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A Dulled Mind in an Active Body: Growing Up as a Girl in Normalization Czechoslovakia

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Childhood and Schooling in (Post)Socialist Societies

Abstract

The autoethnographic account in this chapter is based on several personal “mundane epiphanies.” They are used to unpick the cultural and historical context of forming intellectual consciousness and gender identities of children and young people by state-socialist educational institutions and educators. The epiphanies fall roughly into two groups: those about intellectual stimulation and those about physical and sporting activities. The central theme is the ambiguity of state-socialist education: restrictive and conservative, while at the same time strangely liberal and progressive, confirming and challenging stereotypes, encouraging individual development in some areas, streamlining into dull uniformity in others.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I used Alejandra Martinez’s autoethnography on inculcating masculinity in young children (Martinez, 2015) as inspiration for the visual structure of this article.

  2. 2.

    Sokol was a physical educational association founded in 1869 and disbanded in 1949 in the aftermath of the Communist putsch; needless to say that the Sokol anti-fascist resistance was not acknowledged in the Communist historical narrative.

  3. 3.

    The family background of an applicant for university study would be vetted for any political non-conformity (on university admissions during normalization, see Jareš (2012)). Parents like mine had their own bitter experience even with entry to secondary school on political grounds, although I have no evidence to suggest that that would have been the case also for my generation.

  4. 4.

    Gymnázium is an academically oriented secondary school, or high school in American terminology, whose aim is to prepare the students for university entry.

  5. 5.

    Petr Šámal (2009) researched the streamlining and molding efforts of state policies on the example of Czech libraries in the 1950s and the function of librarians to create an ideal socialist reader.

  6. 6.

    None of the researchers involved in that project ever published anything from the interviews. An opportunity offered itself to provide the transcripts of my interviews and those of Hana Havelková to a colleague within another research project who analyzed them and argued persuasively on their grounds against the established Czech narrative of how men and women were united in their resistance against the common enemy, the communist power (Zábrodská, 2014).

  7. 7.

    The use of sports to ideological ends in the Eastern bloc is common knowledge. However, concrete evidence of its more nefarious aspects, such as the state-controlled use of steroids in Czechoslovak sports for a decade from 1979 to 1989, came to light only years after the bloc’s demise (Pacina & Nekola, 2006).

    On the structural implementation of Marxism-Leninism in tertiary education, see Urbášek (2008, pp. 76–105).

  8. 8.

    The literature on such sanctions is vast and it often rests on or includes personal testimonies (such as numerous articles in Index on Censorship in the 1970s and 1980s). Pavel Kohout, for example, describes at length the harassment endured for his political dissidence in his autobiography (Kohout, 1987), while his daughter, the writer Tereza Boučková (1992; excerpt in English 1994), offers a fictionalized autobiographical account of how the state avenged itself on the children of dissidents.

  9. 9.

    That the post-socialist world was in need of an educational reform that would cultivate critical thinking was a mantra of the 1990s (Holmes, 1997; Čerych et al., 1999).

  10. 10.

    This conclusion leads naturally to the question of the receptiveness of thus schooled citizens to the ideologies communicated by advertisers and other players in the nascent democracies after the demise of state socialism, but pursuing this argument goes beyond the scope of this article.

  11. 11.

    For an account of the systematic effort toward cultural “middlebrow” in the early years of the Soviet Union, see Dobrenko (1995).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Graz, Graz, Austria

    Libora Oates-Indruchová

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  1. Libora Oates-Indruchová
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  1. Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Iveta Silova

  2. Faculty of Education, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland

    Nelli Piattoeva

  3. Institute for Advanced Social Research, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland

    Zsuzsa Millei

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Oates-Indruchová, L. (2018). A Dulled Mind in an Active Body: Growing Up as a Girl in Normalization Czechoslovakia. In: Silova, I., Piattoeva, N., Millei, Z. (eds) Childhood and Schooling in (Post)Socialist Societies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62791-5_3

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