After the Stalinist turn, however, the underlying ideology, the notion of planning and education, and the role of rural schools underwent radical changes. The Communist regime was, on the one hand, interested in providing equal access to education at the same standard. This was firstly because party leaders considered some basic education a necessary prerequisite for building communism. Just like in the Soviet Union, where the top leadership launched a program for the "liquidation of illiteracy" as early as 1919 (Downing, 1988), Hungarian communists were aware that the modern large-scale industry they envisaged could only function on the basis of a sufficiently educated workforce. What they actually judged erroneously was, as Meusburger (1998, pp. 93–96) underscores, that increasing division of labor did not reduce the need for highly qualified experts in efficiently organizing labor. Hence, providing primary education to all and some secondary education to many could

only complement but not substitute top-notch expertise. Second, the Communist leaders realized the crucial importance of school education in controlling society and that schoolroom spaces were an optimal arena to create the new "socialist type of human" (Sáska, 2005, p. 85). Third, the Communist regime drew great propaganda value from providing equality of chances in education (Kovács, 2003), as it could advertise the "just" character and moral superiority over capitalism that it claimed.

The new political and economic system, however, also had some inherent features and fundamental ideological as well as practical concepts that conflicted with the aforementioned views. Communism presented itself as "more advanced" than capitalism for cancelling the unnecessary waste of resources resulting from the competition of private actors and ensuring a higher level of cost efficiency. Moreover, given the considerable economic handicap of the Eastern Bloc compared to the United States and its allies, the system fundamentally focused on investing as many resources as possible in economic growth and modernization. The outcome was that Communist regimes tended to notoriously underfinance sectors and occupations considered to be "nonproductive" in the narrow material sense, such as those based on nonmanual work (Gyuris, 2014a). Besides, all prominent Stalinist politicians regarded centralization, or "democratic centralism" in the Leninist vocabulary, as an essential prerequisite for efficient control, orderliness, and economies of scale. They believed that a successful implementation of the commands from above, the "vanguard party," was only possible if these were not distorted by any potentially ill-informed autonomous actors at the lower levels.

The outcome of these controversies was a virtually profound nationalization of the school system in 1948 (Kelemen, 2003), including the dispossession of physical structures, the collectivization of the production and retail of textbooks and equipment, and an extreme centralization and Stalinization of the curricula (Horváth & Probáld, 2003; Kardos, 2003). Only ten parochial secondary grammar schools were maintained from the churches' more than 4000 primary and roughly 100 secondary schools, which had to testify that the new regime "did not persecute religion" (Drahos, 1992, p. 49). Moreover, the entire framework of public administration underwent massive centralization. In 1950, the so-called *council system* was introduced in Hungary with 19 county-, 140 district- and roughly 3000 local-level councils in towns and villages, which actually had no local autonomy. Their exclusive task was to execute party-state decrees (Beluszky, 2003). In the words of János Beér, a key expert of public administration in the Stalinist period, "[local] councils are not the organs of local authorities, but local organs of the authority" (Beér, 1951, p. 595).

Small rural villages soon proved incompatible with the regime's notion of centralization and large-scale industrialization. They were seen as a feudal vestige, remnants of a feudal economic and social order that could not adapt to the planned modern future. In the words of János Kolta, who became a regional planner after the political turn in Baranya County, an area with an especially big number of small villages:

Small settlements with an almost exclusively agricultural population are unable to keep pace with the rapid development that began in the political and social life of our country after the liberation [from the German occupation]; they make it harder to locate industrial facilities at suitable sites or create agricultural production units and in addition, they almost entirely prevent any form of equitable social, cultural, and administrative network from being established and sustained. (Kolta, 1979, p. 234)

Furthermore, the regime presented scattered farms as the locus of wealthy peasants or kulaks, after the Soviet terminology—and thus justified a radical restructuring of these settlements as a decisive step against "reactionaries" and "counterrevolutionaries" (Hajdú, 1990/1991). This interpretation was in fact erroneous, given that wealthy peasants mainly lived in larger villages and rural towns, and scattered farm dwellers mostly belonged to the most impoverished stratum of rural society. The population of scattered farms also increased after the Soviet occupation, since the radical, communist land reform of 1945 created a vast number of extremely small plots, and motivated even more people to move to scattered farms, close to their newly gained land. In consequence, the number of inhabitants in such settlements increased to 900,000 in a country of 9 million (Beluszky, 2003).

The regime's firmly negative attitude towards small rural settlements resulted in severe regulations. The leadership soon considered settlements with less than 3000 inhabitants, constituting roughly one half of the Hungarian settlement network, as "uneconomical" to maintain (Beluszky, 2003). Hence, a 1949 government decree banned the construction of permanent flats or public buildings, including schools, on scattered farms, whereas a 1951 official plan for the urban network urged for a total ban on investment in these settlements (Hajdú, 1993). New education laws and decrees adhered to policy and did not provide any updated curriculum for scattered farm schools (Komlóssy, 1997).

The Communist regime tried to propagate these changes as necessary concomitants of modernization and thus referred to them with a strange mixture of technicized and biologized terms. Planners interpreted the envisaged mass demolition as a "process of remediation," "reconstruction of the settlement network," "dissolution of settlement density," and an "honorable, nice task for planners" in order to create an urban network that is "healthier and more capable of life" (Kolta, 1979). For ideological reasons, the Communist leadership, which perpetually claimed that its regime was the most "democratic" ever, also stressed the "voluntary" nature of the process. As Kolta said: "We shall guarantee in the entire process that it will be ... profoundly voluntary, administrative or political measures must not be taken" (p. 235). Yet, the subtext of this sentence's conclusion reveals the true link between plans and the actual punitive reality of strict decrees: "... however, the concentration of the population of small villages in larger ones should be accelerated by influencing people in a planned way" (p. 235).

#### *Continuities Between Interwar and Postwar Modernism*

Although the Stalinist period brought about radical changes in the political, social, and economic domains, the dilemma about scattered farms it faced was not new in Hungarian academic thinking (Győri, 2009). Before Hungary joined World War II, a scientific debate took place between Ferenc Erdei, a sociologist and founder of the National Peasants' Party, part of the leftist opposition of the interwar government, and the urban geographer Tibor Mendöl, head of his department at the University of Budapest after 1940. On the basis of his research, Erdei argued that scattered farms and their central towns formed an optimal structure with units that complemented each other well. He also argued that this model of rural development should be promoted by planning in other parts of the country as well (Erdei, 1939). Mendöl, however, also highlighted the negative aspects, emphasizing that "it is ... easier to provide simple public infrastructure for a village ... than for a scattered farm fifty to a hundred times smaller" (Mendöl, 1939, p. 231). He therefore suggested that scattered farm centers and bigger villages should be developed instead. However, it is important to emphasize that Mendöl underscored these difficulties to provide a more sophisticated explanation of the issue than Erdei did and to explain why a migration from scattered farms to bigger villages was already taking place in some parts of the country. He considered any forced intervention to be intolerable. If people were not willing to move from scattered farms, he argued, one should not "get them into the habit of doing so" (Mendöl, 1939, p. 231).

It is one of the many controversies of the Communist period that Mendöl, who formulated these views, was as a *bourgeois* geographer permanently blocked after the political turn in his later academic career, whereas Erdei was appointed Minister for Agriculture and head of the so-called Scattered Farm Council in 1949, which the Stalinist regime established in order to find a *scientific solution* to the scattered farm problem. Moreover, Erdei now had to justify extremely antirural plans that were diametrically opposed to his interwar views, which the Communist regime promoted in accordance with expectations from Moscow (Győri, 2009; Győri & Gyuris, 2015).

In fact, despite all the radical breaks after 1948, some of the trends that hallmarked the Stalinist period were not totally new and without precedent in Hungary. Evolving social and economic changes during the mid- and late-1930s and early 1940s, including in the education system, were also motivated by international trends of modernization and centralization, and openly inspired by the increasing belief in state planning that developed in Western, Soviet communist, Fascist, and Nazi contexts as well.7 Hence, paradoxically, voluntarist Stalinist attempts at centralization and a more efficient spatial allocation of resources in some sense constituted more of a radical exaggeration of modernist notions that were already in play (although in

7For some analysis of emerging state planning in Hungary in the 1930s and the international influences that fostered the process, see Lampland (2011) and Ungváry (2016). Lampland also reports on remarkable continuities of interwar and postwar (communist) state planning.

a remarkably different political framework) than a profound rupture with the recent past.

Finally, the grandiose plans of the Stalinist leadership largely failed to flourish. The Scattered Farm Council had severe difficulties with functioning from the very beginning, especially as its participants increasingly realized the impossibility of a rapid and successful implementation of anti-scattered-farm concepts (Hajdú, 1990/1991). The necessary material, financial, technical, etc. resources for such a program were also lacking, and Stalin's death in 1953 and the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 resulted in the Communist leadership revising many radical initiatives. Despite the plans that had been made, scattered farm schools mostly remained and the number of elementary schools in the country did not decline.

#### **Non-Stalinist Communism After 1956 and the "Rationalization" of Rural Schools**

After the Soviet troops crushed the 1956 Revolution, the Communist regime was re-established. The new party leader, János Kádár, enjoyed the support of the Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khruschev and took advantage of the somewhat increased flexibility in national political and economic decision-making within the Communist Bloc. He distanced the system from orthodox communist ideologies, and in the early 1960s introduced what later became known as "soft dictatorship" or "Goulash communism." Extremely radical political, economic, and social decisions of the Stalinist era as well as the very low material standard of living were seen as major reasons for the revolution. Therefore, official goals and the means of their implementation changed to some extent, and Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy was increasingly replaced by a technocratic attitude (Romsics, 2010). This had a visible impact on education and schools. In 1961, the government issued a new education law that (for the first time since the communist turn) gave new curricula to scattered farm schools, implicitly justifying their existence (Komlóssy, 1997).

Besides, the leadership wanted to promote "proportional development" by allocating more resources to formerly neglected areas. As early as 1958 an order of the Party stimulated industrial investments in the countryside, and official plans aimed to slow down the extreme concentration of the economy in Budapest (Hajdú, 1992). In several industrial sectors a ban was issued on increasing employment in production units in the capital city (Kondor, 2013).8 The Kádár regime carried out

8Actual outcomes were controversial. Rural areas indeed gained numerous industrial workplaces, and Budapest's share of the national total decreased from 44.6% in 1960 to 25.7% in 1980 (Bartke, 2003, pp. 124−129). Yet, this was just accelerating the upscaling of economic production in the capital city, which kept its extreme primacy in key economic and political branches (Meusburger, 1997) as well as corporate decision-making (Barta, 2002), and after further economic liberalization in the 1980s, became the main center of the so-called "second economy." As Nemes Nagy and Ruttkay (1989) revealed, 30.5% of the economic labor cooperatives (*gazdasági munkaközösségek* (GMKs)), which were semiprivate forerunners of small private enterprises, were in Budapest.

some political decentralization as well. In 1970, it introduced a new council law that to some extent limited the nearly absolute dominance of national-level institutions and provided some competencies and resources to county-level councils as well. State funding for housing, for example, was now allotted to the counties, which could decide on their own how to distribute it among their localities (Illés, 2003).

These developments seemed to have a rather positive impact on rural areas. Yet, the system's inherent aim to maximize growth and reduce costs did not change, and the monolithic structure of the Party remained unchallenged. Hence, arguments for the "liquidation of inherited disproportionalities of the settlement network," as a 1963 official concept study of the Ministry of Construction put it, were still in play (Hajdú, 1992, p. 32). The 1971 National Concept of Settlement Network Development (*Országos Településhálózat-fejlesztési Koncepció* (OTK)), which created a spatially-oriented development plan for the country and served as the most influential such document for over 10 years, also sketched up a hierarchical structure of the urban network.

