Revisiting Pasts, Reimagining Futures: Memories of (Post)Socialist Childhood and Schooling

During the 2016 US presidential race, Melania Trump—the Slovenian-born wife of presidential candidate Donald Trump—plagiarized sections of Michelle Obama’s 2008 speech in her address to the Republican National Convention. The account of this blatant plagiarism soon hit the international news. In less than 24 hours, the search for an explanation for this egregious act turned to Melania's educational history. Given the culture of the “postcommunist educational system” that Melania experienced, it is no wonder that she stole a part of Ms. Obama’s speech and felt no remorse afterwards, argued Monika Nalepa (2016), an associate professor of political science at University of Chicago, in a Washington Post blog. “In that system, what is typically considered plagiarism or cheating was exceedingly common and even encouraged,” she explained. Many, including those who emigrated from Eastern Europe and the former USSR, cheered this article as a true depiction of the socialist legacy in the region. Several days later, however, a group of scholars, editors, and students from Central/Southeastern European and former Soviet Union backgrounds published an open letter contesting the overgeneralizations and stereotypical portrayals of (post)socialist and (post)communist educational systems in Nalepa’s analysis (An Open Letter to the Editors of the Monkey Cage Blog of the Washington Post Online Edition, 2016). Other critical responses emerged as well, pointing out that in Nalepa’s argument, “Melania’s Eastern Europeanness becomes identified in an objective scientific manner as explanatory and justificatory for her behavioral act(s)” (Bejan, 2016).

Nalepa’s analysis reflects the persistent Cold War rhetoric that represents (post)socialist states and their educational systems as problematic, underdeveloped, and oppressive (see Holmes, Read, & Voskresenskaya, 1995; Juviler, 1961; Rogers, 1959; Ross, 1959; Vogel, 1959). These representations reflect what Said (1978) called Orientalizing discourses that constitute “a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philosophical texts; [and] … an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction … but also of a whole series of ‘interests’” (p. 12). The ultimate goal of these discourses is to “control, manipulate, even to incorporate what is a manifestly different … world” (p. 12). Depictions of (post)socialist schooling as spaces that “encourage” cheating and deception, among other things, are useful for constructing (post)socialist contexts as morally corrupt, backward, illiberal, undemocratic, or underdeveloped (Perry, 2009; Silova, 2010; Streitwieser, 2004). In turn, these constructions provide justifications for offering unidirectional guidance for educational change or reform efforts to the systems characterized in these ways (Elliott & Tudge, 2007; Gounko & Smale, 2006, 2007; Silova, 2014; Takala & Piattoeva, 2012; Timoshenko, 2011).

Concepts, such as the West or (post)socialism, have no ontological stability and lend themselves to manipulation. They are made up and contested in attempts to affirm one’s identity and to distance the Other (Hann, 2007). Chatterjee (2015), for instance, shows in her comparative historical analysis of political imprisonment in the Russian Empire and in British-controlled India that single narratives about Russia as an oppressive and controlling state played an important role in obscuring acts of oppression and violence that the British Empire carried out in its colonies. The image of the illiberal, backward East was useful for manufacturing and maintaining the myth of a liberal and democratic West (Chatterjee, 2015). Similar myths remained in circulation before, during, and after the Cold War (Cohen, 2001; Lemon, 2011) and the field of education did not escape this plight. For example, as Popkewitz (1982, 1985) noted, American scholars who analyzed the Soviet educational system argued that schools in socialist countries indoctrinated students into communism and sorted them into particular social roles. Yet at the same time educational systems on the other side of the Iron Curtain pursued their own ideological purposes in a similar manner. Schools promoted capitalism and maintained social control by ensuring stratification of students into predetermined social roles (see Apple, 1985; Bowles & Gintis, 1977 for more on the US case, and Willis, 1977 on the UK case). Depictions of the (post)socialist world remain useful for obscuring the similarities, interconnections, and complexities of systems as well as for perpetuating certain myths of the illiberal, backward, and undemocratic Other.

The term (post)socialism itself often operates as an external Orientalizing imposition that recreates hierarchical positionings and supersedes local preferences for describing those contexts as (post)communist or post-Soviet (Cervinkova, 2012). In agreement with and despite these critiques, in our text we reappropriate the concept of (post)socialism because of its inclusiveness of wider geographic areas than Eastern Europe and the USSR and because of its rootedness “in historical and processual analyses of social change” (Borelli & Mattioli, 2013, n.p.). The conceptual bridges with postcolonial studies (Chari & Verdery, 2009) that it affords and the critique of neoliberal capitalism that it makes possible (Buyandelgeriyn, 2008) make it a particularly useful tool for our work.

