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Title: “The Image of the Teacher in the Memories of Sofia English Language School’s Alumni

From the 1970s”

Author: Nadezhda

Velinova

Galabova

How to cite this article: Galabova, Nadezhda Velinova. 2013. “The Image of the Teacher in the Memories of

Sofia English Language School’s Alumni From the 1970s”. Martor 18: 123‐132.

Published by: Editura MARTOR (MARTOR Publishing House), Muzeul Ță ranului Român (The

Museum of the Romanian Peasant)

URL: http://martor.muzeultaranuluiroman.ro/archive/revista ‐martor ‐nr ‐18‐din ‐2013/

Martor (The Museum of the Romanian Peasant Anthropology Review) is a peer ‐reviewed academic journal established in 1996, with a focus on cultural and visual anthropology, ethnology, museum studies and the dialogue among these disciplines. Martor review is published by the Museum of the Romanian Peasant. Its aim is to provide, as widely as possible, a rich content at the highest academic and editorial standards for scientific, educational and (in)formational goals. Any use aside from these purposes and without mentioning the source of the article(s) is prohibited and will be considered an infringement of copyright.

Martor (Revue d’Anthropologie du Musée du Paysan Roumain) est un journal académique en système peer‐review fondé en 1996, qui se concentre sur l’anthropologie visuelle et culturelle, l’ethnologie, la muséologie et sur le dialogue entre ces disciplines. La revue Martor est publiée par le Musée du Paysan Roumain. Son aspiration est de généraliser l’accès vers un riche contenu au plus haut niveau du point de vue académique et éditorial pour des objectifs scientifiques, éducatifs et informationnels. Toute utilisation au ‐delà de ces buts et sans mentionner la source des articles est interdite et sera considérée une violation des droits de l’auteur.

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ince the 1960s and the publishing of Cen-turies of Childhood (Aries, 1962) theissue of childhood has become a promi-

nent theme in the studies of social researchersand historians of modern Europe. Althoughthere has been a lot of criticism to the methodsAries applies in his book, the significance of his studies has hardly ever been denied, sinceAries is the first to initiate the discussion onchildhood as a social construct. He also makesit possible for historians, educationalists andsocial researchers to start recognizing and an-alyzing the importance of children not only asinfluenced by but also as influencing historicalprocesses.

Therefore, the aim of this article is not tocharge a detailed critique of Aries’s Centuriesof Childhood. On the contrary, it takes as itsstarting point the central statement of the

French historian – that the way children were viewed in early modern Europe differed con-siderably from the way childhood was per-ceived in the Middle Ages. Whereas inpre-modern times children were, to a great ex-tent, integrated in the world of adults, from the17th century onwards infants began to be seenas vulnerable, ignorant, incompetent and in-nocent. They needed protection, educationand cultivation. Thus, we see how within theframework of the emerging modern Europeanstates childhood commenced to be viewed asa specific stage in human life. With the rise of the Industrial Revolution, urbanization, mod-ernization and most importantly – formalschooling, children were ‘sacralized’ (Hen-drick, 1992: 2). They were envisioned as theessence of human nature, the potential and fu-ture of humanity. This potential, however, had

The Image of the Teacher in the Memories of Sofia English Language School’s Alumni from the 1970 ’s

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to be accordingly supervised, guided and disci-plined in order not to get distorted. Childhoodbecame an ‘invention of modernization’(Shorter, 1976: 168) that proved to be instru-mental to the building of the modern nation-

state. The enlightened individual that the childhad to be transformed into – the embodimentof the social policy, healthcare services andmass education provided by modern institu-tions – had to pose no threat to society, to pos-sess the right conduct and contribute to theimprovement of the social world. The transfor-mation of the attitude to children, the focus onthe children’s welfare – the future of humanity had to be protected against brutality and abuse

– changed the place of children in society.Rather than the families, which sometimesdemonstrated harsh treatment or indifferenceto their children, it was the state that had to in-troduce appropriate legislation and rearingpractices that would guarantee the children’sadequate upbringing. Thus, the children fellunder the gaze of various modern institutions,which limited the children’s freedom and re-stricted the perception of children as inde-pendent subjects of history, as free agents.

