Testing Times: Slovak Schools Chalk Up Life Lessons

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In Slovakia, Politics Is Still a Gentlemen's Club

Slovakia's Infectious 'Infodemic'

"Maybe now we'll see all the things we have been teaching unnecessarily and we can edit the volume of education," Branislav Grohling, Slovakia's new minister of education, said on Facebook in March, two weeks after the country's schools went into lockdown.

Elsewhere, Grohling has spoken of the opportunity to forge ahead with education reforms that have been neglected for decades.

"I think we'll see that we don't need so much testing and examinations," he told the Dennik N daily. "We'll see that education can be interactive and students can participate in different ways."

Schools in the capital, Bratislava, were the first institutions to be affected by coronavirus, with a number closing in early March as infections popped up among teachers and students.

All schools, kindergartens and universities across the country followed suit on March 16, and officials have suggested they might stay shuttered until September.

The closures came during a transfer of power, as a new government geared up to take office on March 21. Analysts say the regime change makes it easier for leaders to diverge from past thinking as emergency measures morph into policy innovations.

But that means seeing what works and what needs fixing.

The crisis has prompted the education minister to conclude — along with many teachers — that it is better to give children more time to digest important lessons rather than making them plough slavishly through every item on the curriculum.

And more than ever, teachers have had to adapt methods to the needs of individual children. Children, for their part, are having to rely on...