The lessons that can be learned from (post)socialist contexts are numerous. Centralized educational bureaucracies can, for example, facilitate equitable academic achievement (Carnoy, Gove, & Marshall, 2007). Examples analyzing socialist pedagogies also show how teachers “teach for humanity” rather than for economy or as instructed by ideological prescriptions (Dull, 2012; Millei, 2013). It also demonstrates how purposes of higher education can include both professional preparation and spiritual growth (Aydarova, 2015a). (Post)socialism is even relevant for the examination of much-admired educational systems of Finland and Shanghai, as those bear socialist and Marxist legacies, though this factor is commonly obscured. Much also remains to be learned from examining the experiences of emigrants from and visitors to the former USSR and Eastern Europe, who attempted to replicate socialist approaches to schooling in other contexts (Abramova, 2012; Epstein & Kheimets, 2000; (Charon-Cardona, 2013). As Rogers (2010) suggested, “it is time … to expand the ways we understand postsocialist transformations, broaden the range of analytic contact points between local/regional postsocialisms and transnational processes, and, along the way, reflect anew on some of our interdisciplinary and international conversations” (p. 2). Our research project, which has culminated in this special issue and the subsequent edited volume (Silova, Millei, & Piattoeva, in progress), forms a part of this body of exploration of (post)socialist education and schooling.

(Post)socialist contexts provide not only lessons for other systems but also an opportunity to analyze the educational transformations in the context of global neoliberalism through a comparison with the Soviet bureaucracy (Amann, 2003). The model of bureaucratic control currently spreading across Western educational institutions heavily resembles the five-year plans of socialist states, which similarly included centrally determined performance targets that were used for punitive measures against those who failed to meet them (Amann, 2003; Brandist, 2014, 2016). Ironically, in the socialist era, education was largely spared from rigid performance monitoring and competition. Kukulin, Mayofis, and Safronov (2015, pp. 643–647) refer to a Soviet state decree that condemned the practice of socialist competition in school education and prohibited the evaluation of school or teacher quality based on students’ progress in learning. The responses that the new models of performance measurement evoke—fabrications, fake performances, and alienation (Aydarova, 2015b; Ball, 2003)—are reminiscent of responses to the socialist plans and communist bureaucratic controls. For those who supported Nalepa’s claim that cheating was characteristic of (post)socialist systems but not the Western ones, it behooves to remember the cheating scandals that erupted in the context of the neoliberal testing regimes in Atlanta, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, and Houston, where teachers and administrators fabricated test results to avoid punishment for low results (Goldstein, 2011). At the same time, the cheating incidents involving students and teachers, frequently reported in the Russian media and condemned by politicians and education experts, have all occurred in the context of the recently introduced standardized testing for school graduates and the application of testing scores for performance steering—all fostered by Western development agencies as a replacement for what they perceived as a backward and subjective Soviet examination practice and irrational policy-making (Piattoeva, 2016). Educators’ and students’ attempts to “game the system” across various geographical contexts echo Stenning’s (2010) observation that “we are all postsocialist now” (p. 239). It is time to examine shared human experiences, even when these experiences might emerge out of interactions with different sociopolitical and ideological systems.

The focus on shared human experiences across (post)socialist and (post)capitalist contexts is ever more important in the context of growing educational neoliberalization around the world. The replication of Orientalizing and Cold War discourses label as deviant educational systems different from dominant Western models and rob humanity of imagining alternatives to capitalist schooling and neoliberal educational ideologies. This labeling perpetuates the “There is no alternative” framework that entrenches neoliberalism as the dominant educational paradigm despite its multiple failures (Griffiths & Millei, 2013). While obscuring the heterogeneity of currently existing education models, it positions neoliberal Western reform packages as the only viable development project to be replicated around the world. This thinking contributes to the proliferation of neocolonial and neoimperial structures in global policy circulation, in which the perpetual gaze toward the West secures its hegemony in discourse and in form. Globally circulated neoliberal policies, in turn, intensify social inequality, entrench social hierarchies, and eliminate alternative approaches to education, potentially destabilizing the futures to come (Griffiths & Millei, 2013, 2015; Hursh & Henderson, 2011; Silova, 2010, 2014).

