In the fall of 2017, Czech social networks circulated an image of first-grade students from the basic school Plynárenská, in which an ethnically mixed classroom was pictured, with children from the Czech majority, as well as students (presumably) of Vietnamese, Arabic, and Roma backgrounds. Many people commented on the photo, one of them indirectly suggesting that those children should be sent “to gas,” because “at least they are from BS Plynárenská [Gasworks Street]. The solution is at hand.” (Golis 2017) The author of this statement later said to defend himself: “This really has been taken out of context. I am no (big) racist.” A woman in another comment chastised majority parents for sending their children to the same classroom with minority children. Media cases like this are not at all rare in the Czech context—news articles and documentaries about the Roma often spur hateful and heated debates, in which the Roma are labeled as “parasites” or “shirkers.” The above-mentioned example is symptomatic, because the author of a strongly racist comment defends himself saying that he is no “big” racist. This commenter thus personifies the discourse of ethnic intolerance that has become widespread and legitimized, especially in relation to the Roma. What the authors of similar comments cannot stand is ethnic diversity, which they have not encountered often in their lives and thus, are not at all accustomed to it. They might have attended schools with no culturally or ethnically “different” classmates and no students with reduced physical or intellectual capacities. However, the reality of post-socialist schooling has been shifting, moving toward greater heterogeneity in the classroom. In this book, I highlight the ambivalent processes of disappearing ethnic homogeneity in educational settings in the Czech Republic after the Velvet Revolution, coupled with the continuing segregation of Roma students.
Over the last decades, the social exclusion of racial and ethnic minorities has been (and persists as) a subject of great public, political, and academic concern. In the European context, and especially in Central and Eastern Europe, individuals with inscribed Roma ethnicity are targets of discrimination, facing everyday racism and increasing social media hatred. The problem of Roma exclusion has been recognized by European bodies (e.g., by the European Court of Human Rights in the case D.H. and Others v. the Czech Republic), as well as by international organizations. From many different vantage points, it is acknowledged that education represents a major mechanism for both exclusion and inclusion, especially at a time when the integration of minorities represents a new and pressing task. Thus, this book addresses a timely and controversial issue—the dynamics of inter-ethnic relationships in ethnically mixed desegregated schooling. It draws from the experience of declining ethnic homogeneity in a school that has undergone a process of desegregation. The subjects of this book are minority children interacting in classrooms attended jointly with children from the majority. It is a space in which the boundaries and the meanings of categories such as ethnicity, gender, and class are negotiated on a daily basis. The dynamics of peer culture can provide the scenario for successful inclusion strategies as well as for reproducing or strengthening inequalities and perpetuating segregation. Based on a long-term ethnographic study, this book develops an interactionist sociological analysis of ritualized forms of behavior in ethnically mixed classrooms, which reveals that students can actively negotiate their identities in ways that are mediated not only by ethnicity, gender, or class, but also by the specific context in which the interaction takes place. While focusing on the emic perspective and the agency of minority youth, it also reflects on the discourses and rituals of teachers, which can reproduce and even fix some types of identities. The research is framed by the following general questions, which provoked my curiosity and animate the rationale of this book: Are there any forms of community in classrooms attended by majority as well as minority students, and if yes, then in what ways are these affirmed or transformed? Which positions do individual children assume and what identities do they perform? In what ways do they show respect during breaks and other situations both inside and outside of the classroom? And what is the role of ethnicity in these processes? In my ethnographic study, I have progressed a great deal of the way in answering these and other pressing questions about desegregated classrooms.
But before introducing the main arguments of this book and further elaborating its structure, I wish to familiarize the reader with the research context. In the following section, I will briefly—and thus inevitably selectively—sketch out the recent history of the education of Roma children in the Czech context. The historical links and socialist legacy are crucial to understanding the way minority children are treated and educated nowadays. Historically rooted segregation of Roma students in the Czech educational system persists, which seems to be geared toward producing an easily organizable “sameness.” Where appropriate, I will also present the basic facts about the educational system in the Czech Republic and specifically about the education of socially disadvantaged children and minority students.
