AAU Lecturer Reflects on Life Abroad and Coming Home in Radio Prague Podcast Feature

Milan Babík, International Relations Lecturer at AAU, was featured in Radio Prague International’s Czechast with insights from his education in the Czech Republic, United States, and London as well as his experience with culture shock and reverse culture shock.

Babík talked about leaving Prague to study in Massachusetts on a scholarship in the 1990s at age 16 with all of the language barrier and challenges of being isolated from your native culture. He eventually settled down in the US to pursue an academic career.

“I’m at home wherever I am… I am at home in Midcoast Maine. I am at home in Oxford. I’m at home in London. I’m at home now in Prague,” said Babík, who has almost lived the past 30 years away from the Czech Republic.

Spending so long in the US, Babík said he lost his Czech but re-learned it through teaching his children and raising them in Czech. Babík compared his high school in the US to Czech education and adapting to life back in the Czech republic when moving to Prague a year ago.

“Here [in the Czech Republic]…[education] is very top down. It is very constricted to rules and curricula that do not cater to individual interests,” said Babík. “There [in the US] it is bottom up. It is based on the interest of the students, it is experiential, it’s very much hands-on, it’s a process of discovery, and driven by curiosity.”

Teaching at AAU, Babík gets a taste of being back in the US not only because of the English-language curriculum, but because of the experiential education and pedagogy driven by individual motivation and interests.

Babík also discussed democracy and society, comparing the American and Czech systems. He highlighted the tensions between the US and Europe related to security and economics but also compared the political polarization both regions are facing.

“You need much more than functioning institutions [for a liberal democracy], you need robust civil society, you need to have a society that is not as polarized and stratified, including the distribution of wealth,” said Babík.

Prague has a long history of strong civil society, and Babík believes that when each of us act in small ways it also breeds hope:

“We all have enough energy if we apply ourselves to do things that are important…in the small slice of civil society that is around us, that is familiar to us…At the end of the day, it is really about cooperation and working together,” he concluded.

Listen to the full podcast here.

Photo: Kateřina Cibulka, Czech Radio