectorates of minority schools in interwar Czechoslovakia often drew attention to the "weak" national awareness of parents in border areas and to their willingness to send children to school in a language other than their mother tongue.