Educația politică în România comunistă

Abstract

In the article entitled „Political Education” there is an analysis made on the subtle ways in which the
communist regime was using indoctrination in Romania, towards obtaining the „new man”. We encounter
repetitions of some specific terms that the socialist and communist ideologies are using (sometimes national
communism). The idea of „semantic satiation” is developed and it refers to the fact that the repetition of
some terms – and even ideas – can lead to a „lapse of meaning” of the words, leading to the „understanding”
of those ideas/words as being normal and true, and by that, people considered to be part of the „normal” life
back then. One example could be the overuse of the term (political) „party” and this can lead to the loss of
meaning of the word so people tend to consider that they fully understand its’ meaning. The interviews and
the analysis of school manuals, articles, chants, slogans and the language used in official documents, represent
the key argument of the position that the paper is approaching – and that is the idea of indoctrination
and the subtlety in which this indoctrination was used – really show an inexcusable moment in Romania’s
communist history, which produced negative effects in today’s society. Other analyses including school
manuals from Romanian’s educational system – both the images and the texts – , the chants and slogans
frequently used in the day-to-day life of the Romanian citizens for four decades, organizations created for
giving the impression of omnipresence from the Romanian Communist Party in people’s life starting from
childhood to old age, conclude some types of thinking that we can possibly observe today as a consequence
of the formal and informal educational system at that time.