 | |
| Founded | May 1980 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford |
| Focus | Underground education network in communist Czechoslovakia |
| Headquarters | Brno, Czech Republic |
| Website | Jan Hus Educational Foundation |
The Jan Hus Educational Foundation was founded in May 1980 by a group of British philosophers at the University of Oxford. The group operated an underground education network in Czechoslovakia, then under Communist Party rule, running seminars in philosophy, smuggling in books, and arranging for Western academics to give lectures.
The Foundation was deemed a "centre of ideological subversion" by the Czech police, and several of the visiting philosophers, including Jacques Derrida, Roger Scruton and Anthony Kenny, were arrested or placed on the "Index of Undesirable Persons".[1][2]
In 1998 Václav Havel, the last president of Czechoslovakia and first president of the democratic Czech Republic, awarded Roger Scruton the Medal of Merit (First Class) for his work on behalf of the students, and gave Commemorative Medals of the President of the Republic to the Foundation and two of its organizers, Barbara Day and Kathy Wilkes.[3] In 2019 the British ambassador to the Czech Republic, Nick Archer, unveiled a plaque on the building in the Letná area of Prague in which the early seminars were held.[4]
- ^ Barbara Day, The Velvet Philosophers, London: The Claridge Press, 1999, 5. ISBN 978-1-87062642-2
- ^ Roger Scruton, England: An Elegy, London: Continuum, 2006 [2000], 126ff. ISBN 0-8264-8075-6
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
Day1992pp281-282was invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ Petra Polčáková, "Memorial plaque in Prague commemorates secret underground seminars", Universitas, 14 November 2019.
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