Soviet Empire, Childhood, and Education

Auteurs-es

  • Iveta Silova
  • Garine Palandjian

DOI :

https://doi.org/10.5944/reec.31.2018.21592

Mots-clés :

Soviet education, Soviet empire, childhood, comparative education

Résumé

Children constituted a key element of the Soviet empire-building project, reconfiguring childhoods and refashioning the colonial space itself.  Children of different ethnicities across the territories of the Soviet republics were to be united by the Russian language and a sense of Soviet patriotism, manifest in such political slogans as “friendship of all people,” “interethnic equalisation,” and “internationalism.” Education curriculum and activities were utilised to facilitate social and cultural “merging” of all ethnic groups on the basis of the Soviet Russian language and culture.  At the same time, the Soviet empire advanced the idea of “unity in diversity,” allowing national minorities the right to self-determination and some political autonomy within a socialist context. Drawing on post-colonial theory and critical geography studies, this article looks at how early literacy textbooks were used to shape Soviet childhood by regulating children’s minds, bodies, habits, as well as “locating” them in the empire’s space and time. The article provides a brief historical context of the Soviet empire-building project, followed by a cross-national analysis of early literacy textbooks published in Russia, Armenia, Latvia, and Ukraine. Our goal is to highlight the continuities, contradictions, and ruptures in the vision of the Soviet childhood - and the Soviet future more broadly - as it travelled from the Empire’s centre (Moscow) to its geographically diverse peripheries (Armenia, Latvia, and Ukraine). 

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Bibliographies de l'auteur-e

Iveta Silova

Iveta Silova is professor and director of the Centre for the Advanced Studies in Global Education at Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University. She holds a Ph.D. in comparative education and political sociology from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University. Her research focuses on the study of globalisation and post-socialist education transformations, including intersections between post-colonialism and post-socialism after the Cold War. Since 2008, Iveta has served as a co-editor (with Noah W. Sobe) of European Education: Issues and Studies (a quarterly, peer-reviewed journal published by Taylor & Francis).

Garine Palandjian

Garine Palandjian is a PhD student in Educational Policy and Evaluation at Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University (ASU). Her current research focuses on Soviet and post-Soviet education transformations in Armenia, including childhood, gender, and national identities. Prior to ASU, she worked at the American University of Armenia (2013-2017) where she set up the Centre for Student Success and student support services. Garine received an IREX Individual Advanced Research Opportunity fellowship to conduct fieldwork as part of her research on peace education in Armenia (2012). She has Master’s degree in Comparative and International Education from Lehigh University.

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Publié-e

2018-06-29

Comment citer

Silova, I., & Palandjian, G. (2018). Soviet Empire, Childhood, and Education. Revista Española de Educación Comparada, (31), 147–171. https://doi.org/10.5944/reec.31.2018.21592

Numéro

Rubrique

MONOGRÁFICO: Imperios y educación