This paper analyzes the participation of the vocational school graduates in further education in five former socialist countries between 1948 and 1989. The students in the vocational secondary schools were not acquiring complete secondary education equivalent to that offered in the academic and professional high schools. Previous analyses have shown that many apprentices re-entered the system of secondary education and had a chance to attain a secondary-school leaving examination. The principal question is in this text: who were the apprentices who re-entered school after completing their vocational training? Using event history analysis of a large survey data file (N=6010) the author shows that school re-entry played a dual role in educational stratification during socialism. It was a vehicle to educate the communist cadres and, at the same time, it served as a second chance for the members of the politically persecuted families.
This article is concerned with readership and reading, a key theme in the work of the founding fathers of British Cultural studies, like Hoggart, Thompson, and Williams, and related American scholars, such as Altick. The article offers links with research areas related to this tradition in terms of time and concerns, that is, analyses of the centrally controlled readership in the ‘socialist’ countries. In addition to a Marxist orientation, the common features include an attempt to critically challenge the privileged position of the ‘elite culture/text’ as an object of enquiry, the rehabilitation of the non-elite (common) reader, as well as a search for the relation between the phenomena of reading, the reader, and literacy on the one hand and socio-economic progress on the other. In both traditions, reading is burdened with enormous social expectations and tends to be transformed from an analytical category into a prescriptive, axiological one.
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