Childhood and Youth in Socialist Czechoslovakia
Childhood and Youth in Socialist Czechoslovakia

Summary/Abstract: The ten-member team of authors, under the lead of Jiří Knapík and Martin Franc, in their collective volume entitled "Mezi pionýrským šátkem a mopedem: Děti, mládež a socialismus v českých zemích 1948–1970" [Between a Pioneer Scarf and a Moped: Children, Youth and Socialism in the Czech lands in 1948–1970] (Praha, Academia 2018) deals fairly successfully with the task of sketching a comprehensive picture of childhood and growing up in the Czech lands in the period between the communist coup and the beginning of the normalization era in Czechoslovakia. In the chapters thematically focused on the perspectives of state, party and parents as authorities, on the world of children and youth under Czechoslovak socialism ,on the transformation of youth organizations, and on school and the extra-curricular life and activities of the actors, they seek to trace how an attempt at a radical change in educating the young post-war generations, shifting from liberal individualism to collectivist ideals in building the new social order, developed and was applied in practice. The volume also deals with contemporary problems, such as social pathology and the social protection of children and youth in the Czech lands. For the reviewer, the most valuable contribution of the work is the authors’ success in proving continuities in the approach to educating children and youth after the communist coup, which resisted ideological pressures for a radical revision of values and mentality and which merged with a more general change in lifestyle that formed a socialist consumer society in the 1960s.

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