CURRICULAR REFORM IN SLOVAKIA IN A COMPARATIVE CONTEXT (Reforma kurikula na Slovensku v komparativnom kontexte)

The article offers a comparative view on current curricula in the primary area developed within the whole range of educational reform in both England and Slovakia. If education reform is not viewed as an one-off isolated in time event then in England, the education of which has been regularly revised by the central government since the introduction of the National Curriculum in 1988, serves as an inspiring comparative case study. In addition to that, England is a country in which the responsibility for some aspects of education is traditionally delegated downwards as a result of which the system of education is marked by a high degree of decentralisation. Home education reform activities indicate their conformity with analogous reform initiatives within the European Union. But, if the reform rhetoric is limited to curricular contents update, the reform is doomed to fail in producing desired educational effects, since a syllabus is only a part of a curriculum as a structurally more complex mechanism. The article provides a systematic analysis and qualitative evaluation of the relevant curricular documents from both countries - from the perspective of coherence and ideological integrity of their components. The compared curricula differ in their respective theoretical and philosophical underpinnings and the stages of imple