Although this gave impetus to regional centers in order to counterbalance Budapest, it also tended to provide decreasing resources to small settlements with fewer (or no) central functions. In light of agricultural collectivization, which had its decisive phase between 1958 and 1961 and caused many people to leave the countryside, and also because of the increasing need for additional labor force in cities and towns due to accelerated industrialization, the leadership calculated that the maintenance of small settlements would be inefficient in the long run. Since the regime believed that many rural schools would soon be unnecessary, it judged that the best chance for improve the standard of education lay in diverting pupils from ill-equipped institutions in small villages and scattered farms to well equipped town schools (Komlóssy, 1997). It propagated these notions of centralization in a technocratic language as "rationalization," to present the possible outcomes as positive and serving the interests of the entire country.9

Relocating resources from small rural settlements to larger centers was not only in the interest of the national leadership. The shortage economy also strongly motivated county-level leaders (Kornai, 1992), who now had some power over resource allocation in their county, to withdraw resources from their own periphery to stimulate faster growth in the main centers of the county, especially in the county capital. As a result, public services and infrastructure rapidly declined in many small villages during the 1970s (see Fig. 6.7) (Gyuris, 2014a). The total number of primary schools nationwide also dropped from above 6000 to nearly 4200 in a period of only 10 years (see Fig. 6.8).

Furthermore, as Kondor (2013) shows, the lobby force of large industrial enterprises and branch ministries was strong enough to slow down the planned relocation of industrial activities from Budapest to the countryside.

9Flyvbjerg (1998) and Basu (2004a, 2004b) explain in great detail the logic of similar discursive strategies in Western contexts.

**Fig. 6.7** Infrastructural changes in Hungarian settlement network due to "rationalizations" between 1960 and 1980. Adapted from Gyuris, 2014a, p. 308. Data from Nemes Nagy, J. (1987). *Regionális folyamatok a nyolcvanas évek első felében* [Regional processes in the first part of the 1980s]. Budapest: Országos Tervhivatal Tervgazdasági Intézet (p. 71). Reprinted with permission

**Fig. 6.8** Number of primary schools in Communist Hungary (1948/1949–1989/1990). Adapted from Gyuris, 2014b, p. 546. Data from Hungarian Central Statistical Office. (1996). *Magyarország népessége és gazdasága: Múlt és jelen* [The population and economy of Hungary: Past and present]. Budapest: KSH (pp. 229–230). Copyright by the Hungarian Central Statistical Office. Used under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported. Retrieved from https://www. thecommonsjournal.org/articles/10.18352/ijc.458/. Reprinted with permission

Massive attempts to centralize infrastructure were in fact specific features of neither Hungarian communism nor the Communist Bloc (see chapter by Kučerová in this volume). As Bondi (1987), Meusburger and Kramer (1991), and Basu (2004a, 2004b) reveal, such considerations were rather typical in capitalist countries as well, which suggests that they were fundamentally rooted in modernism in general and not communism in peculiar. Yet the different political frameworks on both sides of the Iron Curtain resulted in remarkable variations in implementation. Whereas in Western countries mass protests and other organized forms of resistance often succeeded in at least slowing down centralization, in Communist regimes modernist plans could be carried out without considerable opposition. Schools were collective property, and local party leaders were appointed by their superiors, whom they loyally served in most cases instead of articulating the interests of local community. As Forray (1990, 1995) reveals, teachers themselves, with very few exceptions, also offered no resistance. Although they usually had some opportunity to formulate professional arguments in favor of sustaining small schools, they generally accepted the final decision of their superiors because they did not want to wreck their (or their family members') careers in a system where virtually all workplaces were provided or strongly controlled by the state.10

The outcome was severe. Virtually all scattered farm schools were closed in the 1970s (Komlóssy, 1997), and many villages were left without schools as well. This accelerated the already massive outflow of population from these settlements, which was fueled not only by the pull factor of rapid industrialization and improving services in cities, but also by the firm push factor of agricultural collectivization and worsening access to even some basic infrastructure in small villages. Scattered farms thus lost 43.2% of their inhabitants during the 1970s (Becsei, 1996, p. 48), and villages with fewer than 500 inhabitants in 1970 suffered a loss of 17.8% (based on data from Beluszky, 2003, p. 301). For villages with the same size, those which lost their schools had a significantly stronger decline than those where this institution survived (Nemes Nagy, 1982).

The conflicting interests and goals of the Communist regime therefore ended up subordinating the school system in general, and the management of small rural schools in particular, to the modernist goals of the system. Since these were aimed at promoting industrialization and urbanization, the Stalinist period brought about extremely radical plans for demolishing both small settlements and their schools, although these concepts remained largely unrealized due to a lack of resources. In the decades of post-Stalinist technocratic communism, the national party leadership's official attitude towards small settlements and small rural schools turned more tolerant. Yet the growth-oriented framework of the regime and the drive of more powerful urban centers for additional resource investment in a shortage economy, even at the cost of siphoning these resources from their own rural hinterland, resulted in an unprecedented decline of small rural schools during the 1960s and 1970s. This had a historically enduring impact on the school system, with small

10For a more detailed explanation of the lack of resistance, see Gyuris (2014b).

rural schools generally remaining mired in their massively subordinate position from the 1970s until today.

#### **Conclusion**

The Hungarian education system in general, and rural schools in particular, had a turbulent history in both the interwar and communist periods. Their development trajectory reflected all significant shifts in the overall political, social, and economic framework of the country, and mirrored the manifold changes in dominant ideologies and the notion of spatial planning. After Hungary suffered immense territorial losses through the 1920 Trianon Peace Treaty, education became an even stronger cornerstone of nation-building than before. In a country that had surrendered two thirds of its territory and a vast amount of resources, schools were assigned a decisive role in defending the homeland. They now had to educate an internationally competitive elite and a mass of well-trained labor force in order to make Hungary economically competitive with other nations and to create millions of patriotic people supporting the revisionary goals of the political elite. Rural schools constituted a crucial means of this strategy, as the lack of sufficient education (including the problem of illiteracy) was the most pervasive in small rural settlements. Influenced by these considerations, the national political leadership backed large-scale school development projects, which thus enjoyed massive political and financial support.

Beyond these general features that were characteristic for the entire interwar period, however, the school system's development in some sense took a different path around the mid-1930s. In accordance with shifting international power relations after the Great Depression (including the Nazi takeover in Germany) and internal political changes in Hungary, which were not independent from the former process, the education system became increasingly centralized and dependent on state funding. It was increasingly focused on creating additional labor for the economy instead of increasing the intelligentsia, and more devoted to promoting social restructuring, including a conscious decrease of the share of Jews in specific occupations, instead of sustaining social stability.

The first few years after World War II witnessed multiparty governments trying to restore the education system after the damage of the war and carrying out several changes in institutional settings as well as regulatory frameworks, including ones that already been planned by interwar governments. The establishment of the communist dictatorship in 1948, however, opened the floor for extreme centralization in every sphere of life. Education became a means of creating "the new, socialist type of human" who is indoctrinated with Stalinist views and trained to provide manpower for large-scale industries. For its drive for maximizing material production and growth, the communist regime gave first priority to industrialization and urbanization. In contrast to egalitarian propaganda, this soon resulted in grandiose plans to demolish small settlements and their schools. Despite all these ruptures after 1948, however, radical attempts at centralization in the Stalinist period were rather an extreme exaggeration of modernist notions that had already been present in Hungarian politics and public administration since the 1930s than a complete break with the recent past.

Furthermore, just like the interwar period, the decades of communism were not homogeneous in Hungary in terms of education management. After the post-Stalinist shift and in accordance with decreasing orthodoxy in the entire Soviet Bloc, the emerging technocratic communist regime from the late 1950s onwards tried to counterbalance regional polarization and one-sided development of heavy industries. It now provided rural districts, small settlements, and their schools with more flexibility. The extreme level of centralization also decreased. Still, given the regime's inherent aim to maximize growth and the consequent pressure on every actor to find additional resources for investment in a shortage economy, villages now became massively exploited by regional urban centers. This resulted in a historically unprecedented decline of small schools in Hungary during the 1960s and 1970s. Therefore, although the technocratic communist regime made several changes in its economic and social policy compared to its Stalinist predecessor, it finally merely accelerated those processes that were rooted in the communist framework, and which had negative impacts on small settlements and schools that have lasted until today.

**Acknowledgements** The research reported in this chapter was supported by the ÚNKP-17-4 New National Excellence Program of the Ministry of Human Capacities (Hungary).

#### **References**

Meusburger, P., & Kramer, C. (1991). Die Entwicklung des Vorarlberger Volksschulwesens zwischen 1948 und 1987—im Vergleich zum gesamtösterreichischen Trend [The development of primary education in Vorarlberg between 1948 and 1987—in comparison with national trends in Austria]. *Österreich in Geschichte und Literatur mit Geographie, 35,* 185–201.

Mills, C. W. (1956). *The power elite*. New York: Oxford University Press.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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## **Chapter 7 Changing Structures and the Role of Education in the Development of the Educational System in Czechia**

**Silvie Rita Kučerová, Kateřina Trnková, and Petr Meyer**

Since the mid-twentieth century, economically developed countries have witnessed crucial changes in their elementary school systems. Some of these changes were transformed conceptions of educational politics and formulations of educational reforms (e.g., Dvořák, Starý, & Urbánek, 2015a; Tyack, & Cuban, 1995); others were altered school spatial patterns. After the nineteenth-century wave of school construction, the late twentieth century brought a reduction in the number of schools and the concentration of educational functions in larger centers further up the urban hierarchy (Ribchester & Edwards, 1999). Although this general concentration process was inevitable (Hampl, 2000), as it was rooted in organizational principles as well as demographic trends, it gave rise to a discussion of school's role in society and for local communities (Kvalsund, 2009). The school closures that followed were connected with overall development and quality of life in rural and remote areas (Dostál & Markusse, 1989).

S. R. Kučerová (\*)

Department of Geography, Faculty of Science, J. E. Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem, Ústí nad Labem, Czechia e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
K. Trnková National Institute for Futher Education, Brno, Czechia

Department of Educational Sciences, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno, Czechia e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
P. Meyer

Department of Social Geography and Regional Development, Faculty of Science, Charles University, Prague, Czechia

Department of Geography, Faculty of Science, J. E. Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem, Ústí nad Labem, Czechia e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
The original version of this chapter was revised: The affiliation of all the authors were corrected. The correction to this chapter is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18799-6\_18

Critical voices first arose in the 1970s, when the largest transformation of the elementary school pattern began—especially in democratic European countries, but also other developed countries across the world—leading to emancipation of small rural schools (e.g., Bell & Sigsworth, 1987; Kramer, 1993; Lyson, 2002; Solstad, 1997; Witten, McCreanor, Kearns, & Ramasubramanian, 2001) and their later appreciation as an important elements of educational system with their specific pedagogical and social culture (e.g., Åberg-Bengtsson, 2009; Smit, Hyry-Beihammer, & Raggl, 2015). Nevertheless, the reforms continued in former countries of the Eastern bloc, changing the elementary school network with consequences that have lasted to the present day (Bajerski, 2015; Kovács, 2012; Kučerová & Kučera, 2012).

In this chapter, we present the changes undergone by Czechia's system of elementary education. In recent decades, the country of Czechia has transformed itself from a centrally planned economy controlled by the Communist regime towards a democratic society and free market economy. This chapter will explore ways in which, in the course of the twentieth century to the present day, the spatial organization of elementary education in Czechia has been transformed along four dimensions: The first dimension refers to changes in the objective external conditions of education (mainly the evolution of settlement structures, the evolution of the number of persons in need of education, and subsequently the transformation of the management of education across a territory). The second concerns the development of political doctrine and the economic situation and direct connections with the development of both educational and regional policies. The third dimension entails those changes of the concept, forms, and content of education itself that are dealt with pedagogical-psychological theories. The fourth dimension involves how the perception of education's role, recognized competencies, and social relevance has evolved.

An analysis of the spatial distribution of schools as well as a discussion of the consequences of regional and educational policies in Czechia help us answer the following questions: Are changes in the spatial organization of education related to regional education policy as well as to pedagogical concepts? Are territorial and educational organization connected in any way? How is elementary education characteristically provided and utilized in a directive and unfree social system in comparison to a system with a decentralized administration that provides actors with greater autonomy?

#### **Factors Affecting Spatial Distribution and the Organization of Elementary Education**

We are restricting our attention to elementary education, and the conditions of its provision and realization can be specified as follows on the basis of the four aforementioned dimensions.