As this article aims to interpret and ana-lyze the school-day memories of Sofia EnglishLanguage School’s alumni from the 1970s, thequestions that it will discuss here are: How didBulgarian state socialism instrumentalizechildhood (and if we bear in mind the contextof the current article – adolescence) in its aspi-rations to create ‘the new socialist person’?How did socialist Bulgaria – a society so muchin love with the concept of equality – legitimize

and interpret the foundation of elite schools(such as Sofia English Language School)? Whatnarrative strategies do the alumni resort towhen they have to present now the problem-atic past public image of the school? How dothey explain now their distinction in a society obsessed with egalitarianism?

In order to address these questions I will,first, outline the methodological framework and theoretical findings this paper draws on inunfolding its arguments. Secondly, I will pres-ent the set of arguments with which the state

authorities supported the establishment of eliteschools and enabled their (problematic) inte-gration in the field of socialist mass schooling.Finally, I will analyze the school-day memoriesof the alumni, using them not so much as

sources of ‘hard facts’, but as narratives throughwhich the respondents present themselves, andwant to think of themselves, as agents, as activeprotagonists in the everyday life of the school.

This study owes a great deal to Foucault’sand Bourdieu’s critical observations about therole of schooling in the individual and biogra-phical development of modern citizens.Though it is true that their critiques of Moder-nity cannot unquestionably be superimposed

on the Bulgarian context, it is also true thattheir ideas can help us comprehend the com-plex fabric of everyday life in socialist Bulgaria,the intersections between the state’s interven-tions and the individuals’ efforts to pursue theirown interests, express their own selves. Com-bining the critical findings of Foucault andBourdieu seems important to me as it allows usto observe not only how the state individual-ized and normalized the people, turning theminto ‘docile bodies’ (Foucault, 1995 (1977):135), but also the subtleties by which the dis-tinctions and differences in Bulgarian socialistsociety were simultaneously instilled and con-cealed (Bourdieu, 1984).

The socialist state considered thechild/adolescent biological material, which,after appropriate treatment, would become anefficient, loyal, responsibly behaving citizenwhose public actions would not undermine theexisting social order and whose disciplined

work would contribute to the common good.What’s more, in his private life the individualwould never totally escape public surveillance,thus making no allowance for potential disrup-tion and disturbance of the homogenized andunified socialist collective.

The child was deemed a major moderniz-ing resource for society. As Bulgarian socialistchildren were growing in the best of all possi-ble social regimes, what they needed was to befully incorporated and integrated in thesocial(ist) reality. A key role in this regard

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played schooling and education. School wasthe public-disciplinary space that had to incul-cate the legitimate modes of conduct, the ac-ceptable principles of ‘vision and division’(Bourdieu, 1989: 14-25) of the world. By the

means of the overt and covert curriculumschooling entered the individual space of thestudents, thus naturalizing the existing socialhierarchies and stratifications and presentingthem as the only normal, meaningful order of the existing world.

Here I intentionally label the space of school ‘publicly-disciplinary’, drawing prima-rily on Bundzhulov’s observations about theorder of socialist living. In his book Hetero-

topies (1997: 70-75) he points out that in thesocialist world the two aspects of power (theindividualizing, i.e. the disciplinary and thenormalizing, i.e. the public) merged into onedue to the invalidation of the modern norma-tive orders. Whereas in western democraciesthese two spheres (the public and the discipli-nary) of living remained separated, in socialistBulgaria the difference between the norma-tive/normal and disciplinary was eradicated.The individuals became visible to the author-ities not because they diverted from the norm;the state would recognize and notice the peo-ple only when/if they tried to adhere to thenorm. The norm of socialist living, however,was always removed somewhere ahead in theutopian future. The individuals had to disci-pline their bodies and summon their strengthin a constant attempt to reach their civil, pub-lic status of normal people: “A person is asmuch liberated as he or she has made the ob-

jective requirements of life his or her own viewpoint, attitude and need” – this mightsound similar to Bourdieu’s definition of habi-tus2, but is in fact a quote from Makarenko(Chakarov, 1979: 89) 3.

