Kundera in class

„It is great material to work with. Finally we get to work on something authentic. It seems like we have until now been stuck in times of Havlíček Borovský,“ said a 23-year-old student of journalism dressed in a colourful shirt on the ground floor of Charles University's Faculty of Social Sciences on the Vltava bank. A new social studies course, which was first introduced in November last year, is starting in just a few minutes. Entitled „The Kundera case in Czech media 2008“, the course, which is taught within the media studies programme, aims to help students find out for example how today's media cover our communist past and what impact it has on Czechs.

What happened

At 2pm, seven young men and women are sitting down around a table in a small study room. Most of them are students of journalism around 20. „It is closely related to reality. It won't be some kind of boring library work,“ said 4th grader Michal Mareš. The girl sitting next to him, Barbora Vaníčková, is hoping to learn more about history in the class. „We don't know anything about it. I feel like our parents' generation finds it difficult to talk about it. They don't seek to find the truth about their life under communism,“ she said. The student dressed in the colourful shirt believes that something similar is happening in the local school of …