Power, ideology and children: Socialist childhoods in Czechoslovakia

Abstract

There was not one, singular childhood in socialist Czechoslovakia, but many and diverse, plural, childhoods. Spanning over 40 years (1948–1989), the Czechoslovak communist governance produced diverse conceptualisations of childhoods that remain often invisible, unexplored, and the current analyses are at best sketchy and refer mostly to pedagogical nuances of strong ideological pedagogical struggles. One way to explore such an abundance of historical data in a short journal article is to utilise a somewhat personal narrative of a child. This dialogic approach allows the strong presence of the voice of a child, re-told from an adult’s perspective, and it methodologically justifies an approach to thinking and theorising of socialist childhoods through Vaclav Havel’s (1985; 1989; 1990) theoretical thinking that has been utilised in philosophy of education previously (see Tesar, 2015e). There are also other examples of complex and thorough analyses of socialist childhoods in other countries (see for example Aydarova et al, 2016), and theoretical thinking about the socialist child as a foreigner to its own land, can be done through Kristeva’s lens (Arndt, 2015).