This book explores childhood and schooling in late socialist societies by bringing into dialogue public narratives and personal memories that move beyond imaginaries of Cold War divisions between the East and West. Written by cultural insiders who were brought up and educated on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain - spanning from Central Europe to mainland Asia - the book offers insights into the diverse spaces of socialist childhoods interweaving with broader political, economic, and social life. These evocative memories explore the experiences of children in navigating state expectations to embody ¿model socialist citizens¿ and their mixed feelings of attachment, optimism, dullness, and alienation associated with participation in ¿building¿ socialist futures. Drawing on the research traditions of autobiography, autoethnography, and collective biography, the authors challenge what is often considered ¿normal¿ and ¿natural¿ in the historical accounts of socialist childhoods, and engage in (re)writing histories that open space for new knowledges and vast webs of interconnections to emerge. This book will be compelling reading for students and researchers working in education, sociology and history, particularly those within the interdisciplinary fields of childhood and area studies.¿The authors of this beautiful book are professional academics and intellectuals who grew up in different socialist countries. Exploring ¿socialist childhoods¿ in myriad ways, they draw on memories, and collective history, emotional insider knowledge and the measured perspective of an analyst. What emerges is life that was caught between real optimism and dullness, ethical commitments and ideological absurdities, selfless devotion to children and their treatment as a political resource. Such attention to detail and examination of the paradoxical nature of this time makes this collective effort not only timely but remarkably genuine.¿¿Alexei Yurchak, University of California, USA

Builds on first-hand experiences of socialist and post-socialist conditions within schools

Remembering Childhoods, Rewriting (Post)Socialist Lives; Nelli Piattoeva, Iveta Silova & Zsuzsa Millei.- Memories in Dialogue: Transnational Stories about Socialist Childhoods; Helga Lénárt-Cheng & Ioana Luca.- A Dulled Mind in an Active Body: Growing up as a Girl in Normalization Czechoslovakia; Libora Oates-Indruchová.- On the Edge of Two Zones: Slovak Socialist Childhoods; Ondrej Kascak & Branislav Pupala.- Growing up as Vicar¿s Daughter in Communist Czechoslovakia: Politics, Religion and Childhood Agency Examined; Irena Kašparová.- Uncle Ho's Good Children Award and State Power at a Socialist School in Vietnam; Violette Ho.- Tito's Last Pioneers and the Politicization of Schooling in Yugoslavia; Anna Bogic.- Hair Bows and Uniforms: Entangled Politics in Children's Everyday Lives; Zsuzsa Millei, Nelli Piattoeva, Iveta Silova & Elena Aydarova.- Interrupted Trajectory: The Experiences of Disability and Home Schooling in Post-Soviet Russia; Alfiya Battalova.- Teaching it Straight:Sexuality Education Across Post-State-Socialist Contexts; Ela Przybylo & Polina Ivleva.- Erasure and Renewal in (Post)Socialist China: My Mother's Long Journey; Jinting Wu.- Towards Decolonizing Childhood and Knowledge Production; Zsuzsa Millei, Iveta Silova & Nelli Piattoeva.- Preface to Afterwords; Zsuzsa Millei, Iveta Silova & Nelli Piattoeva.- Narratives from Bygone Times: Towards Multiplicity of Socialist Childhoods; Marek Tesar.- The Worlds of Childhood Memory; Robert Imre.- Decolonizing the Postsocialist Childhood Memories; Madina Tlostanova.- Beyond the Young Pioneers: Memorywork with Socialist and (Post)Socialist Childhoods; Susanne Gannon.- A New Horizon for Comparative Education?; Jeremy Rappleye.