The political changes after the Velvet Revolution of 1989 in Czechoslovakia fundamentally affected the life of society, including the form of education. The socialist concept of the unified school was abandoned in connection with the overall desire to decentralise and deregulate the structures created during the period of state socialism. However, the immediate impact on the life of schools can vary locally and be influenced by the nature of the environment. The study focusses on the context in which these changes impacted the everyday life of elementary schools in rural South Moravia, and it traces local specificities by analysing school chronicles and the memories of teachers who experienced the period of transformation in rural schools. It focusses in particular on personnel changes, the transformation of the relationship between schools and municipalities, and the dynamics of the influence of long-term processes of modernisation and political changes on school life.
The spatial concentration of social disadvantage in rural areas not only poses a risk to social cohesion but also represents a challenge for public policy. This article draws on a multidimensional concept of disadvantage to study spatial aspects of disadvantage in Czech rural areas. Current studies aimed at identifying ‘inner peripheries’ as areas with an increased risk of social exclusion fail to distinguish between different forms of disadvantage. Their methodological approach blends regions struggling with various problems into one category. Contesting the one-dimensionality of peripheries, this article presents an alternative approach that allows the delimitation of multiple types of peripheral areas based on four separate dimensions of disadvantage. It is possible then to distinguish: peripheries characterised by low qualifications, lower living standards, and the absence of a middle class; peripheries with an increased risk of social exclusion; peripheries with poor accessibility; and peripheries facing demographic challenges. Differences in the spatial patterns of the four types of peripheries indicate that different sociospatial processes contribute to the emergence of different types of peripheries and this calls for varied public policy tools and measures.