In this context, it is important to heed the calls from postcolonial studies scholars for researchers and educators to re-envision their relationships with the West, to pursue decolonization of their imaginations and knowledge production, and to uphold alternative constructions of modernity, humanity, and education. To this end, Chen (2010) suggests that researchers seek decolonization by multiplying reference points of comparison and by performing “a self-analysis through a process of constant inter-referencing” (p. 253). Concerned about the spread of global neoliberalism as a universal design applicable to all contexts, Mignolo (2011) argues for a form of decolonial thinking that begins by

accept[ing] the interconnection between geo-history and epistemology, and between bio-graphy and epistemology that has been kept hidden by linear global thinking and the hubris of the zero point in their making of colonial and imperial differences. (p. 91)

These interconnections serve as the foundation for the epistemology of “I am where I do and think” that “flatly rejects the assumptions that rational and universal truths are independent of who presents them, to whom they are addressed, and why they have been advanced in the first place” (Mignolo, 2011, p. 99). Close attention to the critical entanglements between bio-graphy, place, and knowledge production, according to Mignolo, foster support for maintaining alternative civilizational paths and preserving the possibility of pluriversal futures. Central in postcolonial and decolonial pursuits are not only attempts “to reconstruct and rearticulate new imaginations and discover a more democratic future direction” (Chen, 2010, p. 112) but also efforts to deploy (auto)biographic, autoethnographic, and oral history approaches to renarrate the construction of (post)colonial—or in this case, (post)socialist and (post)communist—subjects. In such pursuits, the (post)colonial and (post)socialist subjects reclaim the power to narrate their own experiences and speak on their own behalf.

The call for papers for this special issue stemmed from a desire to both interrupt the persisting prevalence of Cold War narratives and to explore possibilities of alternative historical constructions of schooling and childhoods. The invitation included a call to engage with memories of (post)socialist pasts in order to reexamine the totalizing and monolithic accounts still present in scholarly literature and public imagination in the West (Lemon, 2008). The exploration of pasts from (auto)biographic, autoethnographic, and oral history approaches also offers resources for re-imagining how education and institutional experiences of schooling can be differently conceived, how relationships between participants in educational institutions can be understood in more complex terms, or how constructions of space and childhoods can interact with educational approaches. By re-examining, renarrating, and re-evaluating past experiences, we as historical beings not only hope to open avenues for the articulation of alternative histories but also to find paths toward differently or better understanding the present and to map out futures that are perhaps more just and more equal (Kontopodis, 2012; Stetsenko, 2012).

Viewed from this angle, (post)socialist contexts have much to offer to the search of viable alternatives to and even within neoliberalism (Griffiths & Millei, 2013, 2015; Silova, 2010, 2014). (Post)socialist spaces are replete with narratives of the past that provide glimpses into alternative constructions of modernity that emerged as a counteraction to the capitalist world order. While the construction of that modernity has collapsed in some contexts or evolved into new forms in others, it still offers lessons and insights worth considering at present. As Ghodsee (2011) observes in her ethnographies of (post)socialist transitions, something was lost in the move toward neoliberal capitalism and that something is worth critical interrogation. This critical interrogation, however, is not the path of what Boym (2001) calls restorative nostalgia—or an attempt to present “a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home” (p. xviii). Rather, it is an attempt to engage in reflection on multiple pasts in order to “dwell on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging, [without] shy[ing] away from the contradictions of modernity” (p. xviii). An analytic reflection on the past can cast aside categories constraining one’s imagination of alternative social orders, of different educational institutions, as well as of variegated constructions of schooling and childhoods. This casting aside can help clear the way for creating more open and pluriversal futures.

MEMORIES OF (POST)SOCIALIST SCHOOLING AND CHILDHOODS

Memory is considered as a “vast potential resource … in the exploration of relations between public and private life, agency and power, and the past, present and future”(Keightley, 2010, p. 55). In the past three decades, studies of memory have exploded in all areas of the social sciences, including those drawing on memories of everyday life under socialism (see more recent examples such as Bodovski, 2015 or Ilič & Leinarte, 2015; Todorova, Dimou, & Troebst, 2014). Memories, however, are less utilized in education and childhood studies (for exceptions, see Hughes Jachimiak, 2014, Moss, 2011; Paksuniemi, Määttä, & Uusiautti, 2015; Tisenkopfs, 1993, and childhood under socialism from Elenkov & Koleva, 2010). Childhood memories offer an exceptionally productive avenue for childhood studies, since children’s childhoods cannot be accessed directly by researchers. As Chris Philo (2003, p. 7) argues, the childhood memories of a researcher can create a connection between his or her own childhood and the childhoods of children under study allowing researchers “at least some intimation of children’s geographies as experienced and imagined from within.” Inevitably memories are tentative and incomplete, they are not “veridical acts” that reproduce the original experiences of being a child or being in school. They are always constituted from a particular time and place and discursive frame, as contributors to this special issue also carefully outline and demonstrate (Davies & Gannon, 2006; Keightley, 2010).

