European Education

ISSN: 1056-4934 (Print) 1944-7086 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/meue20

Revisiting Pasts, Reimagining Futures: Memories of

(Post)Socialist Childhood and Schooling

Elena Aydarova, Zsuzsa Millei, Nelli Piattoeva & Iveta Silova

To cite this article: Elena Aydarova, Zsuzsa Millei, Nelli Piattoeva & Iveta Silova (2016) Revisiting
Pasts, Reimagining Futures: Memories of (Post)Socialist Childhood and Schooling, European
Education, 48:3, 159-169, DOI: 10.1080/10564934.2016.1223977

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10564934.2016.1223977

Published online: 28 Sep 2016.

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European Education, 48: 159–169, 2016
Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1056-4934 print/1944-7086 online
DOI: 10.1080/10564934.2016.1223977

INTRODUCTION

Revisiting Pasts, Reimagining Futures: Memories of

(Post)Socialist Childhood and Schooling

Elena Aydarova
Arizona State University

Zsuzsa Millei and Nelli Piattoeva

University of Tampere
Iveta Silova
Arizona State University

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 edu-
cational 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 overgeneraliza-
tions 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
160 AYDAROVA ET AL.

representations reflect what Said (1978) called Orientalizing discourses that constitute “a distri-
bution 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 “con-
trol, 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 them-
selves 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 impor-
tant 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 maintain-
ing 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, interconnec-
tions, 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 edu-
cational 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
 MEMORIES OF (POST)SOCIALIST CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOLING 161

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 for-
mer 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 transfor-
mations, 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 cur-
rently 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 perfor-
mance 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 learn-
ing. 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 adminis-
trators 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 replace-
ment 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
162 AYDAROVA ET AL.

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 think-
ing 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 decoloni-
zation 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 alterna-
tive civilizational paths and preserving the possibility of pluriversal futures. Central in postco-
lonial 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 mem-
ories 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 explo-
ration 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 dif-
ferently 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).
 MEMORIES OF (POST)SOCIALIST CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOLING 163

Viewed from this angle, (post)socialist contexts have much to offer to the search of viable alter-
natives 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 trans-
historical 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, [with-
out] 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 dif-
ferent 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 pub-
lic 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, includ-
ing 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, how-
ever, 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 pro-
ductive 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 allow-
ing 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 narrat-
ing 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, politi-
cians, educators, state authorities and the media view children [in particular ways], but such
164 AYDAROVA ET AL.

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 coloni-
zation 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 tem-
poral 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 dis-
courses 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 experi-
ences 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 dis-
associated 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 commu-
nist summer camps or market-based schools of choice—can be appropriated by participants
 MEMORIES OF (POST)SOCIALIST CHILDHOOD AND SCHOOLING 165

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 construc-
tions 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 inter-
pretations 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 chil-
dren 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 extracur-
ricular 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)
166 AYDAROVA ET AL.

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 operat-
ing 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 liber-
ates 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 tradi-
tions. 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.

AUTHOR BIOS

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, teach-
ing, and teacher education in the context of global neoliberal transformations.
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.
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.
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.

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