From the general perspective of its external objective conditions (the first dimension), education's spatial organization is primarily affected by population and settlement characteristics. For one, there exists the spatial distribution of the population itself at the macroregional level—which is particularly contingent on altitude, climatic conditions, and historical path dependencies (Åberg-Bengtsson, 2009; Green & Letts, 2007)—as well as at the meso- and microregional levels—which are especially influenced by orography (e.g., Kučerová, Bláha, & Kučera, 2015a). Another important factor is constituted by the structural characteristics of a population inhabiting a particular territory (demographic, cultural, and socioeconomic) (Barakat, 2015), settlement structure (Bajerski, 2015), and transport characteristics, that is, the existence and functioning of road networks and means of transport (Kučerová, Mattern, Štych, & Kučera, 2011). The relationships between an educational system and the above-mentioned factors can be quantified and spatially visualized quite easily, such as by using geographic information systems and maps (Kučerová et al., 2015a; Taylor, 2007; for older publications see e.g., Marsden, 1977).

Capturing those social system factors and mechanisms that fall under the second and third dimensions of conditions of education is rather more complicated. In compliance with the mechanisms emphasized by Giddens's (1984) structuration theory or with the new institutionalist paradigm (Berg, 2007), we can state that education's spatial organization within the second dimension mainly depends on three groups of factors:

The first group encompasses the manner in which the education system is managed, its funding mechanisms, and its regulation methods. The basic challenge in managing that system is to determine the degree of centralization versus decentralization (see Kvalsund, 2009; see also Chap. 6 by Gyuris in this volume). That is, it consists of determining the degree of concentration of state authorities managing and controlling powers, as well as the related degree of financial autonomy. Maroy and van Zanten (2009) or Altrichter, Heinrich, and Soukup-Altrichter (2014) mention a wide range of approaches to regulation and intervention in education. These approaches comprise curriculum control, control of the work of school staff, and competition on the educational quasimarket (see below).

The mechanisms of governance are regulated by legislative frameworks that enable the enforcement of a definite form of organizational structure and equipment of particular schools (e.g., minimum school size) (Meusburger, 1998, 2015; Trnková, 2009). School structures and *the norm of the shape* of elementary schools constitute the second group of factors. A school's structure depends on its operator (public, private, ecclesiastical, etc.) or on its focus (e.g., schools for students with special needs or, by contrast, selective schools), which conditions their conduct on the educational market as well as their catchment area (Jennings, 2010). The term norm of the shape of an elementary school refers to the dilemma of educational policy: whether to maintain more larger, fully organized schools (regularly situated in cities) or to promote system diversity, that is, to also support small schools (namely the rural ones) (Ribchester & Edwards, 1999). A large urban school has often been used as the "norm of what schools can be and should be like" (Bell & Sigsworth, 1987, p. 55), and preferred to rural institutions. In urban society, these problems have been defined more strongly in urban terms and in line with urban perception (cf. Cloke & Goodwin, 1992). Accordingly, many discussions about small schools in rural and remote areas began in the late 1980s and continue to the present day (e.g., Kramer, 1993; Smit et al., 2015; Solstad, 1997).

Thirdly, the spatial distribution of schools is influenced by factors on the side of learners, or more precisely by school enrollment terms. Constructors of a school catchment system are thus faced with this last organizational challenge: Who is allowed to make decisions about school enrollment? The students themselves, or rather their parents, schools, or public administrators (Jennings, 2010)? On one side, there is the concept of school catchment districts under which schoolchildren living in a school's hinterland are enrolled on the basis of their place of residence (Bajerski, 2015). On the other side, there is the system of parental school choice that has largely evolved under the influence of liberal economic approaches to education. In conditions close to a free market (Maroy & van Zanten, 2009), parents choose which school their child will attend according to their own preferences. A number of theoretical concepts explaining school choice mechanisms and strategies subsequently emerged in sociology, psychology, economics, and geography (e.g., Cucchiara & Horvat, 2014; Holloway & Pimlott-Wilson, 2012; Noreisch, 2007; Straková & Simonová, 2015).

In the third dimension of conditions of education, spatial organization of education is affected by pedagogical-didactic principles of how teaching, classes, and forms of knowledge transmission should be organized (Bertrand, 1998). Different demands on educational organization arise when classes that are homogenized according to age cohorts are preferred than when it is admissible to teach more grades together in a heterogeneous class. Similarly, what matters is whether emphasis is put on frontal instruction, research-oriented teaching, or even on individual instruction and other alternative forms of education.

The fourth dimension, involving the goals of education and related social expectations, seems to be decisive for the second and third dimensions of educational conditions. These factors determine the setting of both educational policy and regional development policy, as well as the strategies of how individuals act in a particular territory. Beyond the main educational function, the school system provides a range of other functions for individuals, families, communities, and society as a whole (Lyson, 2002).

Van de Werfhorst (2014), for instance, defines four tasks of education: (1) The "labor market task" is specified as preparing youth for the labor market and ensures economic development. (2) The "optimization task" consists of efficiency in sorting students into tracks according to their talents and interests. (3) The equal opportunity program's goal is to provide quality basic education for all children, regardless of their ethnic or socioeconomic background. (4) The "socialization task" denotes socializing citizens into active civic engagement. Experts' perceptions on the importance and the rate of accomplishing individual tasks have evolved incessantly over time along with social system changes.

The labor market task was the first to appear crucial (Halsey, Lauder, Brown, & Wells, 1997). Since the nineteenth century, state authorities in developed countries have therefore been systematically constructing a network of institutions ensuring compulsory and uniformly organized school attendance. Liberalism and pragmatic pedagogy grounded in Dewey's (1966) thought subsequently strengthened the optimization task by advocating equal opportunities for everyone so that he or she could attain more benefits through the development of his or her abilities with the aid of educational capital. In contrast, economic nationalism claiming a qualified and loyal workforce for the national economy (Halsey et al., 1997) amplified the labor market task. In countries that came under Soviet influence after World War II, this idea, together with a unilaterally, ideologically targeted socialization task, governed their educational system until the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1990 (Zounek, Šimáně, & Knotová, 2017). Contrarily, a vast majority of democratic countries had been accentuating the equal opportunities task since the 1970s. During that period, diverse societal groups, or territorial communities, became emancipated, and their efforts for equal opportunities and equal access to education flourished. These groups called attention to the injustices of educational concepts and management that favored only certain societal groups, areas, or types of schools (Corbett, 2007). Since the 1980s, emphasis has again been placed on the optimization task: Combined with the application of some market principles to education—such as free parental school choice—this task tends to be rather detrimental to equal opportunity (Holloway & Pimlott-Wilson, 2012). The new institutionalism (Berg, 2007) and the widening enlargement of the European Union at the beginning of the millennium have reinforced (new transnational) socialization and labor market tasks.

Researchers have developed various possible scenarios for education system development to estimate which of the tasks will be determining for the future. A good example is the 2001 OECD report, which presented six so-called "Schooling for Tomorrow Scenarios." Its authors take into consideration the preservation of the existing status of school as an institution as well as its consolidation involving broadening its functions and forms, and possibly also the extension of market approaches of education providers, or, by contrast, the weakening and decline of educational system in favor of other forms of education.

Just like other components of the social system, educational system is a semicomplex whole (Hampl, 2000) cocreated by many interacting factors. It is almost impossible to capture their full extent. Here, we therefore take Czechia as a case study to merely describe the basic connections of changes concerning spatial organization of elementary education with the transformation of broader social circumstances.

#### **Changes of the Czech Educational System and Policies**

#### *Research Organization and Methodology*

In the present study on changes in the spatial organization of elementary education provision in Czechia, we conducted a quantitative analysis of how the geographical organization of elementary schools has evolved on the national level from the middle of the twentieth century. We mainly chose such a long time span because a large number of elementary schools were closed during this period (Trnková, Knotová, & Chaloupková, 2010). In the second phase, we have attempted to interpret the key development tendencies of the elementary educational system, taking into account educational and regional developmental policies treated by other authors in secondary sources.

Our quantitative analysis was limited by the availability of relevant statistical data and by the time required to gather such data. Although the analysis covered a very long time period, only a few statistical publications provide data on the number of schools in basic administrative units, such as municipalities. In general, the data were based on the results of the preceding population censuses and provided information about schools in the whole territory of Czechia at four points in time: 1961, 1976, 1990, and 2004. However, information about the presence of a school in a particular municipality often appeared to be incorrect. Therefore, the information provided in the statistical lexicons and databases had to be compared with the data on the number of schools in larger territorial units or corrected with the use of archival sources.

It is here necessary to point out some important specific features of Czechia's education and settlement system that influence all other characteristics and the development of the country's elementary education. Above all, measured by European standards, the settlement pattern is extremely fragmented (Hampl & Müller, 1998). Czechia's territory (78,000 km2 ) includes approximately 15,000 settlements (towns, villages, hamlets) that are governed by 6250 local self-government units (municipalities) (Kučera, 2007). For that reason, municipalities are usually divided into rural and urban pursuant to the size limit of 3000 inhabitants (see e.g., Hampl & Müller, 1998; Perlín & Šimčíková, 2008). Also for the purpose of our research we selected this population limit on the basis of Act No. 128/2000, Coll., on Municipalities, according to which only a municipality with more than 3000 inhabitants can become a town or a city.1 However, it must be noted that opinions about how to define rural areas diverge widely, and no universal definition exists (see e.g., Halfacree, 1993; Hruška, 2014). Although only 30% of Czechia's population live in small municipalities with less than 3000 inhabitants, these constitute 90% of all municipalities in the country. The remaining part of the population is concentrated in urban settlements. If rural space is defined in this manner, a little over 2000 elementary schools operate nowadays (60% of the total in Czechia) (Kučerová & Kučera, 2012).

On the basis of the data provided in our statistical sources, we have drawn up a list of almost 5500 settlements in which an elementary school existed during at least one of the four designated time spans. In the next step, we integrated the list into a GIS database of Czech municipalities (the boundaries of the municipalities were defined as of January 1, 2016). Taking into consideration the amount of territorialadministrative changes that occurred during the observed period (consolidation of municipalities and in some cases, especially after 1989, their division into new units—see e.g., Hampl & Müller, 1998), we used the Statistical Lexicon of Municipalities to verify the location of the listed settlements in appropriate municipalities.

1Legislators introduced this limit in reaction to the excessive self-identification of municipalities during the 1990s to consolidate a definition of an urban municipality, as some municipalities had retained their town status from the ancient times, although their population comprised only several tens or hundreds of inhabitants.

This process of data collection and organization produced a database that has allowed retrospective historical comparison of the number of elementary schools for all the municipalities in Czechia, according to either the rural or urban status of their municipality in four distinct years: 1961, 1976, 1990, and 2004. The database also included information on school type. Act No. 561/2004 Coll. on Education dictates that elementary school education in Czechia is compulsory for a duration of 9 years. It is provided either by large "complete" elementary schools, which contain all nine grade levels, or by smaller "incomplete" schools, wherein fewer grades are taught (normally first to fifth grades, but sometimes even fewer—see Trnková et al., 2010) and whose students must subsequently commute to a larger 9-year school to complete their elementary education. Moreover, the majority of the latter schools are organized as schools with *composite classes*, that is, they contain at least one class where students of two or more grades are taught together.

In order to carry out subsequent cartographical visualization, it was necessary to find a way to distinguish between complete elementary schools and incomplete schools, and to indicate the total number of schools in each municipality on a single map. For the purpose of this chapter, we have divided Czechia's municipalities into three categories depending on the highest school level situated therein: municipalities with at least one complete elementary school, at least one incomplete school, or with no elementary school. We have therefore given up on enumerating schools in municipalities, as—especially in more distant time spans—more schools would often be located in the entire municipal territory. We have applied other methods of thematic cartography, accentuating absolute numbers to the detriment of qualitative data, for example, in Kučerová and Kučera (2012) or Kučerová et al. (2015a). In this paper, we will use the outcomes to interpret our data.

