Voting and speaking out about government are often rights taken for granted in the United States, but are still new in the Czech Republic.
But to learn more about them, Czech teachers Ivana Havlinova, Anna Buzkova, Dagmar Havlikova, and Kvetoslava Lyskova visited Clarkston High School May 15 as part of a federal exchange tour.
“Their democracy is about 15 years old ? teachers need to learn how to teach democracy and civics to kids,” said Peggy Grasso, Clarkston High School social studies teacher. “It’s wonderful.”
“The United States is highly developed in teaching current issues and civics,” Havlinova said.
“We’re trying to learn more about how to connect civics lessons to real life, how to practice what we teach.”
As part of their week-long tour of Michigan schools and government, the teachers visited CHS global-issues teacher Chas Claus’ class.
“It’s excellent,” Claus said. “Having people who have experienced these things is better than learning from a textbook.”
Students’ opinions of what it means to be an American citizen included supporting the country and its troops, patriotism, being educated and informed about global issues, speaking out about injustice, and helping citizens in other countries.
“(Clarkston students’ views) are similar with the views of our young citizens,” Havlinova said. “It’s nice to compare and see we have similar concerns.”
The visitors explained some recent history of their country, which as Czechoslovakia overthrew Communist rule in a “Velvet Revolution” in 1989, then split from Slovakia in 1993 to form the Czech Republic.
The republic has a parliamentary form of government, in which several parties, including the Communist Party, get seats in government proportionate to popular vote.
“The Communist Party is still strong,” Grasso said.
The challenge is how to teach the nation’s history, especially the Communist totalitarianism of the 1950s and 1960s, said Buzkova, through Havlinova’s translation.
“Critical thinking about what happened, compared with the development of other countries at the time,” she said.
The goal of the Civitas International Civic Education Exchange program is to strengthen commitment to constitutional democracy through school civics in the Czech Republic and the United States, said Linda J. Start, executive director of Michigan Center for Civic Education.
The United States Department of Education funded the trip.