Childhood and Schooling in (Post)Socialist Societies: Memories of Everyday Life

301 Pages·2018·3.63 MB·English

by  Iveta Silova

Childhood and Schooling
in (Post)Socialist Societies
memories of everyday Life
edited by
Iveta Silova, Nelli Piattoeva, Zsuzsa Millei
Childhood and Schooling
in (Post)Socialist Societies
“The authors of this beautiful book are professional academics and intellectuals
who grew up in different socialist countries. Exploring ‘socialist childhoods’ in a
myriad ways they draw on memoirs and memories, personal experience and col-
lectively history, emotional knowledge of an insider and a measured perspective of
an analyst. What emerges is life that was caught between real optimism and dull-
ness, ethical commitments and ideological absurdities, selfless devotion to children
and their treatment as a political resource. Such attention to detail and paradox
makes this collective effort not only timely but also remarkably genuine.”
—Alexei Yurchak, Professor of Anthropology,
University of California, Berkeley, USA
“How can the intimate stories of childhood – the memories and experiences of
everyday life – disrupt colonial/modern accounts of history and political change?
In this highly original volume, rich and evocative memory stories of (post)socialist
childhoods are weaved together to offer profound insights into the possibilities for
decolonising childhood. The thoughtfully situated auto-ethnographic and collec-
tive biographical accounts presented here brilliantly reveal the cultural-political
significance of childhood. In doing so, this volume breaks new methodological
and theoretical ground for the fields of childhood studies and comparative
education.”
—Arathi Sriprakash, Lecturer, Sociology of Education,
University of Cambridge, UK
“Childhood and Schooling in (Post)Socialist Societies offers a thoughtful and
diverse series of reflections on memories of living with socialism. The chapters
weave vivid accounts of childhood experiences with nuanced theoretical insights.
The book provides a key intervention in cross-disciplinary scholarship about child-
hood memories and their role in understanding societal transitions.”
—Peter Kraftl, Professor and Chair in Human Geography,
College of Life and Environmental Sciences,
University of Birmingham, UK
“Ranging from Hungary and Russia, to Vietnam and China, Childhood and
Schooling in (Post)Socialist Societies paints a complex and productively contradic-
tory picture of the diversity of children’s lived experiences in (post)socialist coun-
tries. Through the lens of the researchers’ own memories, children’s active
participation in their development and their unique social and political contributions
are taken seriously. This is an essential reference point for historians of childhood
and memory, of the self, and of (post)socialist ideologies and experience.”
—Stephanie Olsen, Department of History, McGill University, Canada
“Elegantly structured, this collection is unusual in its evocative and analytic power.
The editors have drawn together an accomplished set of researchers who offer
remarkable autobiographical insights into socialist childhoods. This is a pathbreak-
ing book that will inspire others to develop new approaches to comparative educa-
tion research.”
—Noah W. Sobe, Professor, Loyola University Chicago and President of
Comparative and International Education Society (CIES), USA
Iveta Silova • Nelli Piattoeva
Zsuzsa Millei
Editors
Childhood and
Schooling in
(Post)Socialist
Societies
Memories of Everyday Life
Editors
Iveta Silova Nelli Piattoeva
Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College Faculty of Education
Arizona State University University of Tampere
Tempe, AZ, USA Tampere, Finland
Zsuzsa Millei
Institute for Advanced Social Research
University of Tampere
Tampere, Finland
ISBN 978-3-319-62790-8 ISBN 978-3-319-62791-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62791-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017958863
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
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A
cknowledgments
The idea of this book emerged as we shared our memories of growing up
in different countries on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain. We felt a very
personal connection during storytelling—almost as we were related—and
we were curious to explore these connections further. Our more intimate
exchanges have gradually developed into more in-depth and organized
conversations, drawing in a larger number of colleagues. Over the last four
years, we have organized multiple meetings, workshops, webinars, and
conference panels to explore our memories and experiences together.
Some colleagues who participated in those gatherings are the authors of
chapters in this book, while others wrote their own books (see Katerina
Bodovski, 2015), published articles in a special issue we coedited in
“European Education” (see Silova, Aydarova, Millei, & Piattoeva, 2016),
