During the Communist period further progress was made in the school system towards equality in opportunity between regions and genders, but access to higher education depended upon the political compliance of students and their families.
Czechoslovakia (and its succession states) had a tradition of academic and scholarly endeavor in the mainstream of European thought and a history of higher education dating from the Middle Ages.
Perhaps in no other aspect of public life did Czechoslovakia more effectively address the disparities among Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Ukrainians, and Germans.
Eight years of compulsory education in the native language of each ethnic minority did much to raise literacy rates, particularly among Slovaks and Ukrainians.
An expanded program of vocational education increased the technical skills of the country's growing industrial labor force.
In the Czech lands, prosperous farmers and even cottagers and tenants had a long history of boarding their children in towns or cities for secondary, vocational, and higher education.
[2] Despite regional and ethnic imbalances, Czechoslovakia entered the Communist era with a literate, even highly educated, populace.
Education under Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSC) rule has a history of periodic reforms (often attempting to fit the Soviet model) and efforts to maintain ideological purity within schools.
In 1974-75 planners began an education reform, shortening the primary cycle from nine to eight years and standardizing curricula within the secondary-school system.
The state financed education, and all textbooks and instructional material below the university level were free (returned at the end of the semester).
Although women continued to cluster in such traditionally female areas of employment as health care and teaching, their enrollment in many secondary schools outstripped that of men.
However, a look at students' backgrounds during the 1950s and 1960s reveals that in no year did children of workers or peasants constitute a majority of those in institutions of higher education.
We make no secret of the fact that we want to do this at the schools in a manner that will guarantee that future graduates will be supporters of socialism and that they will place their knowledge at the service of socialist society."
The system allowed for some manipulation; a member of the intelligentsia without a political blot on his or her record might have taken a job as a worker temporarily to permit his child a claim to proletarian status.
If a moderately secure livelihood and a reasonable standard of living were the regime's "carrots," excluding children of dissidents from higher education was one of its more formidable "sticks.