1.1 Historical Outline and Basic Facts on Roma Education in the Czech Context since the Second World War
Socialist Czechoslovakia used to patrol its borders carefully, and immigration was extremely rare. In the period of the communist government, a mostly negative migration saldo prevailed—that is, more people left the country than moved to it. The only exception was the influx of foreign workers in the 1960s and 1970s, based on bilateral inter-governmental agreements with other countries within the Soviet bloc (Poland, Yugoslavia) and also with other communist countries outside of Europe (Vietnam, Cuba). In addition, a notable group of migrants was comprised of Roma workers who started to arrive after 1945 through state-organized transfers from poor and war-scarred regions in eastern Slovakia. They were moving to Czech industrial cities and to the borderlands, from which Jews had been deported during the Second World War, along with Germans after the war.1 The Roma came in search of a better living in agriculture, industry, brick and iron factories, and sandpits (Sidiropulu Janků 2015). Even if the communist government made them formally equal, in the 1950s, the regime openly adopted a policy of controlled assimilation, which sought the integration of the Roma minority into the majority population. It manifested in the suppression of Roma language and culture, as well as the efforts of Roma citizen groups (mainly elites) to legalize the status of a Roma nationality. Many authors criticize the Roma post-war migration as an example of state-controlled social engineering, resulting in the concentration and settlement of the Roma in the housing estates of large industrial cities, which, in turn, led to the emergence of today’s socially excluded localities (e.g., Horváthová 2002).
The post-war Roma migration had several waves, and in total, about 100,000 Slovak Roma migrated between 1945 and 1992. At present, some of them have lived in the Czech Republic for four generations, and their numbers have been rapidly increasing due to high fertility rates (Víšek 1999). The statistics from the last decennial census (Český statistický úřad 2011) show that approximately 13,000 people declared Roma nationality or its combination with Czech, Moravian, or Silesian nationality.2 However, government statistics estimate that out of the 10,578,000 inhabitants in the Czech Republic today (Český statistický úřad 2017), there may be between 150,000 and 300,000 persons of Roma origin. The discrepancy between these two numbers can be understood as an expression of the unwillingness of respondents to declare their Romanness. The reason for this does not necessarily stem from the fact that they do not identify as Roma, but that they often distance themselves (mostly before members of the majority) from their Romanness. That is to say, they live in a society in which Roma ethnicity is heavily stigmatized and Roma affiliation has brought more risks than advantages for decades. At play here is a high level of mistrust among Roma toward the majority (and vice versa), fed, among other things, by the fear of generations of Roma that their statistical data and registers could be abused by the majority.3 Such abuse had been occurring during the Second World War, during the forced resettlement by the socialist regime in the 1950s, as well as during the period of forced sterilizations among Roma women in the 1970s and 1980s. A similar tendency to what has repeatedly been found in the country-level censuses since the 1990s has been identified, for example, by Moravcová (2006) in a survey conducted among fifth- and ninth-grade students. Some of the students who stated that their parents were of Roma nationality identified themselves as Czech, and a number of the students identified by teachers as Roma rejected Roma affiliation for themselves as well as for their parents. The heads of basic schools in the research conducted by Fučík et al. (2009) also provide twice as high a number of Roma students in comparison with what the students themselves had declared.
In the context of the Czech Republic since 1989, the education system bears the legacy of the socialist era, when the segregation of Roma students to “special” schools was institutionally enacted, and the vision of an ethnically homogeneous society was (re)produced. Almost as a rule, Roma children used to be segregated in the so-called special schools. These were established at the beginning of the 1950s by the communist government for children with lower intellectual capacities, but in disproportionate numbers, they educated Roma children. Not even the Velvet Revolution—the symbol of the transition toward an open and democratic society—managed to overturn this practice. Most Roma children living in socially excluded localities in the Czech Republic are educated in ethnically segregated school...