A fundamental breakthrough in the treatment of transgender children. What scares the revision of the Czech school curriculum

In Britain, a comprehensive report on the state of care for transgender children was published in April, largely proving the skeptics right. This is a fundamental breakthrough. The report was authored by Hilary Cass, former Chair of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. She was commissioned by the National Health Service to review the current state of science and the medical approach to trans children. Ondřej Šmigol writes more about it in the new edition of the Weekly Echo.

What scares the revision of the Czech school curriculum: loosening of claims and ideologization. The Ministry of Education and the National Pedagogical Institute (NPI) are expecting “feedback” on their proposal for a new curriculum in primary education, which is modernly called the Framework Education Program (FEP). The opportunity for the general public to comment will be open until the end of May. After that, experts from the institute will evaluate the comments and submit the revised RVP to the Ministry of Education for final approval in September. He writes more about curriculum revision Daniel Kaiser.

“Scientists found out.” Tereza Matějčková on the relationship between expert knowledge and democracy. At present, we only encounter populist denigration of science and a general declaration of distrust in experts. This attitude often goes hand in hand with a confidence in completely experimental procedures. Such an attitude can really threaten democracy, whose current form is based on knowledge. However, it would be a mistake to assign sole responsibility to confused citizens or populist politicians. Faced with how inappropriately we have referred to science in recent periods of crisis, it may even be a correct intuition, but it leads to wrong conclusions. More in the essay Tereza Matějčková.

New contract with the Czech Republic. There is a threat of a generational clash of “old Czechs” with “young Czechs”. The government made changes to the pension system because of the unsustainable demographic situation. Last year alone, 73 billion crowns less was collected than was finally distributed to pensions. If the current model is maintained, this number would increase dramatically in the coming years. Especially after people born during the so-called Husák baby boom from 1972-1979 retire. He writes more about the pension reform Bohumil Pečinka.

A cocktail of idiocy and anti-Semitism in American universities. At the epicenter of the protests at Columbia University, demonstrators broke into the historic Hamilton Hall administration building, smashed windows and barricaded themselves inside. On the campus of the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA), there were more and more fights. Eventually, the police intervened and evacuated both Columbia University and UCLA. Supporters of the protests say they are not anti-Semitic… He writes more about the situation at American universities Ondrej Šmigol.

My home is in Russia, I am in temporary exile in the Czech Republic, says the Russian Machoninová. His entire professional life deals with Russian culture and translations of Russian literature. She lived in Moscow for several years and after returning she feels like she is in exile. She published last year Alena Machoninová his first prose novel Hello. It describes the author’s attempt to reconstruct the life story of Helena Frischerová, a prototype of one of the novel’s characters Moscow-border Jiří Weil, a Czechoslovak communist who went to the USSR with her husband, was imprisoned in the gulag and after her release lived alone in various places in Soviet Russia. The text, which combines Russian history and the present, the destinies of the heroine and the narrator, the need to recognize and reconstruct, and awareness of its limits, won the Magnesia Litera Book of the Year award. He conducted an interview with the author Jakub Perina.

A drastic crackdown on TikTok: are there enough arguments for it? In the US, a law was passed that makes the further availability of TikTok conditional on its sale to an American owner, because it is perceived as a potentially dangerous tool of the Chinese regime that can be used for both propaganda and espionage. The European Union, in turn, emphasizes the allegedly harmful and destructive influence of TikTok on the psychological state of children and adolescents, in particular. Editor of the Echo Weekly Ondrej Stindl debated the (un)meaningfulness of efforts to limit TikTok with Sinologist Filip Jirouš and an anthropologist Maria Heřmanová.

You can read the new issue of the Echo Weekly now electronically. From Thursday, it will also be available in print shops. You can subscribe to the weekly Echo from 249 crowns per month here.