This thesis provides an analysis of British communist attitudes to education in English schools between 1926 and 1968. Although the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in many ways remained a marginal force in British politics throughout its life (1920-1991), historians have acknowledged that it made a contribution to cultural and industrial politics in Britain which far exceeded its membership figures and electoral success. Surprisingly, given that the Party produced several teacher trade union presidents and Britain’s foremost post-war educationalist, scholars have largely overlooked British communism’s role in the politics of education in schools – a field which straddles both areas in which the Party is widely regarded to have punched above its weight. Researchers into the Party’s internal life have also paid little attention to its schoolteachers’ group, despite the fact that it was one of the CPGB’s largest occupational groups, and the fact that leading communist teachers and educationalists also took up prominent positions inside the Party. Although some existing work has discussed CPGB attitudes to the education of children during the 1920s, 1940s and 1950s, to date there has been no PhD-length study which covers the period between 1926 and 1968 and has British communism and the politics of education as its sole focus. This study fills this gap by identifying individuals and institutions central to CPGB discussions and policy-making on education in schools, namely the leading figures in and around the Party schoolteachers’ group, and exploring how they anticipated, reflected or resisted the wider Party line in their work throughout several pivotal shifts in the CPGB’s position. Drawing upon source material unused by or unavailable to previous researchers, the thesis complicates existing arguments about the extent to which Party teachers and educationalists subordinated questions of educational content, method and theory to trade union work between 1926 and 1968. Furthermore the study also contextualises and illuminates the notable communist contribution to broader educational politics on the Left in Britain, particularly during World War Two and in the campaign for comprehensive education in the two decades which followed.

The content of the thesis is focused on the process of teaching about the socialist era in former Czechoslovakia, in the so called "Human and Society" sphere of education, which means in the subjects Education to Citizenhood and History at scondary school. The theme of this thesis is The Comparison of Educational Programs for Teaching about Communism at elementary schools in the subject called education to Citizenhood. The teoretical part of the thesis analyses the opinions of the Education Ministry of the Czech Republic to the efficient changes in teaching and high increase of using the oral history. The oral history is the main contents of the projects and programs that started mostly to introduce the socialist era to the wide public. The main aim of the thesis is to compare the educational programs, tha were put together for the public by non-profit organisations, many of these have an extensive presentation on web pages. The practical part of the thesis deals with their comparison with the help of the "comparative method", it is also focused on didactical analysis of publications published for this ocassion. The source materials for this comparison were the publications of the organisations Člověk v tísni, Opona, Post Bellum, or the internet projects Totalita.cz, Moderni-dejiny.cz etc. None of the printed publications succeeded in more than 50% in the final didactic analysis. Anyway the best results were achieved by the publications of the organisation Člověk v tísni from the project "The Stories of Injustice" and the book "The Alphabet of Communism" written by the journalist for MF DNES and published by the Host publishing house.