Възраждане и ценности: как се мисли детската възраст в началото на модернизацията на българското общество
Revival and Values: Thinking about Childhood in the Beginnings of the Bulgarian Society’s Modernization

Summary/Abstract: The study focuses on Petar Beron’s, Raino Popovich’s, Konstantin Fotinov’s and Sava Dobroplodni’s views on childhood revealed in their writings. Moments from their works tell us their answers to the question „What's a child?“, which the beginnings of modernization had put on the public agenda. For them, children should not be seen oximoronically as „little grownups“. One of their strongest messages is for a new understanding of childhood and children as a stage in human development, requiring from adults specific treatment. Along with Locke, they believed that a kid's mind is a tabula rasa focusing on its being free of the „original sin“. Childhood is „innocent“; corporal punishment should be abolished, and the other punishments should be inflicted on a strictly individual and equitable basis. Some of them were especially strong on defending the right of girls to school education. More traditional are they regarding the power distribution at home and school: free choice is the domain of adults; children don't have enough knowledge and experience to be vested with it (reminding one of Locke again). But unlike Locke, Beron, Popovich, Fotinov and Dobroplodni seem to see the goal of moral education to be the production of subjects, not citizens. Their belief that children should be trained to re-act in mâlchanie, blagochinie, pokorenie and smirenie (roughly: reticence, respect of one's betters, submissivness and humbleness) definitely points that way.

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