#### *Heritage of a Dense School Pattern: The 1960s*

The origins of the dense elementary school network in Czechia date back to the turn of the twentieth century. In 1869, the compulsory education system was constituted according to the *Reichsvolksschulgesetz* school act in the Habsburg Empire, which Czechia was a part of. Compulsory school began at age six and lasted 8 years for all children. This was the classic period of construction of a network of schools that were distributed as evenly as possible (Váňová, Rýdl, & Valenta, 1992). The Habsburg Empire's aim was to provide the entire population with uniform elementary schooling for its own needs. Accordingly, most elementary schools, with the exception of ecclesiastical and some private schools, came under state (municipal) authority. Elementary schools, referred to as *common schools*, were internally structured into *starting schools* of six grades, with a relatively even spatial distribution, and *burgher schools*, more frequently found in regional centers. The distance between starting schools ought to have been delimited by a circle with a radius of 4 km or by 1 h walking distance (Váňová et al., 1992). Schoolchildren went to the school that was closest to their home. With

**Fig. 7.1** Elementary schools in Czech municipalities in 1961. Source: Petr Meyer. Data from Kučerová, 2012

regard to Czechia's population development—the reverberating demographic revolution (Srb, 2004)—the number of schools showed an upward and then gradually stagnating tendency until World War II (Šimáně, 2010).

The Communist party seized power in Czechia in 1948, incorporating the country into the so-called Eastern Bloc, which lived under communist rule with a centrally planned economy. In the 1950s, the party nationalized the entire schooling system and placed its management and curricula under central supervision (Jelínková & Smolka, 1989), in compliance with the educational principle of economic nationalism. In 1960, the government radically transformed the school system by adopting the School Act No. 186/1960 Coll., which introduced nine-grade elementary schools (herewith called "schools") consisting of five grades at the first level and four grades at the second level. Mostly rural municipalities with a small number of children in their school's catchment area were still allowed to run schools constituted only of by first-level grades (incomplete school) (Trnková et al., 2010). Such small schools, which symbolized "uneven educational conditions for socialistic state citizens," were gradually abolished from the early 1960s onwards (Kořínek, 1975, p. 216). In 1961, the country had approximately 8000 schools—almost one school per municipality (Kučerová & Kučera, 2012). Although the network of schools was dense and their spatial distribution relatively even, some areas showed a lower density of schools. This was in particular true for upland regions lying along the state border, which suffered from insufficient resettlement after World War II (Kučera & Kučerová, 2012) (see Fig. 7.1).

Settlement and educational policies greatly influenced the development of the school network in rural areas in the 1960s and 1970s. The Communist regime was keen to centralize state administration and remove local public administration by developing the concept of a so-called *system of central settlement units*, whose goal was to manage settlement network development and to unify all citizens' access to public infrastructure. The policymakers' main tool was the forced concentration of the population in fully equipped settlements, instead of providing widespread public services. Every settlement unit was classified as either "forward-looking" (e.g., these "worth to be maintained," equal to central) or "not-forward-looking" (other, e.g., might be abandoned). Only central settlements could keep their civic amenities and were supported in their urban development and in economic investments (e.g., building up industrial plants) (Musil, 2002). In other settlements, service sector facilities were either closed down or restricted to basic services. Moreover, it was desirable to let such settlements perish due to migration or demographic decline (Hampl & Müller, 1998). Other European socialist states employed the same method of regional planning (see Bajerski, 2015; Kovács, 2012; see also Chap. 6 by Gyuris in this volume).

These policies had a significant influence on the rural school network as well. A decline in the number schoolchildren reduced the number of rural schools, and most elementary schooling was concentrated in complete schools situated in central municipalities. In certain respects this was justified, as school buildings in peripheral and border regions were in poor condition and often failed to conform to norms of hygiene (Slouka, 1967). Small schools were allowed to carry on only in places where transport, student numbers, or other circumstances preserved the local school from closure. Such reasons included, for instance, bad roads in many regions in the 1960s and the fact that many rural settlements were off bus line routes. Later improvements in public transport service led to massive school closures (Kučerová et al., 2011).

#### *Massive Centralization: The 1970s and 1980s*

The communist regime's efforts to centralize management and decision-making had an impact on, among other things, increasing placement of children in schools strictly depending on catchment districts, leaving their parents with no free choice. Free schooling choice in disregard of the assigned catchment area was illegal (cf. Maroy & van Zanten, 2009). Although catchment district policies had existed since the beginning of compulsory education and were simultaneously applied by Western European democracies (Åberg-Bengtsson, 2009; Echols, McPherson, & Williams, 1990), in Czechia's small rural settlements these policies encouraged animosity towards central municipalities (Perlín & Šimčíková, 2008). Whenever a school was closed down, its students were transferred to another school by public notice, most often to one situated in the nearest central municipality, which was therefore not faced with a lack of students (Kučerová & Kučera, 2012).

The blanket closure of incomplete schools and the construction of complete ones was markedly influenced by the school reform introduced in the 1970s. Based predominantly on a concept developed by Leonid Zankov in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, this reform further elaborated Vygotsky's and Cole's theory of proximal zones (1978). It emphasized children's intellectual development, to the detriment of their social and emotional development. The reform had two key aspects: First, it stressed the necessity of using elements of abstract thinking, even in the first stage of elementary school. Second, according to the principle of effectiveness, it modified the distribution of curricula over individual elementary school grades and accelerated the learning pace. The curricula's volume remained unchanged, but compulsory school attendance was reduced by 1–8 years. Unlike simultaneous reform in states of the former Western block, Czech educational policy forbade any discussion of the disadvantages of these modern ideas or attempts to halt the reforming efforts (Dvořák et al., 2015a). The reform changes were nowhere more perceptible than in primary-level teaching. Initial experience indicated that elementary-level teaching was more demanding in terms of both content and organization and hard to sustain in the smallest schools (Spilková, 1997).

Thus, central schools in key settlements were internalized as a social norm in contrast to small mixed-age schools, similarly to other socialist countries (see Barakat, 2015; Fickermann, Weishaupt, & Zedler, 1998; Kovács, 2012). This educational policy and the above-mentioned settlement policies of the 1960s and 1970s forced nearly half of Czechia's schools to close down; most of these were rural schools (Kučerová & Kučera, 2012). One-class and two-class composite schools saw a decline from 4800 in 1960 to 1200 in 1980 (see Fig. 7.2).

Transformations in the spatial distribution of schools are also significant. Figure 7.3 shows the situation after the first stage of school closures in 1976; Fig. 7.4 shows the situation in 1990, after the political turn. The government first abolished schools in border and peripheral regions, generally in the western part of the country, where the population was distributed in a fragmented manner and where school closures were justified due to a lack of students or economic costs. The eastern part of Czechia, which had more populated rural settlements (of over 1000 inhabitants), was only affected by school closures during the 1970s, as a direct consequence of the policy changes discussed above (Kučerová & Kučera, 2012).

In the 1980s, the main factor conducive to the construction of large schools in bigger rural municipalities was a significant fluctuation in the increased number of schoolchildren. These were children born in the early 1970s, during a period of rising birth rates. The increase was caused by a large, postwar cohort of mothers entering the reproductive age and was combined with short-term, propopulation policies (Srb, 2004). The school-aged population grew rapidly, which led to an imbalance in the population structure and temporary discrepancies between the numbers of children attending compulsory school and school capacity. Teaching was often divided into shifts in a limited number of classrooms and the highest grades were prematurely transferred from small schools to the nearest big schools (Trnková et al., 2010).

**Fig. 7.2** Structure of elementary schools in Czechia according to first-stage organization (ISCED 1) from the 1960s through the 1980s (selected years). Source: Design by author, following Jelínková and Smolka, 1989. Note: Five-class (from the school year 1960/1961 to 1979/1980) and four-class schools (from the school year 1980/1981) are complete schools where each grade has a class of its own. Since the school year 1980/1981, the first stage has been composed of only four grades

**Fig. 7.3** Elementary schools in Czech municipalities, 1976. Source: Petr Meyer. Data from Kučerová, 2012

**Fig. 7.4** Elementary schools in Czech municipalities, 1990. Source: Petr Meyer. Data from Kučerová, 2012

#### *Transformation of Society: From the 1990s Until Today*

Significant qualitative change in Czech education began only with the fall of the Iron Curtain and the onset of the democratic regime of 1989. The transformation of Czech society included a comprehensive transformation of its educational system its curricula, didactics, school management, and spatial planning (Dvořák, Starý, & Urbánek, 2015b; Janík, 2016) have been a part of two forms of transformation. Hampl (1999) refers to the first as a posttotalitarian transformation and to the second as a global societal transition from modern to postmodern society.

The effect of posttotalitarian transformation manifested itself in the transformation of the organization of public administration. The year 1990 saw more than 4000 municipalities return to self-government, while approximately 2000 others disintegrated from their central settlement units (Hampl & Müller, 1998). The decentralization of political and economic governance passed more autonomy and responsibility on to schools and their operators. The new public administration legislation made municipalities responsible for providing children with schooling (Act No. 128/2000, Coll., on Municipalities). It now thus falls to the local administration to decide whether or not a municipality can run a school. If it cannot, it may make an arrangement with another municipality's school to admit its children (Perlín & Šimčíková, 2008). Some municipalities decided to restore their local schools that had previously been shut down. Beside the establishment of new private or nonstate schools, this is one reason why roughly 200 new schools emerged in the 1990–1996 period. Most of these institutions were rural schools with composite classes (Trnková et al., 2010).

The educational system's decentralization is also connected with the transformation of elementary school funding, which is based on two principal sources: the Ministry of Education, which funds schools through a lump-sum per student (to cover teacher salaries and key school equipment), and municipality budgets, which fund school operation and related investment (especially school buildings). A norm regarding the minimum average number of students per class (13) remained incorporated in the School Act until 2009. Unless it achieved the required number, every municipality had to guarantee that the missing costs of teacher salaries and school equipment would be paid from its own budget (Trnková, 2009). Since Czechia's accession to the European Union in 2004, the regional governments have also laid emphasis on acquiring irregular financial resources for school budgets through European cohesion policy funds (e.g., as a part of projects for renovation of buildings or modernization of technological equipment).

In spite of the fact that self-governing municipalities are the dominant operator of Czechia's elementary schools (95% of schools), more than 100 church and private schools have been established since the 1990s (Kučerová, 2012). At present, we can observe a partial trend of founding other alternative forms of schooling ensured by, for example, parental associations (cf. Hána, 2017; Kraftl, 2012). Further processes related to system decentralization that have been developing in Western European countries since the 1980s (see e.g., Dvořák & Straková, 2016; Echols et al., 1990; Holloway & Pimlott-Wilson, 2012) have clearly differentiated forms and types of institutions providing education. They have increased their specialization, but also intensified the competition between them. Schools now participate in the curriculum development process, and student admission is based on the principle of free choice. In the 1990s, the government abandoned its policy of compulsory placement of schoolchildren in their district schools. The School Act No. 561/2004, Coll. leaves parents free to choose where their children will go to school. Nevertheless, some elements of the preceding school district policy have persisted. Municipalities are still obliged to delineate school districts by means of a binding regulation and give preference to local students rather than applicants from other districts (cf. Nekorjak, Souralová, & Vomastková, 2011).

Although the number of schools has been decreasing slightly since 1996, researchers have observed no distinct changes in their distributions, as illustrated in Fig. 7.5. The possibility of attending a school in one's place of residence is, however, markedly influenced by society-wide trends in population development. On the one hand, student numbers decreased due to the significant birthrate decline after 1989 (Burcin et al., 2010). On the other hand, increased immigration from the large cities to their immediate or wider hinterland at the beginning of the twentyfirst century has put a halt to this decrease, or almost reversed it in some regions. Although peripheral rural areas were struggling with a lack of students, mass suburbanization often doubled the population of the villages in the hinterland of the cities (Ouředníček, Špačková, & Novák, 2013), rendering the capacity of local schools insufficient (Hulík, Šídlo, & Tesárková, 2008).

