Today we had a day off from visiting schools and instead went to meet one of CEDU’s partner organisations in Brno, Masaryk University Civic Education Centre. They are doing really interesting work on adult civic education through libraries. I love the idea of libraries as hubs for civil society.
In their office they had some posters taken from the Information is Beautiful website about ‘rhetological’ fallacies. The author says,
The word ‘rhetological’ is made up. Just so I can munge two types of entity: rhetorical techniques and logical fallacies.
The Civic Education Centre have translated them into Czech and I think they would be a great addition to the the wall of any citizenship classroom or school council meeting room.
After our visit with the Civic Education Centre and a tour around Brno we drove on to the town near our next school, right in the centre of the Czech Republic. Whilst having supper in our hotel we became involved in a Czech Christmas tradition. Here St Nicholas comes on the 5th/6th of December to give presents to children, but he’s accompanied by devils and angels. Whether you get sweets or a potato and whether you have to answer to the devils or angels depends on how good or bad you’ve been during the year. Two of our hosts, Camila and Filip had their sins and achievements recounted by St Nic, but unfortunately Greg and I missed out as he didn’t speak English.
Tomorrow we’ll have another school to tell you about.