Before I move on to a brief summary of the controversial history of the English Lan-guage Schools in the educational field of so-cialist Bulgaria, I must add one more detail tothe theoretical framework that gives a vantagepoint to my research. In a subtle analysis of theexamination situation Deyanov deepens our

understanding of the hidden interactions be-tween the private and public in socialistschool. Working on Foucault’s model of theexamination situation, Deyanov (1994: 85- 92)points out that what becomes evident in this

situation is the consolidation between hierar-chical surveillance and normalizing sanction.Along with this, however, we can also see acomplex interaction between the overt andcovert, between the public and private. Thespace of school (and more specifically – thespace of the classroom) is the place where thestill unregulated, personal and influenced by the family habitus of the student finds its pub-lic expression. The examination, the evalua-

tion is a process which transmits the personaltime of the student into the classroom. The asif unsupervised, unintegrated time of theyoung individual is actually incorporated inthe regime of schooling. While examining, theteacher, in fact, becomes aware to what extentthe student has devoted his ‘domestic time’ toaspiring to the state prescribed norms/the ex-cellent grade. Thus, the examination is the sur-reptitious way through which the official timeoccupies the private temporality, making itsusceptible to normalization, unification andsurveillance.

Furthermore – and it is clearly underlinedby Deyanov – the examination is the ‘magical’(i.e. irrational) fashion that facilitates thequasi-legitimate ‘publication’ (making public)of the students’ interests and intentions. Thefamily habituses, competences and incompe-tence that the students inherit through theirfamily background become publicly (in)ac-

ceptable. It is the decisive role of the teacher asa ‘consecrator’, an executive body of theschooling institution that determines theup/down-going social mobility and biograph-ical trajectory of the student.

This is where the arguments of my articlestart. The current text is part of a bigger proj-ect aiming at researching the place of Englishlanguage schools within the educational fieldof socialist Bulgaria – who initiated their es-tablishment; how the necessity of such schoolswas articulated; which Bulgarian adolescents


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were summoned to the schools and deemedloyal enough to be exposed to the dangers of the constant interaction with the ‘capitalist lan-guage and culture’ and yet keep their trustwor-thiness. Another important aspect of the study

is to trace the channels of selection and accessto these places, as well as the incorporation of these schools within the mass school network.

After Bulgarian Communist Party took power in 19484 and became the sole politicalsubject that claimed to represent and defendthe interests of the people of Bulgaria, it closedall schools funded or supported by private andforeign organizations. With Decree 1445 from2nd August 1948 the activities of these schools

were discontinued. Thus, all schools wherewestern foreign languages were taught disap-peared from the educational map of Bulgaria.This initiative was part of the state’s efforts tohomogenize and integrate the educational sys-tem of the country. Having proclaimed the es-tablishment of a completely new society, whereequality and emancipation regulated the socialorder, the state had to make sure that the rightsteps in that direction were taken. The purgingof the schooling system from past residues, for-eign influences and unsupervised channels of education was part of the efforts to provideequal opportunities for everybody. The statecould guarantee this through unified, central-ized rules for upbringing of reliable and effi-cient young citizens. Along with this, however,the political authorities were aware of the factthat the lack of cadres who could adequately use foreign languages and communicate withthe West might lead to isolation of Bulgaria and

damage its international image. Therefore, assoon as they closed the private schools, the au-thorities initiated the foundation of a similartype – this time state-controlled – of school.Not only did it have to provide excellent educa-tion in the subjects of the mass secondary school curriculum, but it also had to supply in-tensive foreign language teaching. The task as-signed to it was to educate such model citizenswho, in spite of being constantly exposed towestern influences, would keep their loyalty tothe communist creeds and promote Bulgaria’s

