Abstract
This chapter explores the opportunities for early childhood education and care (ECEC) reform in Uzbekistan, and the extent to which reforms can build on ‘local knowledge’. Uzbekistan was part of the Soviet Union and inherited a rigid Soviet style kindergarten system, which nevertheless promoted care and education, and attempted, in principle, to offer access to all children. These kindergartens fell into disrepair and disuse, but are now being revived with the help of the World Bank funds. At the same time, the Uzbek government has promoted a partly concocted patriarchal traditionalism, especially in rural areas, as a means of social control. The inherent contradictions and repression under the Soviet system continued in a different form under the current Uzbek government have led to confusion about what is local knowledge or what people might want or expect from an ECEC system.
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Notes
- 1.
The vividness of the experiences of black Africans under colonialism is described by many black writers, including Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe, but especially by Ngugi Wa Thiongo (1986).
- 2.
The exiled Uzbek nationalist, Hasmid Ismailov gives a highly critical account of the accession of Karimov in his novel A Poet and Bin-Laden: A Reality Novel (2011). Ismailov claims that Uzbekistan has a dusting of religion, because Karimov was forced, in order to gain accession, to make some concessions to the religious communities. Otherwise it might have remained entirely secular, as it was in the Soviet era.
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In my work in several other countries of the region I was able to interview parents, and even took part in a phone-in TV program in Bosnia. Parents in every country I visited were overwhelmingly in favor of kindergarten provision, although the aid agencies in general were unfamiliar with this kindergarten model, and only referred to it in disparaging terms, if at all.
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I witnessed one of these weddings in Bokhara, where the men sat at long tables in the garden of the madrassah, and the women, in traditional dress, carried in the platters, to the accompaniment of medieval trumpets, sackbuts and drums.
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My guide in Bokhara admitted that she had escaped from such conditions. She was an educated but traditionally married Muslim woman, and felt hounded by her mother-in-law, who imposed numerous tasks, and forbade her even to see her own parents. She eventually escaped, thanks to help from a relative, and managed to find work, but at the cost of considerable social isolation. She was lucky to be able to keep her children.
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Penn, H. (2019). Uzbekistan: Implementing ECEC Services in Authoritarian Regimes. In: Kjørholt, AT., Penn, H. (eds) Early Childhood and Development Work. Palgrave Studies on Children and Development. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91319-3_8
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