Memories of childhood are created through “a kind of inter-subjectivity between child and adult self” where childhood, children and the ‘child self’ are considered as Other to those of adulthood, adults and adult self (Eiland, 2006 in Jones, 2008, p. 209). Remembering and narrating one’s childhood offer a qualified form of access to childhood experiences and an avenue to engage with children’s otherness (Jones, 2012). They offer ways to gain insights into “how children make their own (other) worlds within the fabrics of the adult-ordered world. This might involve children contesting adult constructions, scaling and demarcations of space in material and symbolic forms, and (re)appropriating materiality, technology and space to their own ends” (Jones, 2012, p. 141). As Jones (2012, p. 141) further elaborates “parents, politicians, educators, state authorities and the media view children [in particular ways], but such notions may have little to do with the process of being a child from the child’s point of view.” Memories can shore up childhood experiences where complex interrelations between childhood and adulthood could be explored and linked to the material social practices and relations that produce certain childhoods. These childhoods then can be transposed to current arenas of childhood that is characterized, as Katz (2008, p. 556) explains, by “increasing inward colonization directly connected to capital accumulation under the conditions of neoliberal globalism … the production and reproduction of weak citizenship, not only of the children themselves but through them,” and where capitalism is sustained in the material social practices of everyday life. Therefore, we see the potential of analyses that draw on memories of childhood, such as in this special issue and the forthcoming edited volume (Silova et al., in progress), to create alternative histories of childhoods that rub against interpretations infused by Cold War discourses and currently dominating historical accounts.

The articles selected for this special issue draw on authors’ and participants’ memories of (post)socialist childhood and schooling and attend to the “relationship between the past, present and future, as remembering is the activity that enables us to navigate and mediate these temporal arenas and forge links between them” (Keightley, 2010, p. 62). Yet they are also built on the understanding that “‘the present’ both disciplines and determines ‘the past’” (Leinarte, 2015, p. 17), which places additional burdens on the scholar who is excavating meanings in the context of public contestations over historical pasts and present nostalgias (Ilič & Leinarte, 2015). Despite these entanglements, narratives presented in the articles provide new insights into the contradictions, complexities, and heterogeneities of (post)socialist childhoods and schooling.

Rooted in the traditions of collective biography, oral history, and qualitative interviews, these articles demonstrate “how personal stories become a means for interpreting the past, translating and transforming contexts, and envisioning a future” (Holman Jones, 2005, p. 211), thus paving the way for liberatory and emancipatory possibilities (Nash, 2004). By engaging with these memories, the authors have the opportunity to question the dominant discourses of childhood and schooling and contest what is constructed as “normal” and “natural” in the narratives, as well as explore the subject positions available to them in relation to other children, teachers, and education institutions. As memories become acknowledged as a valuable source of knowledge, the authors regain authority to (re)narrate their own lives and thus pluralize knowledge production about socialist childhoods and schooling.

Anna Kozlova explores official and unofficial accounts of instructors’ and children’s experiences in Artek—a prestigious international children’s camp and a model of the socialist pioneer movement during the Soviet and post-Soviet eras. In “‘Fairy Tale for Pioneers’: Deconstruction of Official Ideology in Memories About Artek 1960s−1980s,” Kozlova draws on the construct of a travelogue to document how participants narrated their journeys to the camp, how they experienced the abundance that Artek offered as a trip to a different country, and how they disassociated their time in Artek from the large ideological apparatus of the Soviet era. The ironic contradiction of these accounts reveals that despite the Soviet government’s attempts to use Artek as the model of a communist ideal and the training ground for the communist ideologues, many of those who visited Artek presented depoliticized narratives and moved away from seeing it as a communist educational institution. The narratives presented in Kozlova’s work underscore the ways in which the intended purposes of constructed utopias—whether communist summer camps or market-based schools of choice—can be appropriated by participants toward opposite ends. Instead of embracing the official purposes, participants can use those utopias to escape from the officialdom.

