ABSTRACT
In debates about the future, particularly in the fraught and accelerated time
of late modernity, children stand in the tumultuous crosscurrent of
various competing cultural projects. Writing at the end of the last century,
Sharon Stephens (1995) noted that, as representatives of a contested future,
‘[children’s] minds and bodies… their senses, language, social networks, worldviews, and material futures are all at stake in debates about ethnic purity,
*Corresponding author. Email: mmead83@gmail.com
Michael A. Mead* and Iveta Silova
In the former Soviet Union, the upbringing of children in the spir t of Marxist-Leninist values was central to the project of societal transformation. More than 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is important to understand how the education of young children in this region has changed in response to a world rapidly globalising and increasingly driven by market economic policies. Just how much have post-socialist states, as others across the world, reoriented their educational projects to ensure the development of individuals maximally adapted for the information economy of late capitalism? This study probes this question through the crit cal discourse analysi of a genre of early literacy textbo ks – bukvari – used widely throughout the Soviet and post-Soviet education system. Through comparison of literacy texts published in the late Soviet era with those used over the past wo decades in independent Latvia and Ukraine, we explore how discourses representing children and their behaviors – what we call ‘literacies of childho d’ – have evolved during post-socialist transformations. In contrast to the predominant assumption that values com on to socialism should have given way to cosmopolitan, neoliberal principles, we find surprising flows and modifications betwe n visions of the ‘Soviet’ and ‘post-Soviet’ child. Most significantly perhaps, our analysi reveals that even the most recent textbo ks reject assertions of a global and futureoriented cit zen, instead idealising visions of a distinctly national Latvian or Ukrainian cit zenry, growing up in a trap ed-in-time, ethnically and linguistically homogenous homeland.
