Zdeňka Horáčková

* 1947

21. 8. 1968 - Invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops
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    A series of unfortunate events

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    "The whole situation was peculiar. Not during the selection of respondents but at the time when I was undertaking the interviews. Within a short period of time from Christmas until Junary many atypical situations took place. A classmate died under blurred circumstances, during his funeral there was a confrontation between the headmaster and the children based on which one student was expelled. Then one professor committed suicide, another one attempted the same, and also the class teacher's wife died, disabling him from caring after the class. It was very peculiar, atypical and for my research in a way counter-productive."

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    Escalation of tensions between students and the headmaster

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    "The point was that the students wanted to present themselves as a class which holds together, and therefore wanted to wear black. They felt they had to show a sense of togetherness with the dead boy. The headmaster forced them to wear the official uniforms which they rejected. An incident took place when someone wore a necklace with a cross and the headmaster tore it off. For the children it was very emotional - they saw it as a sign of disrespect to them, and most of all to the dead classmate. It was very heated and virtually everyone was later recalling this situation."

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    Headmaster under pressure

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    "Perhaps what was lacking was for the headmaster to keep his distance. I must admit that I was in an opposition to him. First of all because he was so unhelpful, second because I felt he mismanaged a situation at his school, not fulfilling his duty. With hindsight I see that he was also under enormous stress. Not only because of the students but also because of relations among the teachers. His subordinates were commiting suicide! On top of it, there was normalization, the screws where tightening up and the headmaster must have been under great strain from the Communist Party, the education department and who knows where else. So, I wouldn't want to be unfair."

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    Praha, 01.08.2016

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I graduated from critique of contemporary burgeois schools

Young Zdeňka
Young Zdeňka

Zdeňka Horáčková, née Forštová, was born in 1947 in Pardubice and grew up in the village of Trnávka. After graduating from a grammar school in Mladá Boleslav she wasn’t admitted to a university and istead spent two years taking a course in public education. At that point in time she became interested in sociology. She started studying it at a university in 1969, in the course of her studies she got married and gave birth to a son. In 1973 she began writing a diploma thesis on the topic of Process of Socialization of Adolescent Youth - a contribution to the question of values, value orientation and aspiration of pubescents. Prof. Milan Nakonečný should have been her thesis supervisor but unfortunately was fired from university after 1968. During her thesis defense, Zdeňka was paradoxically mostly helped by the opponent who rejected objections raised by the assigned supervisor and who praised her method. She defended the thesis in 1974, at a time when sociology was already renamed to “critique of contemporary burgeois schools”.

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