Xiaobei Chen worked with her mother to produce a dialogic engagement over memories of childhoods and schooling in (post)socialist China. In “Memories of the Revolution Childhood and Modernization Childhood in China: 1950s–1980s,” they use a collective biography approach to narrate their experiences as women who received a more equal treatment under stronger socialist controls and as members of intellectual class who were discriminated against under the policies that promoted workers and farmers. Recollecting the stories of heroes whose fabricated biographical accounts are taught in school, they note both the aspirations those stories of heroic feats were meant to elicit among schoolchildren and the ways those stories toppled with the advent of the internet. Together, their memories capture the ambivalences and the contradictions of observing social transformations that colonize even as they promise to liberate.

Drawing on biographical interviews, Raili Nugin and Kirsti Jõesalu explore the memories of Estonian participants of their schooling and kindergarten experiences under the communist regime and the change they observed in the postcommunist transition. Their article “Narrating Surroundings and Suppression: The Role of School in Soviet Childhood Memories” presents an intersectional analysis that documents how memories of the past intersect with the constructions of space—the greater status and prestige of living in newly built Soviet-era apartment blocks contributed to greater willingness to embrace the official ideology. School was central to those memories both as a place of connection and belonging to the community adjacent to the school. The stark contrasts emerge during the postcommunist era, when interpretations of space changed, more affluent neighbors moved into suburbs, and the buildings of educational institutions built during the Soviet era began to fall apart. Despite the narratives of repression and discontent at state controls and rigid behavior management, participants shared nostalgic recollections and described their acts of subversion against the communist controls imposed on them. Together these memories reflect multiplicity and heterogeneity of meanings and interpretations that move away from totalizing and monolithic accounts of Soviet control and oppression.

Finally, Paula Pastułka and Magdalena Ślusarczyk’s article “Understanding Foreign Future and Deconstructing Polish Past” focuses on the memories of Polish migrants in West European contexts. Participants in this study went to school during the socialist era and were raising children in their new contexts. This double positioning on the border between different epochs and political systems affords participants an opportunity to draw out the contrasts they experience between their own childhood memories and the childhoods their children live according to interviewees. They note greater freedoms that they experienced as children, with more flexible schedules and ample time for play than their children had growing up. Focusing on extracurricular activities, they also observe that the burden for holistic development of a child is now placed on families instead of the state. While in their view the seemingly more democratic pedagogical approaches employed today offer greater respect for an individual child, they also seem to decrease teachers’ authority, leaving the parents doubting the wisdom of these approaches.

Together these articles reveal that the imperative to engage with the past comes out of a need to make meaning of the current individual and collective crises as well as out of the desire to break away from the binaries inherited from the Cold War. Drawing on Chen’s (2010) provocative invitation to reimagine scholarship and research, the special issue opens ways to decolonize and de-imperialize knowledge, while at the same time critiquing discourses operating as part of Cold War knowledge production. These papers change the frames of reference for the narration of (post)socialist pasts and attend to finer nuances that may have been overlooked in previous accounts of (post)socialist childhoods and schooling. Instead of keeping the West as an explicit or implicit center against the standards of which those not conforming to its practices will inevitably fall short, scholars in this special issue approach (post)socialist pasts through the personal narratives of cultural insiders.

Moreover, in the context of increasing neoliberal globalization, the approaches employed in this special issue provide resources for counterhegemonic constructions. As contributors to this special issue demonstrate, critical engagement with their or their participants’ memories liberates and provides resources for contesting dominant constructions of their pasts, their identities, and subsequently their futures. Yet this critical engagement is not always easy as scholarly writing often remains constrained by the dominant forms of knowledge production and relies on argument structures that are assumed to be universal but are deeply rooted in Western traditions. The process of liberation is slow and strenuous. This may be only the beginning of a much longer journey and the four articles included in the special issue are glimpses into what these perspectives can offer for future research in (post)socialist contexts and explorations of childhoods and schooling.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elena Aydarova

Elena (Helen) Aydarova, Ph.D. is a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at Arizona State University. Her research focuses on the interaction between social change and the work of teachers, teaching, and teacher education in the context of global neoliberal transformations.

Zsuzsa Millei

Nelli Piattoeva is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Tampere, Finland. Her research has previously focused on political socialization and nation-building in formal education, and has recently shifted to datafication of education governance.

Nelli Piattoeva

Iveta Silova is Professor and Director of the Center for the Advanced Studies in Global Education at Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University. Her research focuses on the role of education in post-socialist education transformations.

Iveta Silova

Zsuzsa Millei is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Social Research, University of Tampere, Finland and a member of the Space and Political Agency Research Group at RELATE, Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence.