Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Separation, Judgment, and Laments of Civic Criticism
- 2 Civility and Crisis in the Slovak Public Sphere
- 3 Sentimental Kritika
- 4 Love, L'udskost', and Education for Democracy
- 5 Young Literary Critics
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Love, L'udskost', and Education for Democracy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2013
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Separation, Judgment, and Laments of Civic Criticism
- 2 Civility and Crisis in the Slovak Public Sphere
- 3 Sentimental Kritika
- 4 Love, L'udskost', and Education for Democracy
- 5 Young Literary Critics
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy.
—John Dewey, The School and SocietyFor at least a century binary oppositions of alienation and intimacy have informed Western theories of how political orders disempower or empower their subjects to public critical discourse. We have seen how some Czechoslovaks, in varying degrees of dialogue with this North Atlantic intellectual heritage, deployed similar thinking to mobilize revolutionary protest in 1989. The most famous name that many participants and observers gave to events in the former Czechoslovakia, the Velvet Revolution (Slovak: Zamatová revolúcia), carried the dual meaning in Slovak and Czech of soft, tactilely comforting cloth and the adjective “tender”: tender in means, but also in the end of infusing society with more tenderness. The Velvet Revolution's goals of toppling the KSČ's hold on state power emerged in part through other longings to imbue social relations with more gentle sentiments.
This chapter casts a critical eye on how Slovaks, Czechs, and Western observers understood the emotional, sentimental, or affective component of interpersonal interactions to buttress a political order during Slovakia's (and the former Czechoslovakia's) transition from Communist rule. More specifically, it looks at the popular diagnoses and social realities of how alienation and intimacy work through Slovak educational settings and society.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Critical Thinking in Slovakia after Socialism , pp. 132 - 157Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013