**Fig. 7.5** Elementary schools in Czech municipalities, 2004. Source: Petr Meyer. Data from Kučerová, 2012

In 2004, the government adopted a new School Act as part of the school management decentralization process. At its core was a curricular reform shifting part of the responsibility for curricula development to individual schools by means of so-called School Curricular Programs (Dvořák et al., 2015b; Kučerová, Bláha, & Pavlasová, 2015b). On the one hand, it increased the potential of place-based curriculum, taking into account the particularities of both schools and students; on the other hand, it cleared the way for a yet stronger market environment and quality-based school differentiation (Dvořák & Straková, 2016; cf. Geppert, Knapp, Kilian, & Katsching, 2015). The market behavior of schools is most noticeable in metropolitan areas, not only in terms of parental choice, but also in how schools themselves seek new clients (Dvořák et al., 2015b). Although urban schools have maintained their status of superior institutions in terms of hierarchy and quality (Trnková et al., 2010), small schools—namely those proposing alternative teaching methods—have been appreciated as well (Kučerová et al., 2015b). Czechia's opening up towards the West and globalization tendencies have not merely affected the shape of school curriculum, but also lead to the formation of a new, hierarchically higher social norm of a school that is integrated with international structures (e.g., through interschool cooperation) and positively evaluated in national comparative tests, such as PISA or TIMSS (Dvořák & Straková, 2016).

#### **Conclusion**

It is quite challenging to embrace, on a limited number of pages and in a complex manner, the intricate, long-term development of an educational system that often displays contradictory tendencies. We have therefore selected only the most crucial processes provable by primary data or bibliographic sources.

To conclude, the development of Czech elementary schools over the observed period can be divided into five key stages: (1) an increase in school numbers in parallel with the construction of a system of accessible local education until World War II; (2) a decrease of redundant schools in areas with a population decline during the 1960s; (3) an extreme nation-wide decrease in rural schools due to settlement system regulation and educational centralization policies in the 1960s and 1970s; (4) a revitalization of the school network associated with the renewal of local, democratic self-governance in the early 1990s; (5) a continuing slight decrease in school numbers and significant spatial differentiation in education provision due to demographic and migration changes, decentralization, and liberalization of the educational market from the 1990s to today.

As suggested by this chronological listing, the development of the educational system involves mutual relationships among the four dimensions of the provision and realization of education mentioned in this chapter's introduction (changes in educational conditions and demand; view of the role of education; transformations of pedagogical conceptions; educational and regional policies). Various policy combinations (e.g., the system of central settlement units), educational principles (e.g., Vygotsky & Cole's, 1978 theory), and notions about education's function (e.g., van de Werfhorst's, 2014 tasks of education) are materialized by those who have the power to implement them. It is thereby that a structure is formed in correspondence to Giddens's conception (1984) of the educational system. Various types of schools, along with their relationships to their environs, are deployed spatially. Actors are limited, as they must act within the confines of this structure. Some of them help maintain the structure, whereas others modify or disrupt it.

In the period of the unfree communist regime, Czechia's educational system functioned within a centralized and authoritatively controlled structure whose makers were striving for unification. The spatial population distribution was dictated by a policy defining which settlements should prosper and where local services (schools) should close down. Students' distribution across schools was determined by the catchment district system. The structure thus forestalled any free choice, which could only be exercised secretly. This structure, too, was differentiated due to the effect of various factors (Hampl & Müller, 1998). A complete, nine-grade urban school became the social norm in education. The structure was especially disturbed by the frequent declines of small rural schools, whereby relations in every environment were changing (Kučerová et al., 2015a).

After the renewal of the democratic regime and Czechia's integration into European structures, the country's educational system began to transform into a system of autonomous units participating in the formulation of educational principles and objectives. The distribution of inhabitants in space and that of schoolchildren across schools followed the rules of free market and free choice. Freedom, however, imposed limits on the scope of schools' activities, forcing them into commercialization. The national norm is now a school that ideally enables every individual to succeed in subsequent levels of education (Dvořák et al., 2015b). Actors have a great possibility to create and recreate the structure, although both physical and mental obstacles exist (e.g., the impossibility of choosing a local school that was closed in the past). Choice thus becomes a limitation as well, as not all individuals and schools can succeed in the competition (e.g., the chosen school cannot admit a student due to insufficient capacity). The varying success rates therefore polarize the system.

**Acknowledgements** The paper is supported by the research project of the Grant Agency of the Charles University No. SVV UK 260425. The authors thank it for the support given.

#### **References**

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## **Chapter 8 Securing Indigenous Dispossession Through Education: An Analysis of Canadian Curricula and Textbooks**

**Laura Schaefli, Anne Godlewska, and Christopher Lamb**

#### **Introduction**

The beliefs and attitudes that were used to justify the establishment of residential schools are not things of the past: they continue to animate official Aboriginal policy today. Reconciliation will require more than apologies for the shortcomings of those who preceded us. It obliges us to recognize the ways in which the legacy of residential schools continues to disfigure Canadian life and to abandon policies and approaches that currently serve to extend that hurtful legacy (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015, pp. 103–104).

We also have no history of colonialism. So we have all of the things that many people admire about the great powers but none of the things that threaten or bother them. (Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper (2006–2015) presenting to the G20 summit in Pittsburgh on September 25, 2009; quoted in Wherry, 2009).

In the quotations above, we hear two views of reality: an Indigenous view of Canada as a colonial country with a powerful legacy of destructive policies toward Indigenous peoples; and a state view of Canada as an innocent place, untouched by colonialism.1 The contrast is even more striking as Prime Minister Stephen Harper is the prime minister who in 2008 apologized for the harm inflicted on Indigenous people by Residential Schools, a more than 100-year policy of forced removal of Indigenous children from their families for placement in under-resourced schools dedicated to the assimilation of Indigenous children—in short, a colonial project. How can such contradictions exist within a society and within a single mind? As we

1We use the term *Indigenous* as an umbrella term for all people in Canada who identify as such, including First Nations, Métis, and Inuit. We use the term *Aboriginal* in legal contexts and in the context of Newfoundland and Labrador, where it is the favored term.

L. Schaefli (\*) · A. Godlewska · C. Lamb

Department of Geography and Planning, Queen's University, Kingston, ON, Canada e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
know, denial and continued support for the violence that is colonialism takes work. The ideologies supporting colonialism—the myths of a hierarchy of civilizations, the white man's burden, and the vanishing Indian—and the imaginative geographies of spatial exclusion have resulted from sustained intellectual and cultural labor (Battiste, 2013; Fitzmaurice, 2007, 2014; Moreton-Robinson, 2015; Williams, 1990). Intellectuals, authors, artists, bureaucrats, educators, and everyday citizens, working on multiple levels in society, conceive and carry out these efforts.  However, as we argue in this chapter, it is the formal education system that plays the most important role, through its cultivation of colonial epistemes—entire ways of understanding the world and one's place in it. Our examination of curricula and texts in three provinces in Canada—Newfoundland and Labrador, Ontario, and British Columbia suggests that in all three educational jurisdictions, students are learning a logic of relation premised on the disappearance of Indigenous peoples as sovereign, selfdetermining nations. Silence around Indigenous philosophies and territories, apologia for colonial incursions on Indigenous territories, and reinforcement of racialized hierarchies of being all work to minimize colonial violence and preclude imagination of distinct, vital, and self-determining Indigenous nations. Particularly troubling are the ways in which curricula and texts invite students to participate in the perpetuation of colonial modes of thought and action.

We have carried out research in three jurisdictions: Newfoundland and Labrador, in the far east of the country—Ontario, in the center and the region that holds the nation's capital—and British Columbia, in the far west. These regions are fundamentally different in terms of the Indigenous peoples of the territories, the physical geography of the provinces, their history of colonial settlement, and the degree and nature of engagement between Indigenous peoples and settlers. Newfoundland and Labrador was the first region to encounter European colonialism. It was also the last to join the Confederation of Canada. When it did so in 1949, it failed to recognize the existence of Aboriginal peoples within the province, including Mi'kmaq, Innu, and Inuit (Hanrahan, 2003). Ontario, formerly Upper Canada, was the heart of the British colony and ultimately the nation's economic and political center, instrumental in developing and implementing colonial policies including the Indian Act and residential schools (Lawrence, 2004; Milloy, 1999). In British Columbia, in contrast to many other parts of Canada, the provincial and federal governments did not sign treaties with Indigenous peoples, preferring to force them onto tiny reserves which governments and settlers proceeded to erode over time and in a variety of ways (Harris, 2002). Since the 1990s, the provincial and federal governments have sought to negotiate modern treaties, with the aim of securing the forms of political and economic certainty attractive to capital investment. However, many First Nations in the province have refused to take part, given government denial of Indigenous sovereignties and insistence on conversion of collectively held lands to fee simple title. For these reasons, relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in British Columbia are perhaps more unsettled than elsewhere in Canada.

As a first step to our contribution to decolonizing college and university curricula, we have analyzed the curricular documents and the textbooks used in primary and secondary education in all three jurisdictions. We were interested in the degree to which students were undergoing colonial or decolonizing education and what strategies of inclusion or exclusion these educational systems deploy. Our research to date has shown that these educational systems are all colonial and work to marginalize Indigenous peoples, though they employ subtly different strategies of exclusion. As members of a colonial society and as non-Indigenous academics, we cannot escape colonial thinking. Thus, we began by educating ourselves through reading critical Indigenous theorists and by working closely with Indigenous educators and community members. Part of our research, which is not presented here, has involved the development of knowledge tests for entering and exiting postsecondary students. It is through codesigning the knowledge tests that we have gained insight into what colonialism and a decolonized society might look like. This process has informed our word-by-word and multidisciplinary analysis of curricular documents and textbooks across these three provinces of Canada.2

#### **Minimizing Colonial Violence**

#### *Vanishing Indigenous Sovereignties and Critical Perspectives*

Curricula and textbooks in Newfoundland and Labrador, Ontario, and British Columbia all work to deny the violence of colonialism. A principal strategy is evacuation of Indigenous sovereignties from discussion of European arrival in what is now known as Canada. By omitting Indigenous territories, legal traditions, and critical perspectives, the curricula and texts assume European jurisdiction and encourage students to think about land as empty of Indigenous peoples. In Newfoundland and Labrador, whitewashing language works to minimize dispossession: Land acquisition resulted from "interactions between European and Aboriginal Peoples" (N.L.D.E., 2011a, p. 204). Reserves, the tiny remnants of Indigenous lands to which status Indians largely have been restricted, are "parcels of land set aside by the federal government for the exclusive use of a First Nation." There is no discussion of the federal government's right to that land, how reserves were created, the parcels' adequacy, or limited First Nations freedom to govern reserve land (Clark & Wallace, 1996, p. 99). Texts in British Columbia similarly present the Canadian government as always already sovereign and generous, describing the reserve system with no attention to the coercion, betrayals, and violence they entailed (Deir et al., 2000; Francis, 2000; Sterling, 2000, 2002). This perspective consistently undermines Indigenous sovereignties: Colonists are portrayed as coming from "countries" and the places they colonize are "areas of land," always already "other" and "for" the colonizer (Clark & McKay, 1992; Sterling, 2000, p. 143). In Ontario, curricula and texts work to vanish Indigenous sovereignties by framing settler history as the

2We analyzed curricula and associated textbooks in Newfoundland and Labrador up to 2013, in Ontario up to 2015, and in British Columbia up to 2016.

totality of history. Indigenous traditional territories are never discussed. In fact, the closest mention of Indigenous territories in the entire K-12 curriculum is a parenthetical aside focused on contemporary populations: "[I]llustrate and explain the regional distribution patterns of various peoples across Canada (e.g., Aboriginal peoples, Francophones, immigrant groups)" (OME, 2005a, p. 31). When Indigenous peoples are discussed, the focus is on settler benefit (OME, 2004, p. 34). Additionally, several high school history and civics texts frame Canada as developed exclusively through British and French democratic traditions (Blair, 2003; Brune & Bulgutch, 2000; Clark & Wallace, 2003, p. 176; Gini-Newman, 2001, p. 6), which is a formulation also present in British Columbia's curricula and texts (BCME, 1997, p. 26; Buckingham, Marcotte, Epp Buckingham, Manning, & Thompson, 1997, p. 19). One Ontario text goes so far as to claim that it is only now that Indigenous people are healthier and better educated that they are "beginning to make their mark in Canada" (Gini-Newman, 2001, p. 394). Such patronizing portrayal neglects the pivotal roles of Indigenous people(s) and political philosophies in shaping the governance of New France, British North America, and Canada, a characterization that perpetuates terra nullius (empty land) logic, casts Indigenous peoples as passive nonagents, and thereby reinforces assumptions of settler dominance (Borrows, 2010; Brooks, 2008; Delâge & Sawaya, 2001; Sawaya, 2002).

