engleski

Images of childhood within economic contexts of socialist and post-socialist Croatia

The paper aims at comparing the relationship between childhood and economy in educational systems of socialist and post-socialist Croatia by combining approaches of sociology of childhood and critical theory in education. Sociology of childhood has put a lot of emphasis on the economic activities of children, investigating everyday practices and the meaning they have for children who engage in them (Solberg, 1996 ; Woodhead, 1999 ; Mizen, 2001 ; Abebe, 2007 ; Ruspini, 2012 ; Boneta et al., 2015). Still, in academic and educational circles it remains unusual to consider the active role of the child in economic activities, primarily because the social construction of childhood in Western modern society has been transformed: the child is considered economically useless but emotionally priceless (Zelizer, 1984). The economic role of children, however, has not disappeared, but has been modified: it is no longer acceptable for a child to financially contribute to their household, but it is acceptable for a child to engage in consumption or to do some unpaid household chores for educational purposes. Moreover, as Qvortrup (2001) argued, the children’s school work has become a part of human capital formation, constituent to modern society. In this context, it is interesting to observe the development of initiatives for entrepreneurship and financial literacy education, which have been intensively introduced through global capitalist organizations in the last few decades. Croatia’s post-socialist school curriculum lies somewhere on the continuum between socialist and capitalist approaches to economy, as well as between socialist image of “the happy child” (Erdei, 2006) and neoliberal image of “the competent child” (Smith, 2011 ; Pechtelidis and Stamou, 2017). Our goal is to explore these images of childhood in socialist and post-socialist Croatian textbooks for lower grades of primary schools regarding their economic contexts.

Childhood ; socialism ; capitalism

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