Prague, Oct 18 (CTK) – Ten percent of children in the Usti Region, north Bohemia, do not complete elementary school and they can only find unqualified, badly paid jobs, but they usually end up living on unemployment benefits, daily Mlada fronta Dnes (MfD) writes on Tuesday.
Eighteen-year-old Mariana had a summer job and she saved money for a hairdressing course, but she was not allowed to undergo the course as she did not complete elementary school. A few years before, she had to repeat the sixth grade because she failed in Czech and she left the school after the eight grade.
Mariana attended elementary school for nine years, which is compulsory in the Czech Republic, but she has not completed the school. Instead of attending the final ninth grade, her parents sent her to the labour office to get a job or receive welfare benefits.
Now it is too late to change the unhappy situation. Mariana will not be a hairdresser and she does not want a different job. She will live on welfare. And her story is no exception, MfD writes.
“When a child goes to primary school, all depends on the involvement of the parents. Ten-year-old students can hardly realise that their future lives are at stake. They repeat a grade twice and they are actually written off,” analyst Daniel Hule, from the People in Need humanitarian organisation, told the paper.
Every year, about 3500 teenagers leave school without completing their elementary education and their chance of getting a decent job is very small. In the past five school years, 18,800 students ended their education without completing elementary school.
However, these figures are not so bad. In most Czech regions of the country only a fraction of the students fail to complete elementary school – 2.25 percent in Prague and 2.96 percent in South Moravia, for example. Yet in the four regions bordering Germany it is more than 6 percent, being the highest in the Karlovy Vary Region (7.96 percent) and the Usti Region (9.88 percent).
“It is a problem if this phenomenon is concentrated in one region in which it becomes standard,” analyst Filip Pertold, from the Academy of Sciences, said about students not completing elementary school. He said there is the threat of this trend spreading very fast.
The Czech Republic has no experience with this phenomenon because under the former communist regime everybody was forced to complete at least an apprentice school.
Only 30 percent of people who have merely elementary education or who did not complete elementary school have a job, including temporary jobs, while the employment rate among those who attended apprentice school is over 70 percent and among those who passed the secondary school final exam it is about 90 percent, sociologist Daniel Prokop, from the Median agency, said.
The education systems in some Western countries do not allow elementary school students to fail a grade, but in the Czech Republic it is possible. “We can see very absurd stories: failing in the subject of music, not letting a student to correct his or her failure, and failures already in the first grade,” said Petra Sedlackova, from People in Need.
Failing a grade mostly concerns students whose parents have low education and live in ghettos or hostels for the poor. In the Usti Region, the number of students living in very poor neighbourhoods is the highest, more than 10 percent of children aged 6-15. Moreover, an unusually high portion of the children attend practical schools for students with learning difficulties that give them little chance of getting a good job in future.
The Education Ministry believes that the introduction of inclusive education will help the problematic children in the Usti Region and elsewhere. By placing them into a standard class, the children should be given an opportunity to restart their lives and leave the ghettos.
But most elementary school teachers have a reserved stance on the inclusive education and many strongly oppose it. They argue that the problematic children will slow down the talented students, that they have no interest in education and that they inspire their classmates to rebel against the teachers, MfD writes.
It is hardly surprising that an elementary school is glad that it can get rid of these students once they spent the compulsory nine years at school even if these students did not attend all nine grades.
Hule said this seems reasonable from the teachers’ perspective but not from the perspective of society.
“The young generation can see the unemployment of the older generation and it has no motivation to study,” Pertold said.
He said teachers from the problematic areas should be financially motivated, but this seems to be politically unrealistic in the country, same as positive discrimination of Romany students, which is unfortunate.
“Unless we start considering education of socially excluded children an investment, nothing will improve,” Pertold said.