#### *Denying Colonialism in Canada*

Curricula and texts further minimize colonial violence by underplaying, or denying outright, the presence and endurance of colonialism in Canada. In Newfoundland and Labrador, this denial is achieved principally by framing Indigenous people as settlers "like everyone else," a dynamic that works to undermine any claims by Indigenous people rooted in prior presence. At least two of the textbooks used by most students, the Grade 5 text and the high school Newfoundland and Labrador Studies text, contend that, as Aboriginal people in Newfoundland and Labrador migrated at some time to what is now Newfoundland from the mainland, they are not indigenous to the territory. The Grade 5 text (Cram & Fizzard, 1991, Chapter 3) teaches students that both earlier and later Aboriginal people were all settlers. In the high school Newfoundland and Labrador Studies text, science, in the form of archaeological evidence and cartographic display, is harnessed to frame Aboriginal peoples as "immigrants" like "all residents of Newfoundland and Labrador" (Newfoundland and Labrador Department of Education, 2010, p. 114). The text does include a sidebar critique of this contention by Daniel Ashini (Innu), but the main part of the text critiques his assertions, letting the students know how they should be thinking about any claims to prior presence (Newfoundland and Labrador Department of Education, 2010, p. 123). Also in this text, assertions of early Mi'kmaq presence (Martijn, 2003, p. 121) are dismissed as tainted by the existence of disputes over land rights—disputes which are not assumed to taint the perspective of non-Indigenous players. The link between archaeological data and nationalist discourse, and the weakness of archaeological data unsupported by ethnographic and sociological research and evidence, is not discussed (Kristensen & Davis, 2015, pp. 524–526; Smith & Wobst, 2005). Nor is the political nature of cartography (Brealey, 1995; Sparke, 1998). The argument that all people living in what is now Newfoundland and Labrador are ultimately settlers also works to convert treaty obligations from rights to privileges. One of the high school Canadian geography texts makes explicit the association of Aboriginal people with privileges (Cartwright, Birchall, & Pierce, 1996). Without nuance or reference to treaty obligations, the text describes "Indians" on reserves as non-tax paying (p. 294) and asserts that "tuition as well as travel and living expenses" are provided for all "aboriginal students for the first four years of post-secondary education" (p. 297). Using this strategy, non-Indigenous people can disregard centuries of dispossession and cultural and personal assault, even though the perception of Indigenous privileges is belied by the statistics on Indigenous disadvantage in Canada.

In Ontario, the principal strategy of colonial denial is silence, which, together with silence around Indigenous traditional territories, works to legitimate contemporary Canadian political formulations that dissociate Indigenous peoples from political and economic self-determination. The word colonialism is never used in the curriculum. Instead, the arrival of Europeans is referred to as contact, settlement, or migration (OME, 2004, 2005a, 2005b). Texts present exploration as an exclusively European phenomenon that constituted the first major expansion of human horizons (Asselstine, 2000c, p. 51), was an inevitable outcome of the heroic pursuit of knowledge (Francis, 2000, p. 56), and is inherently exciting and fun (Asselstine, 2000a, p. 22, 2000b, p. 134). Other texts present colonialism as natural, inevitable, and ubiquitous, invoking the Bering Strait theory of Indigenous migration to argue that ultimately, Indigenous peoples are settlers too, as in Newfoundland and Labrador (Asselstine, 2000b, p. 10; Busato & Takacs, 2002b, p. 209; Smith & Pelech, 2002, p. 2). Still others are entirely silent about the presence, endurance, and consequences for Indigenous traditional governance of legislated racism including the Indian Act and residential schools. At the same time, curricular directives frame Indigenous peoples as one amongst many ethnic minorities to be accommodated in a multicultural society, and cast government as an innocent and benevolent arbiter of Aboriginal rights. For example, students are required to "identify contributions to Canada's multicultural society by regional, linguistic, ethnocultural, and religious communities (e.g., Aboriginal peoples, Franco-Ontarians, Métis, Black Canadians, Doukhobors, Mennonites, local immigrant communities)" (OME, 2005a, p. 55). In this multicultural framework, the sovereignty of the Canadian state is taken as given and conflicts around land, resources, and cultural continuity are reduced to a matter of majority rule (Bannerji, 2000; Coulthard, 2014; Lawrence & Dua, 2005; Razack, 1998). The existence and diversity of Indigenous legal traditions are disavowed, and the government and multicultural rhetoric are presented as innocent of alignment with assimilative interests.

Curricular documents and textbooks in British Columbia deny the existence of colonialism in two principal ways: by representing colonialism as a phenomenon Canada moved beyond as it emerged from colonial status, and as a problem of elsewhere. Only three of the mandatory social studies curricular documents mention colonialism and the titles and organization of these courses relegate colonialism to the past. The thematic organization of Grade 5's "Canada from Colony to Country" (BCME, 2006a) portrays Canada as emerging from British and French colonialism to autonomous nationhood, free of colonialism. Primarily concerned with the "development of the nation," this course recounts resource exploitation in British Columbia, the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and the establishment of Canadian Confederation. None of the content makes any direct reference to colonialism. This theme is repeated in Grade 10's "Canada from 1815 to 1914," where students learn to analyze "British support for colonial independence," as one of the "factors that led to Confederation and to the development of Canada's provinces and territories" (BCME, 2006b, p. 27).

Only in the Grade 9's "Europe and North America from 1500 to 1815" are students expected to "define colonialism, imperialism, and nationalism," and to "analyze effects of colonialism on trade and conflict" in Canada, yet the discussion is limited to the period up to 1815, ignoring ongoing colonial presence (BCME, 1997, pp. 26, 28). Beyond representing colonialism as a past event, the curricula and texts in British Columbia present it as a problem of elsewhere. The secondary-school text "Canada Revisited" (Social Studies 9) limits its discussion to British and French colonialism and policy (Clark & McKay, 1992, p. 80). In "Across the Centuries" (Social Studies 8), "Greeks established colonies along the coast of Italy in 750 B.C.," and "[d]uring the 1800s, Europeans began to explore and claim land in Africa" (Armento, 1994, p. 469). Here colonialism "runs its course" during the 1900s in Africa, colonies in the "Western Hemisphere" having "won their independence in the 1700s and early 1800s" (p. 469). The History 12 curriculum and texts focus only on "colonial rule" in "Palestine and the Indian subcontinent" and "decolonization of India and Indochina" (BCME, 2006c, pp. 31, 33–34). Sustained and coherent discussion of colonialism in Canada is restricted to optional courses, available to students in their last 2 years of study, which few students take. Social Justice 12 does suggest coverage of the "continuing legacy of colonialism and its effects on Canada's Aboriginal peoples in contemporary Canadian society" (BCME, 2008, p. 40), and British Columbia First Nations Studies 12 includes significant coverage of contemporary colonialism in British Columbia with a focus on "the resistance of First Nations people to colonialism, especially land encroachment" (BCME, 2006d, p. 5). However, only around 2% of students in the province take either of these courses each year as opposed to, for instance, the 14% taking History 12 or the 13% taking Law 12 (BCME, 2016, 2017; Lamb, 2015). The relegation of meaningful discussion of colonialism in Canada to optional courses so infrequently taken by students subtly reinforces the representation of colonialism as "a problem of elsewhere;" topics related to colonialism in Canada are framed as "fringe" content peripheral to the "mainstream." In the British Columbia curricula and texts, colonialism apparently happened long ago and far away.

#### **Reinforcement of Racialized Hierarchies of Being**

Curricula and texts across all three provinces work subtly to legitimate colonial interests by invoking racialized hierarchies of being. Relegating Indigenous peoples to the past is a common strategy. In Newfoundland and Labrador, the curriculum and texts describe the original inhabitants of the island of Newfoundland, the Beothuk, as extinct, even though Beothuk blood is present in the general population and the Beothuk and the Innu of Labrador are closely related (Macleod & Brown, 2005, p. 27; N.L.D.E., 2005, pp. 34, 125). Commonly used in Newfoundland and Labrador to describe the Beothuk, the word *extinct* places all the Indigenous people of Newfoundland and Labrador, including the Mi'kmaq, in an absolute past. The use of the term extinct is important in other ways: As its common usage is for plants and animals, the term places the Beothuk in that realm of being. Further, most people think of extinction as an unfortunate by-product of the incursion of agriculture, resource extraction, and industrial activity into formerly undeveloped or economically inactive areas. The word, then, fits neatly into two other formulations in the curriculum and texts: Indigeneity as inherently contradictory of modernity and Indigenous people as not part of the economy. Firmly ensconcing Indigenous peoples in noneconomic realms denies the history, presence, and relationships of Indigenous peoples in and with their lands and thus effectively turns Indigenous lands into "wastelands of non-achievement," ripe for potential settlement and development by settlers (Fitzmaurice, 2007, 2014; wa Thiong'o, 1986, p. 3). The portrayal of Indigeneity as contradictory to modernity appears early on, in the Grade 5 curricular directive "[Aboriginal people] want to progress in the modern world but they also want to preserve their traditional way of life" (N.L.D.E., 2012, p. 59). The key word in this assertion is *but*, which creates a contradiction. Language linking Indigenous people to "primitivism" is pervasive in the texts: Indigenous peoples use tools; the Europeans use equipment (Cram & Fizzard, 1991, pp. 44, 194), and Indigenous people are always present before European arrival but rarely possess continuity. Absence from the economy appears in the curriculum and in Canadian geography texts, which take a chronological approach to the demography of the country that begins with Indigenous peoples but makes no further mention of First Nations, Métis or Inuit peoples when discussing immigration, urbanization, resources, energy, economics, globalization, finances, trade, or culture (Clark & Wallace, 1996). The high school economics text reinforces this by relegating Aboriginal people to reserve lands, poverty and "a traditional economy" (Bolotta, Hawkes, Mahoney, & Piper, 2002). The portrayal of Indigeneity and economy as mutually exclusive reinforces discourses of social progression that demand Indigenous assimilation into contemporary economic and social life. The sense of hierarchy with non-Indigenous people at the top and Indigenous people at the bottom is encapsulated in the frequent use of the possessive, "our Aboriginal people" (N.L.D.E., 2011b, p. 57), "our forests" (Cram & Fizzard, 1991, p. 194), and "our culture" (N.L.D.E., 2007, p. 105), which combined reinforce the sense that non-Aboriginal Canadians own everything, including the Indigenous people.

