A comparison of the recent physical education curriculum development in the Czech Republic and Slovakia

Abstract

The current transformations in the educational systems are often associated with the term quality. A number of collocations are used, such as quality of education, quality of school, quality of curricula, quality of instruction etc. The quality of a particular school subject is often discussed, and logically, the aim of the reforming process is to raise the quality in these educational subjects. However, the quality in education as a scientific issue is often not thoroughly elaborated from the theoretical point of view. Thus in the paper we present some theoretical perspectives on the evaluation of the educational quality in the context of physical education. We introduce some factors that influence the quality of education from which we concentrate mainly on the input factors. We also point out the changes resulting from applying different physical education approaches and values. Finally, we presents a short comparison to planning and designing physical education aims, outcomes and standards in Slovakia and the Czech Republic as the countries with common history but currently different approaches to projecting and designing national curriculum. Based on this, we try to identify the principal problems of physical education curriculum development in chosen countries.