ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses around the involvement of teachers in education in the special environment of eastern Germany. The importance of educational reform as part of the more general transformation was brought home to me almost accidentally in the course of my research in eastern Germany. The chapter outlines the links between modernization theory and childhood with special attention paid to the interpretation of socialism in this regard before describing some of the specifics of the two German school systems and the development after unification. It then examines eastern German discourses that signify a privatization of childhood paralleled by a privatization of parenthood. The concept of individualization represents a paradox in modernization theories associated with childhood and the family. As already mentioned, these theories postulate growing individualization linked to the decline in the significance for people's lives of so-called traditional entities such as kinship and ethnic communities.