Curricula and texts in Ontario also work to reinforce racialized hierarchies of being, but do so by portraying Indigenous peoples as nonexistent, past, or weak. As early as Grade 3 and continuing into high school, maps and other geographic strategies insinuate that Indigenous peoples and contemporary land title do not exist in the southern Canadian provinces (Bisset & Permanand-Collins, 2004, p. 38; Clark, Wallace, & Earle, 2006, p. 203; Cruxton, 2008; Gutsole & Gutsole, 1998, p. 6). Textbooks as early as Grade 5 portray Indigenous worldviews as static and irrational and Indigenous cultures as legitimate insofar as they adhere to pre-European contact practices. Change, it is implied, is antithetical to Indigeneity (Asselstine, 2000a, p. 158, 2000b, p. 10; Busato & Takacs, 2002b, p. 253; Draper, Andrew, Duncan, & Roth, 2006, p. 161; Gini-Newman, 2001, p. 13; Smith & Pelech, 2002, p. 2). Still other texts portray Indigenous peoples as technologically unsophisticated, a framing that works to legitimate colonialism by casting European technologies as a gift (Busato & Takacs, 2002b, p. 189; Gini-Newman et al., 2000, p. 303; Healy, 2003, p. 150). Moral claims about government and the nature of Indigenous rights are also mobilized in Ontario textbooks in ways that naturalizes the authority of the Canadian state. Texts consistently portray government as benevolent and generous with regard to Indigenous rights, yet are silent about the instrumental work of Indigenous leaders and activists in advancing protection of those rights. At the same time, Indigenous struggles for self-determination are presented as irrational, criminal, and opportunistic. This appropriation and negative characterization of Indigenous struggle is deeply racialized, constituting a "possessive investment" in the goodness of white Canadians that serves to rescue "settler innocence" while undermining critiques that illuminate the contours and mechanisms of systemic racism and colonialism (Lipsitz, 2006, p. 1; Srivastava, 2005; Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 1). As early as Grade 5, textbooks frame prejudice as a historical phenomenon that has been addressed successfully in contemporary times by government initiatives (Clark et al., 2006; Draper et al., 2006, p. 63; Francis, 2000, p. 34). Other texts describe contemporary Canadians and their government as enlightened benefactors who have moved beyond colonialism and racism.  The text then lauds the inclusion of Aboriginal and treaty rights in the 1982 Constitution with no discussion of the sustained efforts of Indigenous leaders to advance that inclusion (Gini-Newman, 2001, p. 41). A Grade 9 text takes a similarly congratulatory approach, praising "Canadians and their government" for realizing "that the Aboriginal people of Canada have been treated unfairly over the centuries." The same text makes no mention of the work of Indigenous leaders and activists to challenge assimilative policies (Clark et al., 2006, p. 204). Still other texts are more explicit in their undermining of Indigenous people and rights. Some texts present the evacuation of Indigenous self-determination as a foregone conclusion: "[G] overnment treaties deprived Aboriginal peoples of the right to govern themselves" (Clark et al., 2006, p. 201); Indigenous peoples "lost their ability to control their own destiny" (Healy, 2007, p. 189). Others present Aboriginal rights as inherently criminal. A Grade 11 Law text places discussion of Aboriginal and treaty rights in a chapter on "Defenses for the Accused" and warns students that "there are times when Aboriginal peoples may argue that they have an Aboriginal or treaty right to act in a way that would be illegal for anyone else" (Blair, 2003, p. 263). A Grade 10 Civics text considers that Canadian governments "have signaled their willingness to give Aboriginal communities more control" but "they always have a bottom line...Aboriginal peoples must respect the laws of this country and the rights of its non-native citizens" (Brune & Bulgutch, 2000, p. 147). One text even implies that inequities do not really exist, reinforcing the portrayal of Indigenous people as untrustworthy: "Many workers, such as visible minorities, women, aboriginal people, and people with disabilities, have already adjusted to [new] employment situations, whether by choice or necessity ... and thus have a subtle advantage" (Busato & Takacs, 2002b, p. 79). Textbooks' portrayal of racism and colonialism as past, Canadians and their government as inherently benevolent, and Indigenous people and rights as criminal and untrustworthy work to obfuscate the existence of and reasons for Indigenous resistance while dissuading critical thought about systemic racism and colonialism.

#### **Inviting Students to Model Colonial Dispossession**

Curricula and texts sometimes invite students to model colonial dispossession, either under the guise of designing sound social policies for Indigenous people or just as an exercise. In Newfoundland and Labrador, the clearest example of such an exercise can be found in a high school Geography text, "Contact Canada" (Cartwright et al., 1996), in which students learn the stages of development of a fictitious land, Innuvial, and map the terrain (pp. 288–294). In a chilling re-enactment of relocation tragedies that rocked Inuit in the Eastern Arctic through much of the twentieth century (Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, 1996; Tester & Kulchyski, 1994), the textbook asks students to relocate the fictitious Innuviat so that their location makes more sense in the Canadian economy. A Grade 8 Ontario textbook likewise encourages the development of assimilative policies, inviting students to develop proposals detailing the steps the Brazilian government could take to encourage the Yanomami to "leave their traditional technology behind so that they can take advantage of better health care and deal with outsiders coming onto their land" (Busato & Takacs, 2002a, p. 173). In these exercises, students appear to be being prepared to assume the mantle of colonialists: bureaucrats who make decisions for and about Indigenous people, on the basis of statistics, maps, and general principles, in the name of economic and social advancement with no on-the-ground knowledge, no accountability to Indigenous people, and no consciousness of the violence relocation entails.

Some of the most troubling normalizations of colonial dispossession in British Columbia curricula and textbooks occur in activities where curriculum and text direct teachers to ask students to inhabit imaginatively the role of colonizer. The Social Studies 9 curriculum portrays colonialism and imperialism as adventurous and exciting when students are to "compare the exploration mandate given to Captain James Cook with that of the charter of the starship *Enterprise,* focusing on reasons for exploration" (BCME, 1997, p. 28). It is worth noting that the fictional Federation embraces a policy of do no harm/do not interfere, which is a far cry from the realities of colonialism on Earth. Yet the curriculum does not use the Star Trek comparison to make this point. Students learn to identify with the colonizers when asked to become a colonizer for a day and develop their own "charters." Many of the exercises in the texts also treat Indigenous peoples as a problem to be managed. An exercise in the secondary-school text "Across the Centuries" (Social Studies 8) asks students to imagine how they would "establish a colony for [their] country," including how they would "manage the colony" and what they would do if "natives already lived on the site" (Armento, 1994, p. 470). The Social Studies 9 text "Canada Revisited" includes an exercise in which students are to "prepare an official report for the British government outlining your point of view regarding what you think should become part of British policy on what to do with the Native peoples" (Clark & McKay, 1992, p. 81). The geographical focus of many exercises draws on and reinforces colonial notions of land and resources. An exercise in the Grade 4 text "Islands" encourages students to imagine the type of island they would choose to live on, and then "build a model" (Peturson, Asselstine, & Luks, 1996, p. 47). For this exercise students start from scratch and populate their island as they see fit, an activity uncomfortably similar to the colonial European perspective of land in North America as *terra nullius* (Fitzmaurice, 2007, 2014; Pateman & Mills, 2007). Grade 5 takes this treatment even further in a fascinating exercise that ties together physical geography, natural resources, and settlement patterns. Students must "work in groups to design an island," to make maps, "name the region of Canada where their island could be found," and "write a diary or journal entry of the first settler on the island and the discovery of a resource on the island that could sustain the development of a community" (BCME, 1997, pp. 177–178). In order to "assess the role of geographical factors in the development of trade and settlement in Canada and other colonies" the Grade 9 curricula challenges students to "design real estate advertisements to attract settlers to New France" and encourages them to "consider what features would attract prospective settlers" (BCME, 1997, p. 30). None of these exercises includes mention of Indigenous peoples and all three encourage insensitivity to the consequences for Indigenous peoples.

#### **Implications**

It is possible to track the affective consequences of the curricula and texts' colonial ideologies in student's imagination and words. We have surveyed 1st-year university students in Newfoundland and Labrador, measuring their knowledge against their social attitudes, where they were taught, what they think of what they were taught, and how they identify themselves. In that survey, prior to administering a knowledge test, we asked students to "name three things" they knew about

Aboriginal people (Godlewska, Schaefli, Massey, Freake, & Rose, 2017). Over 40% of respondents chose Indigenous absence from the recent Canadian past, the Canadian present, and certainly from any Canadian future as what they know about Indigenous peoples. In spite of the fact that Indigenous people have long been the fastest growing demographic in Canada (Statistics Canada, 2005), in spite of significant Indigenous work and success in securing land and resource rights and in transforming the Canadian political landscape (Asch, 1984; Asch & Macklem, 1991), and in spite of national attention in the form of apologies for wrongs committed (CBC News Canada, 2008), for far too many of these students Indigenous people are simply gone, not there, vanishing, or insignificant in number and culture. These students' voices eloquently echo the "Vanishing Indigenous sovereignties and critical perspectives" purveyed in texts and curricula and reflected in sustained Canadian political and legal strategies (Borrows, 2017):

While over 40% of the students who took the time to respond to our question expressed this "Vanishing Indian" myth, only 8% of the 1st-year students surveyed at Memorial University recognized that the Indigenous population of Canada is increasing, suggesting that the myth of absence is deeply embedded in young people's imaginations.

Quantitative results from our survey of over 40,000 1st-year students at 10 Ontario universities likewise reveal a prevailing misconception that wherever Indigenous people are, they are not here, not present, and by implication not relevant to students' daily lives or to Canadian society. It is significant, given the Canadian government's commitment to resource extraction and the disproportionate impact of that extraction on Indigenous people(s) (Cameron & Levitan, 2014; Preston, 2013), that students have little understanding of Indigenous land and resource rights. Students are also substantially ignorant of Indigenous presence around them. Although about a third of students have some awareness of the Indigenous nations in Ontario, over 96% cannot name the Nation(s) upon whose traditional territory their university campus is built. Moreover, despite the fact that the Indigenous population is not only growing but is the fastest growing population in Canada, fully 65% of Ontario students believe the Indigenous population is decreasing. When students are aware of Indigenous presence at all, the majority associate that presence with First Nations reserves, even though at least 70% of First Nations people in Canadian provinces live off reserve and reserves are not applicable to Métis and Inuit (Statistics Canada, 2013). Students' ignorance of the extent and importance of Indigenous traditional territories, their relegation of Indigeneity to reserves, and their conviction of Indigenous decline is deeply political: Ignorance of Indigenous presence, either here and now, or in resource extraction, for example, means that they cannot have the imagination to engage respectfully with Indigenous people on issues of major importance to all people in Canada today.

While we have not yet completed surveys with students in British Columbia, the prevailing discourse in the curricula and texts we have analyzed subtly reinforces a representation of Indigenous people in the province and country as disappearing and absent. This representation finds its foundation in the frequent use of sanitized and passive language, removing colonists and governments from the action and subtly absolving them of responsibility in dispossessing Indigenous peoples. "Many of the treaty lands were absorbed" (Cranny, Jarvis, Moles, & Seney, 1999, p. vii); "Everywhere (Aboriginal people) were being forced out of good farmland" (p. 10); "It was believed that Aboriginal Peoples would disappear, either by being assimilated or by dying from diseases" (Deir et al., 2000, p. 347). Such passive language also naturalizes the development of colonial legal and economic structures. Settlers' "farms grew bigger and bigger." There "*were* also new laws about fishing and chopping down trees" (Sterling, 2000, pp. 43, 177). "Hunting land disappeared." "Native fishing rights vanished" (Peturson, Asselstine, & Luks, 1997, p. 39). Reading colonialism as a neutral and inevitable process of history insinuates Indigenous absence, exonerates colonial actors and their actions, and obscures settlers' relationship and responsibility to any kind of future conciliation.

#### **Conclusion**

It is very clear that there is more commonality in approach to Indigenous peoples across the provinces than difference. Provinces separated by thousands of kilometers all engage their students in minimizing colonial violence, reinforcing racialized hierarchies of being, and practicing dispossession. It is indeed probable that such strategies are pancolonial, extending into Australia, South Africa, and the many nations shaped by settler colonialism (Veracini, 2010; Wolfe, 2006). Yet there are important differences that speak to the particular challenge of settler existence in each place. Jurisdiction in settler colonies has always been fragile, especially in resource-dependent settler colonies (Smandych, 2013). In Canada, all marginalizing strategies are ongoing attempts to assert settler control, particularly over territory and resources, because Canada has always been overly reliant on resource extraction. This reliance has been acute in Newfoundland and Labrador, creating economic vulnerability and political marginality vis-à-vis the national core areas. The "we are all settlers" narrative, perhaps given verisimilitude by the Beothuk extinction narrative and the relatively recent entry of Newfoundland and Labrador into Canadian Confederation (1949), frames all people in the province as marginalized while obfuscating Indigenous land and resource rights that the resourcedependent province frames as complicating potential future resource development. The "we are all settlers" narrative captures something of the myopia and inability to imagine a healthier society created by the economic vulnerability of a people on the edges of a country that has often neglected them. British Columbia, another heavily resource-dependent economy, has, thanks to the land eviction strategies long employed by the Federal and Provincial governments, such a politically active Indigenous population that any "we are all settlers" argument would seem immediately absurd, even to the myopic. In both British Columbia and in Newfoundland and Labrador, the curricula and texts construe resources and settler need as demanding Indigenous dispossession, which must be practiced. Encouraging students to think like colonists is a long-term strategy for clearing the land of Indigenous people. Ontario, the seat of Federal government, seeks to imagine all of the diverse and feuding parts of Canada as assimilated into the Canadian national imaginary. It is not surprising, then, that multiculturalism, which minimizes difference while apparently acknowledging it, is a preferred tool for Indigenous assimilation in the Ontario curricula and texts.