or entrusted their memories informally to us—all moving our thinking
forward in different ways. This book would not have been possible with-
out every contributor and reviewer who shared their personal and aca-
demic insights along the way.
We would like to especially acknowledge the work of Elena Aydarova
and Olena Fimiyar who started this project with us in 2012. We really
enjoyed their intellectual friendship and collaboration on conference pre-
sentations and papers. We are especially grateful to Elena for working on
the book proposal with us, helping us find a publisher, and moving us
forward in an organized manner as we searched for contributors, reviewed
chapter manuscripts, and communicated with authors. While Olena and
Elena were unable to continue this project with us, their intellectual
presence is nevertheless felt in this book.
v
vi ACKNOWLEdGMENTS
We have received invaluable feedback on this book’s introduction and
conclusion chapters from colleagues at the Article Seminar at the Institute
for Advanced Social Research, University of Tampere, Finland. Our coau-
thored chapter was also reviewed by the same group. We thank the Faculty
of Education at the University of Tampere, Finland, for providing funding
necessary for indexing. Zsuzsa Millei thanks the Institute for Advanced
Social Research and the Space and Political Agency Research Group/
RELATE, University of Tampere, Finland, for the fellowships under which
this project was developed.
We would like to thank Kevin Winn at Arizona State University for his
meticulous attention to detail in language editing and proofreading of the
final manuscript.
Finally, we are grateful to our husbands, kids, dogs, and cats for their
love, patience, and support… and the long Finnish winters that kept
Zsuzsa and Nelli inside with no escape from writing. Iveta’s writing was
occasionally interrupted by a warm breeze through the palms while sitting
by the pool in Arizona or walking through the cactus forest of the Sonoran
desert. She is thankful for those much-needed interruptions!
Our collaborative writing grew into a complex and beautiful friendship.
While working through multiple ups and downs, we have experienced an
ongoing deepening of our relationship and a continuous transformation
of our own selves. Through our friendship, we have learned to recognize
each other’s strengths, weave our ideas and insights together in interesting
(and sometimes unpredictable) ways, become vulnerable together, and
ultimately open ourselves to critique and further learning. We especially
enjoyed ‘tickling’ each other’s brains and emotions, wondering together,
experiencing unexpected turning points and transformations in our think-
ing, and emerging through our collaborative research and writing as who
we are.
RefeRences
Bodovski, K. (2015). Across three continents: Reflections on immigration, educa-
tion, and personal survival. New York: Peter Lang.
Silova, I., Aydarova, E., Millei, Z., & Piattoeva, N. (Eds.). (2016). Revising pasts,
reimagining futures: Memories of (post)socialist childhood and schooling.
European Education, 48(3), 159–240.
c
ontents
Remembering Childhoods, Rewriting (Post)Socialist Lives 1
Nelli Piattoeva, Iveta Silova, and Zsuzsa Millei
Memories in Dialogue: Transnational Stories
About Socialist Childhoods 19
Helga Lenart-Cheng and Ioana Luca
A Dulled Mind in an Active Body: Growing Up as a Girl
in Normalization Czechoslovakia 41
Libora Oates-Indruchová
On the Edge of Two Zones: Slovak Socialist Childhoods 63
Ondrej Kaščák and Branislav Pupala
Growing Up as Vicar’s Daughter in Communist
Czechoslovakia: Politics, Religion,
and Childhood Agency Examined 87
Irena Kašparová
Uncle Ho’s Good Children Award and State Power
at a Socialist School in Vietnam 107
Violette Hoang-Phuong Ho
vii
viii CONTENTS
Tito’s Last Pioneers and the Politicization
of Schooling in Yugoslavia 127
Anna Bogic
Hair Bows and Uniforms: Entangled Politics
in Children’s Everyday Lives 145
Zsuzsa Millei, Nelli Piattoeva, Iveta Silova, and Elena Aydarova
Interrupted Trajectory: The Experiences of Disability
and Homeschooling in Post-Soviet Russia 163
Alfiya Battalova
Teaching It Straight: Sexuality Education Across
Post-State-Socialist Contexts 183
Ela Przybylo and Polina Ivleva
Erasure and Renewal in (Post)Socialist China:
My Mother’s Long Journey 205
Jinting Wu
Towards Decolonizing Childhood
and Knowledge Production 231
Zsuzsa Millei, Iveta Silova, and Nelli Piattoeva
Afterwords 257
Preface to Afterwords 259
Iveta Silova, Zsuzsa Millei, and Nelli Piattoeva
Narratives from Bygone Times: Toward a Multiplicity
of Socialist Childhoods 261
Marek Tesar
CONTENT S ix
The Worlds of Childhood Memory 267
Robert Imre
Decolonizing the Postsocialist Childhood Memories 271
Madina Tlostanova
Beyond the Young Pioneers: Memory Work
with (Post)socialist Childhoods 279
Susanne Gannon
A New Horizon for Comparative Education? 285
Jeremy Rappleye
Index 291