Suchergebnisse

AbstractThrough an investigation of policy documents and reports from post‐1989 Romanian education reform, this article argues that what came to be known in the early 1990s as a 'post‐socialist condition', characterized by exuberant nationalism, needs to be rethought. Rather than an exceptional path, Romanian education displays conspicuous synchronization with wider world trends, while some peculiar national narratives in explaining reform failures persist. Instead of becoming more nation‐focused (as predicted by prevalent conceptualizations of 'Eastern' types of nationalism), discourses of educational reform opened up to the world, most notably through the mediation of Europe. Since the end of the nationalizing decade of the 1990s, educational texts have consistently invoked global themes of adaptation. Narratives about the mission of mass education and reform priorities encapsulating officially‐sanctioned projections of the nation became outward‐looking, in contrast to the self‐referential rhetoric of socialist times. The changing patterns of Romanian nation‐building are reflective of trends across the world, pointing to a reconsideration of the exceptionalism often associated with Eastern Europe.

Based on thematic content analysis of textbooks, curricula, and an overview of educational legislation after the 1989 change of political regime in Romania, this paper presents empirical evidence to argue that that postsocialist citizenship education displays surprising similarities with converging post-war changes in the concept of the 'good citizen'. The findings suggest a complex picture of change combining liberal, communitarian and cosmopolitan renditions of the new citizen, all having a common thread: the shift towards a post-national ethos delinking the citizen from the exclusive purchase of national belonging and decoupling citizen action from the absolute duty to the patria. Such significant changes are often overlooked due to the dominant focus on the failures to comply with an idealized Western liberal model. However, they invite us to reconsider current understandings of both the pitfalls and the opportunities of post-socialist citizenship education by considering them from a different angle: that of wider socio-cultural change that is gradually being institutionalised at the world level.