communist achievements to the West. Thatwas how the first state school for foreign lan-guage learning appeared in 1950 (Secondary School for Learning of Foreign Languages –SSLFL). It was housed in the buildings of the

closed American college in Lovech and had to,literally, take its place. The SSLFL was sup-posed to transform the illegitimate culturalcapital the college had used to produce, to in- visibly incorporate it in the new social orderand make it function for the sake of the social-ist state. It comes as no surprise, however, thatas soon as the school was founded, it acquireda dubious publicity. Although it was supposedto alter the goals of the foreign language learn-

ing and adapt them to the communist pur-poses, the school was still considered an heirof bourgeois traditions and treated with a lot of suspicion by the general public and the author-ities themselves. Furthermore, the fact that thestudents of the school were incessantly exposedto cultural influences coming from the Westturned them into a potential threat for the ho-mogeneity and uniformity of Bulgaria’s social-ist society. As a result, the admission to thisschool had to be closely supervised. In order tomake sure that the students accepted in this ex-traordinary space were really reliable, the au-thorities kept under a strict control theselection procedures. The ones admitted to theschool had to demonstrate not only excellentacademic results but also (this was even moreimportant) an irreproachable family back-ground: children and grandchildren of ex-par-tisans and of current members of thebureaucratic state apparatus were much

favoured since the family relationships wereseen as a kind of guarantee for ideological loy-alty.

The selection at the entrance, however, didnot facilitate the school’s incorporation in theeducational field of socialist Bulgaria. In fact,this caused further problems, because theschool acquired an image of an elite place, aplace producing distinctions in a society thatrevered equality and collectivism. Over theyears the access to this type of schools was lib-eralized due to the fact that the number in-


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creased5. Still, the pressure at the entrance wasgreat and they were decidedly more difficultto access than the mass secondary schools.They were considered to provide a better edu-cation (not only in terms of foreign lan-guages). What is more important, they offeredbetter career opportunities and prospects foran uprising social status in a society wheremost people had very limited opportunities todistinguish themselves.

In this current study the focus is mainly on the English Language School of Sofia. Thereasons for this are, primarily, because it wasthe first socialist school where English lan-guage teaching was laid a special emphasis on.

Another important feature of the school wasthat, along with the rest of the cultural and so-cial capital it incorporated, Sofia English Lan-guage School brought the capital of beingsituated in the state’s capital – a fact that can-not be discounted, bearing in mind that mi-gration to big cities, especially to Sofia, wasrestricted by numerous bureaucratic and legalinstruments. Thus, the location additionally augmented the symbolic capital of the school.

What stays in the center of my research isnot only the reconstruction of the official in-stitutional history of the school, but also theintricate everyday-life happenings within theplace. Therefore, in my work I rely on archivaldocuments as well as on oral narratives of for-mer students of the school. References to per-sonal memories prove to be significant, as they can give us a more detailed understanding of the everyday life in the institution. It isthrough personal memories and testimonies

that the history of institutions, formal eventsand depersonalized publicity can obtain den-sity and richness. The microhistory of daily life, individual stories and interactions can ac-tually show us how ‘institutions think’ (Dou-glas 1986). The sections of mixture betweenthe micro- and macro, the areas of contact en-able us to see how people lived ‘real socialism’,how they followed but also adapted the rulesof socialist life, attempting simultaneously tomeet the public-disciplinary requirements andmake time/space for their own personal aspi-

rations and ambitions.Without underestimating the significance

of archival documents, I base my research pre-dominantly on personal narratives and life sto-ries, believing that these particular utterances

of real everyday life could demonstrate how institutional history structured and shapedpersonal experiences; the oral stories, how-ever, could also show us how at the level of theindividual and experiential, institutional his-tory was sometimes sabotaged, reworked, evencontested. Searching for an insight of the his-tory of Sofia English Language School I de-cided to refer to the memories of formerstudents. School-day experiences can be nar-

rated because they are structured around theday-to-day interactions with teachers andclassmates. What can be remembered and ar-ticulated are the stories that involve particularteachers (with their peculiarities and specifici-ties).

