Children as Children?: Special School Pupils in the Early Years of the Czechoslovak Communist Dictatorship
Abstract
Through pedagogical-psychological knowledge, Czech experts offered a guide to emancipation, but there is a paradox hidden at its core. Through key employment, the child in need of special care was to achieve his or her rightful place in socialist society only when he or she ceased to be a child and became a worker.
Ultimately, therefore, the working imperative of special education integrated not the world of children, but that of adults. Childhood thus did not gain value in itself, but instead became valuable as an educational precursor to adulthood-work-oriented education, not least in harmony with scientific opinion, thus transformed the school years of special school pupils into a "preparation" for adulthood.
Finally, what does this fact mean in relation to the opening question? The children from special schools had to work, so to speak, for an acceptable position within mainstream society. Though limited in their involvement in the work of building a socialist society, they were, at least in terms of official assumptions and expectations, the future and the bearers of hopes and unrealized desires, as the poet František Hrubín wrote about them.
This, however, postponed the equal value of pupils from special schools to their adulthood. During their childhood, it remained a promise and an ideal.