#### **References**

Armento, B. J. (1994). *Across the centuries*. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

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## **Chapter 9 Geopolitical Framings of Subalterity in Education: Compounding a Neoliberalized Welfare State**

#### **Ranu Basu**

State-funded public education—long valued as a critical tool for reducing inequality, promoting economic mobility, and advocating for social justice—can have an ongoing transformative effect on the evolution of the public realm. The ideologies, policies, and practices of state-funded education distinctly shape various aspects of social justice, including the way urban spaces are produced and contested by those most vulnerable. However, researchers and the broader public are increasingly acknowledging the inability of publicly funded education systems to sufficiently address the needs of poor and marginalized groups. Within the context of this systemic shortcoming, *displaced migrants*—whose relegation to the subaltern already disconnects them politically, socially, and geographically from power—face conditions of extreme precarity. This chapter is drawn from a broader project exploring the challenge of displacement and spaces of refuge in the three disparate cities of Toronto, Havana, and Kolkata, where displacement is experienced in different forms.1 Its core argument highlights the dire consequences of forced mobility and immobility, a result of imperialist wars, geopolitics, hegemonic relations between nation states, and the historical legacies of colonialism; these must be given serious consideration should the field of geographies of education remain politically relevant. Given the context of pressing challenges confronting global societies, this chapter presents preliminary theoretical deliberations incorporating these themes, highlighting the geopolitical framings of subalterity2 in education and its contradictory relation with the

1The findings in Kolkata are not discussed in this chapter.

2 "As a group experiencing subordination, subalterity is understood as the *process* of this subjectivity, conditioning the ways of *being* a subaltern that is constantly in an unsettled relation with the state" (Basu, 2013a, p. 261; italics in original).

R. Basu (\*)

Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, Department of Geography, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
neoliberalized welfare state. Such framings are useful if we are to seriously envision the geographies of nonviolence and peace within the spheres of education.

The first section of the chapter presents five propositions or imperatives, framing the geopolitics of subalterity in education to explore the tensions and contradictions between, on the one hand, the ideal notion of state governance and the public good and, on the other, the realities of marketized hegemony and its close connection to the violent geographies of war and displacement. The framing incorporates a spirit of praxis towards a theory for social change within the realm of schooling and education as spaces of transformation and intervention. The second section presents two very different empirical cases related to the spatial politics of displacement. In "Displacement I—Subalterity through Exile," I explore the spaces of displacement and refuge in Toronto, Canada, and the political discourses that preceded them. In "Displacement II—Subalterity through Blockade," I address the context of the economic blockade imposed on Cuba and utilize a case study to examine the effects schools have as revolutionary frontiers in Guantánamo. Both case studies allow us to reflect on the structural significance of engaging with the geopolitics of subalterity in education as a praxis-oriented theory for social change.

#### **The Geopolitics of Subalterity in Education**

The encyclopedia entry on the "Geographies of Education" reviews the complex interactions between education, space, and civil society (Basu, 2010). The geographies of education reflect the various sites and scales of opportunities available for investigating an array of diverse concerns. Educational spaces, the entry's author argues, are imbued with multiple purposes and meanings where the ideologies of the state and its corresponding discursive and material realities become discernible. This is a crucial point I will return to later on in the chapter. Critical studies within this broader realm are concerned primarily with social justice, power relations, and structural inequities relating to or emanating from the educational system. Manzer (1994) defines schools as human communities, public instruments, and political symbols, as well as the means by which people in a political democracy collectively strive for civic virtue, economic wealth, and cultural survival. Apart from its educational mandate, schools are places where neighborhood integration, social capital formation, and the fostering of civil society are ideally endorsed and contested (Basu, 2004). The city-school relationship is also intrinsically linked to the planning and sustainability of urban regions through the quality and vibrancy of its educational institutions; with the increasing rationalization of the neoliberalization of education, however, the public realm is often compromised.

#### *Subalterity of Education: Five Imperatives*

A few years ago in a paper published in the *Canadian Geographer* (Basu, 2013a), I argued that to research the spatialities of subalterity in education was to grapple with a differential and complicated terrain. The "political and theoretical importance of this conceptual framing," I argued, suggested that its "form, function, and structural significance posed a number of new challenges for those investigating social justice and rights in education" (p. 261). In a time of "global economic crisis, cultural divides, and social and political uncertainties," it was crucial to understand how subalterity was further accentuated through the impacts of neoliberalized education. In this paper, I explored how the "terrain of subalterity in education had multiplied in heterogeneous ways accentuated through the project of neoliberalism" (p. 260). I argued that unpacking these "socially, politically, or ideologically through three contradictory imperatives—revealed intersecting spaces of marginality, hegemonic discourses, and complicated outcomes related to the governmentality of educational rights" (p. 261). The three contradictory imperatives discussed in this article included: (i) the premise of a state-funded educational system for a broader public, a universal good that would (ii) maintain equality and equity through proper policy driven redistribution and recognition approaches but in which such mandates would be governed through (iii) the logic of the market in a postcolonial settler/multicultural state. I argued that the act of silencing or subordinating different social groups was embedded within institutional practices and structures of power. This was the realm of subalterity reproduced through spaces of alienation and fragmentation and further legitimized and institutionalized through the rational discourses of neoliberalism. Through different case examples of subalterity and activism, I reviewed the spatialities of contestation.

One aspect that became increasingly evident in subsequent work but that has not been sufficiently theoretically addressed in the literature on the critical geographies of education is the importance of geopolitics in the subalterity of education alongside the radical question of spatial praxis for broader structural change. In this chapter, I thus extend the underlying spatial framing to include a possible fourth and fifth imperative, which allows me to take into account these political conditionings: (iv) Geopolitics in the subalterity of education is a driving force of displacement further complicated by the rationalization of neoliberalism. (v) This in turn leads to serious theoretical and political reconsiderations if we are to indeed engage in any kind of spatial praxis and solidarity for social justice and change. The conceptual framing below (Fig. 9.1) highlights the intersections and contradictions between the governance of territorialities on different scales, the hegemonic influences of neoliberalism and geopolitical regimes, and the tensions between ideal notions of the welfare state and the actual implementations through the microgeographies of school spaces. These are evident in the case studies presented below. In the instance of Canada, international geopolitical strategies and policies designed at the federal level are in contradiction with the legacy of neoliberal policies instituted by the state at the local level. In the case of Cuba, the economic ramifications of over five decades of a financial blockade by the US have constrained and severely limited the flow of resources; at the same time, the presence of the Guantánamo Naval base and detention camp against the will of the Cuban people undermines its sovereignty. I then offer politics through theory and praxis of subalterity in education as a radical alternative.

**Fig. 9.1** Five imperatives on the subalterity of education. Source: Design by author

#### *Geopolitics and Neoliberalism*

Discussions on the linkages between geopolitics and neoliberalism are not new. In their paper "Neoliberal Geopolitics," Roberts, Secor, and Sparke (2003) connect the "geopolitical world vision" to the "neoliberal idealism of free markets, openness, and global economic integration" (p. 886). They warn against the totalizing economic narratives of neoliberalism and recommend paying attention to its "interarticulation with dangerous supplements," including the violence of American military force, alongside the presumptuous myth of the "prosperity and peace building capacity brought about by free market reforms" (p. 887). They articulate a particular kind of *neoliberal geopolitics*, observing that "[t]he economic axioms of structural adjustment, fiscal austerity, and free trade have now, it seems, been augmented by the direct use of military force" (p. 887) through the logics of statemanaged liberalization. Historically acknowledging that most imperial wars have been fought over economic concerns, they note that current interventions are carried out with a "much more open, systematic, globally ambitious, and quasi corporate economic style" (p. 888). As such, the geographies of such militarization and securitization are closely linked to investment capitalism and developmentalism, closely controlled by an elite minority; the market-state-civil society relations remain ambiguous. They then make the important case that neoliberal practices on a global scale have come to depend on violent interventions (p. 895) that are not solely

restricted to war zones but are part of the workings of state institutions themselves. In fact, disposable and readily available subjects are not accidentally produced but can be traced to a chain of institutional linkages for the profit of the neoliberal state. Roberts, Secor, and Sparke note how neoliberal sites of such violence and aggression range from "maximum-security prisons [and] aggressively policed inner cities [to] workfare administration offices" (p. 894), and they note "perhaps the most exemplary site of antiliberal authoritarianism of all—Guantanamo Bay" (p. 894)—a site I will return to later on in this chapter. Such sites, they argue, "should be seen, not as exceptions to neoliberalism, but rather as neoliberalism's necessary spaces of exemption" (p. 894). Child detention centers and spaces of education for youth are not exempt from these geopolitical-neoliberal dynamics and are often used as sites of control and resistance.

#### *Feminist and Critical Geopolitics*

Aside from the logic of the market discussed above, it is important to note the strategies and techniques of governance that bind these two realms further. The neoliberal governance of such sites is aided by the biopolitical instruments and tools central to geopolitics. Hyndman highlights the feminist insights that link geopolitics closely to biopolitics. She notes that "the biometric management of outsiders with its assemblage of new laws, policies and border practices render geopolitics and biopolitics inseparable" (Hyndman, 2012, p. 246). Hyndman argues that the State's role in managing and containing migrants through the process of securitization is a "defining feature of the current state of geopolitics" (p. 243). Through a feminist geopolitical lens, she disrupts dominant thinking in the field by bringing attention to the migrants themselves rather than to the political and abstract constructs of borders that minimize, she argues, the experience of "border crossers." Within the realm of critical geopolitics, Dalby (2008) cautions that a number of elements must be carefully interrogated when exploring imperial interventions that might be considered "more hegemonic rather than dominance" (p. 430). Drawing on Joxe, Dalby (2008, from Joxe, 2002) suggests that the "mode of imperial rule defines the terms and conditions of trade and disciplines local regimes that do not follow policies broadly congruent with American financial and security interests" (p. 426). This is most explicitly evident in the case of Cuba, where the economic, commercial, and financial blockade imposed on its people by the United States continues to exist after five decades, despite being rejected 24 times by the UN General Assembly. Further, the territory illegally occupied by the US Naval Base in Guantánamo continues to challenge its sovereignty. In this case, the *displacement through economic sanctions* and regulations that have isolated this Caribbean island for over five decades are implemented through exclusionary policies. According to Shaw (2013), such "permanent wars" are spatial strategies used by "predatory empires."

#### *Geopolitics and Displacement*

Geopolitical processes are most explicitly evident in the mass displacement of migrants across the globe. According to the most recent data from the UNHCR (2016a), the world is currently witnessing the highest levels of displacement on record: Nearly 34,000 people are forcibly displaced every day as a result of conflict or persecution. As of June 2016, the UNHCR reports that "an unprecedented 65.3 million people around the world have been forced from home. Among them are nearly 21.3 million refugees, over half of whom are under the age of 18. There are also ten million stateless people who have been denied a nationality and access to basic rights such as education, healthcare, employment and freedom of movement" (2016a). Hyndman (2012) has argued that migration has long served as a "barometer of geopolitics, from human displacement generated by war to containment practices in particular territories or camps" (p. 243).

The consequences of subalterity through geopolitical displacement—whether through forced migration, exile, internal displacement, or the blockades and sanctions imposed by wars and conflict—become evident in the struggles and resistance of everyday life. The realms of education, particularly schools, often become the spaces where such daily negotiations take place. For displaced migrants, for instance, schools are frequently the first sites of the settlement experience and the collective community-building opportunity within this realm can either be inclusionary or exclusionary. School spaces are also ideological terrains where structural conditionings can be decolonized from previous histories of colonialism (Battiste, 2000).