The statement that memories are particu-laristic and individual, of course, comes as nonews to students of oral history. In fact, this isone of the main epistemological argumentsagainst the use of memories as historical re-sources – they have problematic truth-value.When we bear in mind, however, that school-day recollections do not reflect factual reality but individual perceptions, we can read in thememories the students’ potential for subver-sion and resistance.

Although the reminiscences construct animage of the teacher as an embodiment / face/ façade of the schooling institution that coulddistinguish the students and make them think

their ‘normal’ biographical trajectory, they alsodemonstrate that the students were able toshift the position of the teacher in the field of the school, to change authorities and stakes.

In the course of the interviews 6 I con-ducted in order to record school-day memo-ries, however, my initial assumption that thenarratives would shed light on the informal,counter-culture of Sofia English LanguageSchool was considerably shaken. The narra-tives of the respondents are not stories of re-sistance, subcultures and informal groups that


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contested the imposed modes of conduct.Rather, they are fairly monolithic and repeti-tive constructions that do not differ much fromthe official, self-congratulatory fashion of speaking about Sofia English Language School

(and socialist education in general), en-trenched in the public pedagogical discoursebefore 1989.

This, in fact, is the main challenge that thecurrent analysis faces. The task that I set is tomake sense of the way these memories actual-ize the past, how their embeddedness in thepast is articulated in the present and to whatextent this articulation can unproblematically be integrated in contemporary life. Another

important task is to go beyond the solidity of the narratives that construct a stable and seem-ingly impenetrable image (of the school andthe teachers) with the aim to work out what thememories silenced or ‘forgot’ so that the pastappears acceptable today.

The act of narrating the life in Sofia Eng-lish Language School faces the narrator with afew problems. As I mentioned earlier – thisschool could not be easily integrated in the ed-ucational field of socialist Bulgaria: on the onehand, it was supposed to educate the future rul-ing elite (it created differences in a society of equality); on the other, the authorities and thepublic regularly criticised the students forbeing ‘spoilt’, ‘lazy’ and demonstrating outrightdisdain to physical labour (the school did notfulfill the authentic goals of socialist education– love for hard physical work).

Along with this we should add another as-pect the narrators have to deal with – they are

supposed to talk about their socialist school-day memories now – a moment when the mas-ter narrative about the victorious march of communism has lost its hold and legitimatepower. The way in which the former studentshandle the arbitrary past and present publicity of Sofia English Language School and show theschool years as an integral (having a positiveimpact on their contemporary life) part of theirbiography is worth the attention. As I men-tioned above, they do not tell stories about mis-rule and disobedience; neither do they try to

devaluate the time spent there by presentingthemselves as victims of a dehumanizing, de-grading institution. Their stories are not mem-ories of resistance and risk, but stories of gratefulness and praise. They present the years

in the school with an uncritical and unques-tionable admiration to the educational stan-dards the institution set. They view thecompetences and skills obtained in the schoolas ‘pure knowledge’ – politically innocent andirrelevant to the ruling order. Therefore, the re-spondents refer to their school-day past as aperiod that does not need critical reflection orreconsideration. Since the time spent at theschool provided them with absolute, irrefutable

knowledge, it can easily be integrated in thepresent. The rationality of the competencesand skills acquired there cannot be tainted by political contingences; hence, the acquiredabilities serve as an explanation of the currentsocial acceptability of the narrator. The school-day past has relevance to the present-day wor-thiness and meaningful existence of therespondent.

