The Ambiguous Nature of Children's Work in Socialist Yugoslavia: An Analysis Based on Children's Magazine Pionirski List

Abstract

Drawing on the educational role ascribed to work in children's upbringing, the article analyzes children's work and its many ambiguities as presented in children's magazine Pionirski list [Pioneers magazine] in socialist Yugoslavia. The magazine featured content for children, about children, as well as contributions produced by children themselves, telling how they experienced different forms of work in their everyday lives. Most notably, Pionirski list addressed children as self-managing pioneers actively participating in shaping social reality, and at the same time it was only yet building and reproducing a construct of the child as a self-managing pioneer and future self-managing worker in line with Yugoslavia's third way of socialism. Although Yugoslavia was consolidating schooling as the child's main obligation and breaking with exploitative child labor, it promoted a social organization centered on productive and socially useful work that included children as well. It built on Marxist notions of self-determined work, yet the understanding of work as inseparable from life also related to the ethos of the agricultural society's domestic economy. After breaking with the USSR, Yugoslavia embraced worker self-management as a so-called third way to socialism. All these various aspects of work fed into the educational value ascribed to work in childhood and placed it in a mutually constructive relationship with play and leisure rather than as their opposite.