Sticking to tradition: history content distribution in Czech school curricula

This study examines the distribution of historical topics within Czech school curricula. Following a pre-registered methodology, a randomised sample of 321 Czech schools was selected, and history topics were extracted and coded according to categories outlined in the Czech National Curriculum. The analysis indicates that schools predominantly adhere to established curricular patterns, with over 95% incorporating broader themes and 80–90% including specific topics. To explore the relationships and patterns of topics classified as ‘other’, t-distributed stochastic neighbour embedding was used for dimensionality reduction. This approach enabled a detailed visualisation of high-dimensional vector representations of topics. Subsequently, k-means clustering was applied to identify distinct groupings of history content, providing insights into additional content adopted by schools beyond the prescribed framework. Despite strong adherence to the curriculum, there is a noticeable trend of shifting content to earlier grades, with additional topics often aligning with textbook content, focusing on the Czech lands in prehistoric times and historical events in England, France and the USA.