“Of course, the others were jealous, but that’snormal – we were the best! I hope everybody else (from the other schools – N.G) will for- give me, but it’s without a doubt – this wasthe best school”(interview recorded on15.09.2005)“We studied a lot, we studied hard… I’m grateful to all my teachers for all the toughtime they gave us!”(interview recorded on10.10.2005).After asking one of the respondents, who

was complaining of the boring textbooks they

had to use, what motivated her to study sohard, slightly annoyed she answered:“What do you mean by ‘what’? The pure de-sire to know, to learn! Nothing else! Nothing else!”(interview recorded on 25.09.2005)In a similar vein another respondent, now ateacher, pointed out that the school was opento people with “a Renaissance attitude toknowledge”(interview recorded on14.09.2005).All the respondents treated knowledge (the

knowledge the school produced) as an absolute


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referent that could compensate for all the con-tradictions and misdeeds of state socialism.They deemed knowledge ideologically inno-cent. Therefore, their memories refuse to see(and to make visible) the connection between

the school curriculum and the prescriptions of the socialist state. They discount the fact thatwhat this school with limited admittancetaught was designed by the state. The curricu-lum produced loyal citizens of socialist Bul-garia and guaranteed the inculcation of thoseprinciples of vision and division which wouldreinforce the social order. The narrators, how-ever, prefer to ignore the interrelation betweenpower and knowledge. By leaving unheeded

the political indebtedness of the acquiredknowledge, they can claim recognition and au-thority in the present.

Inasmuch as all memories (retroactively)restore in the present a kind of lack, therecorded reminiscences about the socialistschool commemorate the stable, unified andhomogeneous picture of the world that socialschooling provided. Praising today the ab-soluteness and completeness of the knowledgegained in the English School, these narrativesmanifest longing for universality. What is si-lenced or forgotten here is the successful ‘private’ manipulation of this ‘universal’knowledge; the narratives leave unheeded themoments when they skillfully made use of theacquired competences to advance their ownpersonal biography.

Similar interplay between the official andthe private, between the public and personalcan be traced in the image of the teacher the

memories construct.Whenever asked about recollections of impressive teachers, all respondents answeredthat all their teachers were exceptional.

“There were no bad teachers…They wereall undeniable specialists” (interviewrecorded on 16.04.2005)“On the whole, all our teachers were unbi-ased. They did not favour students only be-cause their mother or father might havebeen an important person… you see, I like you more because your father is whoever

and I’ll back you regardless of what youknow or don’t know. There were no suchthings. On the contrary, they harassed us. If you ask me, studying in this school was con-stant harassment”(interview recorded on

11.10.2005).Another respondent stated:“As far as studying was concerned, therewere no privileges. They (the teachers –N.G) even bullied more those who came from abroad, whose parents were diplomatsor had worked in embassies”(interviewrecorded on 15.09.2005).These comments represent a monolithic,

unified image of the teacher as an unquestion-

able source of knowledge. When I say ‘unques-tionable’, I mean a specific statement of arespondent. Commenting on the differencebetween the contemporary educational systemand her memories from secondary school, shelamented:

“Back then I would never dare questionwhat the teacher said – be it what they taught or their appearance and clothes. Thiswas inconceivable”(interview recorded on14.09.2005)The quick overview of these comments

displays an image of the teacher that totally co-incides with the norm, prescribed by the edu-cational institution, for this social role. Theteacher is someone who educates and treats ina principled, rational fashion; s/he is supposedto produce equal, loyal, normal individuals.The authority of the teacher originates fromthe authority of the institution. The closer s/heis to the habitus of the institution, the more

perfectly s/he presents the institution itself.S/He is the face of the ratio.Nevertheless, as the narratives of the

alumni unfold, this uncontested image of theteacher begins to disintegrate:

“Bad teachers couldn’t survive for long there… I remember we had a really lousy one. She couldn’t survive and quit”(inter-view recorded on 6.04.2005).“We had a teacher in Literature. She’d come from Varna because her husband wassomebody… that kind of thing. Now, to tell


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you the truth, the first few lessons were acomplete disaster, even we could easily senseit. But this didn’t stop her from becoming one of the best teachers in her field. Some-how, the whole staff supported and lifted

them (the bad teachers – N.G) up and they strove to get better…”(interview recorded on11.10.2005).Apart from the colleagues, other factors

that had a stake in ‘lifting up’ and ‘tumblingdown’ the teacher’s authority were the unoffi-cial, but clearly visible and audible gestures of the students in the classrooms.

The above-mentioned commentaries onthe ‘bad teachers’ present a turning point in the

memories from the school – the monolithicimage of the teacher starts to stratify and disin-tegrate. The memories begin to distinguish theteachers, outlining their specific places in thefield of the school not only according to theiradherence to the educational norm, but alsoaccording to their personal life that finds its en-trance in the classroom. This is the moment toturn back to the initial part of the paper and toreiterate the argument that although the state viewed the children mainly as social materialthat had to be engineered and manipulated, inreality the students were an active side inschool life. Despite not having legitimate andofficially sanctioned resources to representtheir claims, they found ways to express theirinterests, to subvert the dominant rhythm of school life.

Thus, the narratives begin to multiply thehomogeneous image of the ideal teacher fromSofia English Language School; they start ap-

praising the teacher and shifting his/her seem-ingly unquestionable position in the space of the classroom. Surreptitiously the school-day memories begin to construct an image of ateacher, who was not only a face of the institu-tion but also as a person/identity; whose ‘private’, ‘family’ dispositions could obtain apositive or negative ‘public’ sanction. When-ever the respondents mention a particularteacher, they feel obliged to add a few factsabout his or her private life. As if these few factswould make the listener ‘sense’ more inten-

sively the teacher’s professional presence in theclassroom:

“Our teacher in Chemistry – Stoeva –shewas rumoured to have taken part in the par-tisan movement. I don’t know to what ex-

tent it was true but it was part of the legendscirculating around the school”(interviewrecorded on 11.10.2005).“For some time we had a teacher in Englishwho had lived in New York. Her husband was a representative or something in theUN. So she used American spelling. Backthen, of course, we had no idea what Amer-ican spelling, and as good students we beganto notice mistakes in the things she wrote on

the board. And somebody would say, ‘Oh,but this word is spelt with double L’. And she’d say, ‘OK, double L it is’. And thensomebody else would look it up in a diction-ary and say, ‘Well, but it says here you canspell it with one L, too’. And she went on,‘Ok, it could be spelt with one L’. We didn’t consider her a good teacher but at least therewas what to remember her with” (interviewrecorded on 11.10.2005).What becomes evident from these class-

room memories is that the teacher’s private lifealso found its outlet in the classroom and thestudents turned this into an unofficial powerstake that allowed them to change the rules of behaviour in class. The ‘non-institutional’ sur-plus in the habitus of the teacher had the po-tential to change the distribution of powerwithin the classroom. It could actually becomea reason for confirming or contesting the au-thority of the teacher.

One more example. One of the intervie-wees had very good memories, and often men-tioned the name, of her English B teacher 7 –Mary Antonova. (‘Mary’ is the official name of the teacher and this in itself is a symptom of the extraordinary presence of the teacher in thesocialist classroom. ‘Mary’ is not a typical Bul-garian name and sounds unconventional, tosay the least, to the Bulgarian ear). As I learnedfrom the respondent, Mary Antonova had livedin the States for quite some time. This ‘other-ness’, this, as I said before, ‘non-institutional’


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surplus of her life (away from the teachingprofession) could be felt in the classroom.

“She was the Anglo-Saxon type. Lean, tall. A pretty woman. And she could create aspecial atmosphere in class… She was eager

to give her best to everybody. When she gave us something to translate in class, she played quiet music from a portable radio. And the music played, and everybody worked. No fidgeting, complete silence…Then, when we understood that she wasabout to leave the school, we signed a peti-tion and she stayed for one more year. But then she left, or she went to the States. I can’t remember”(interview recorded on

22.09.2005).The memories can give us plenty of otherexamples of similar unregulated invasions of the teacher’s ‘unsupervised’, ‘uninstitution-alised’ private life in the space of the class-room. But only when these undertow streamsencompassed all students, only when they turned the cold and sterile atmosphere of theclassroom into a warm, intimate community,did the teacher receive the unanimous evalu-ation ‘favourite’. Only after the homogeneouscollective of classmates was ludicrously under-played and the formal role interactions dis-placed by ones giving vent to personalexpression, aspirations and stakes, did theteachers obtain their real authority.

“We had pretty liberal teachers, well, they were liberal in their teaching approach, not in their personal interactions with us… wehad an extremely cool class teacher in preparatory class.8 I’ll never forget how on

the very first day at school she came into theclassroom wearing a really short skirt. Wewere lucky, because she won us over withthe way she approached us. We became ateam because of her…(interview recorded on 19.07.2005)What can be stated here as a kind of con-

clusion, is that if we dare to go beyond the sta-ble and uncritical image that the memoriesinitially present, we will be able to see that theeveryday institutional life in the socialistschool was organized around the interaction

between various personal interests, stakes andillusions of the students and the teachers.What gave tangibility to that reality was notonly the official institutional order. Rather, I’dsay that everyday life in Sofia English Lan-

guage School was constructed around the in-teraction of various types of relations – therigid order of disciplinary regime, the ‘domes-ticated’ public life (Creed 1998) and the mo-mentary lapses of authentic publicity.

When we try to analyse these interactionsdeploying the tools of microhistory – theminute, mundane happenings in which thestudents and teachers communicated – we cansee how both sides of these interactions un-

derplayed the rules of the socialist schoolwhile simultaneously staying within theserules. The narratives themselves never get overthe lasting influence of socialist education.They are a symptom of a desire for stable, un-problematised rational knowledge; respec-tively, they construct the image of a teacherwho would be the face and mediator of thisknowledge.

Therefore, the moment when the memo-ries disintegrate the image of the teacher, they are quick to piece it together again. The narra-tives try to ‘forget’, to neglect the multiplicity and diversity of the image, as it would contestthe stability and rationality of the competencesthey obtained at school. The past has to re-main untainted and protected against any crit-ical reflexivity.

What the narrators would always leaveinto oblivion is the fact that the skills and com-petences they acquired at that particular

school were skills and competences taught by socialist school.


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BIBlIOgRAPHY Aries, Philippe. 1962. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life.New York: Vintage Books.

Bundzhulov, Andrei. 1995. Heterotopias . Sofia: Kritika I Human-izam (in Bulgarian).

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judg-ment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice. London-New York: HarvardUniversity Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1989. “Social Space and Symbolic Power” Soci-ological Theory 7 (Spring): 14-25.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (Theory, Culture and Society Series) with Jean-ClaudePasseron. London- New Delhi: Sage Publications.

Chakarov, Naiden. 1979. Proverka I ocenka na truda na uchiteya(Checking and Evaluation of the teacher’s work). Sofia: NarodnaProsveta.

Creed, Gerald. 1998. Domesticating Revolution: From Socialist Re- form to Ambivalent Transition in a Bulgarian Village . University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press.

Deyanov, Deyan. 1994. “Izpitat I kritikata na modernotouchilishte” (The examination and the critique of modern school)Sociological problems 3: 85-92.

Deyanov, Deyan. 1998. “Zagubata na biographichnoto illusio”(The loss of biographical illusio) Sociological problems3-4: 124-139.

Douglas, Mary. 1986. How Institutions Think . Syracuse: SyracuseUniversity Press.

Foucault, M. 1977.1995 Discipline and Punish: the Birth of Prison,trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage.

Hendrick, Harry. 1992. Children and Childhood ReFresh 15 (Au-tumn): 1-4.

Shorter, Edward. 1976. The Making of the Modern Family . New York: Basic Books.

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