Preparing for a “Good Life”: Extracurriculars and the Romanian Middle Class

Abstract

Investment in an “education with an edge” in the form of costly extracurriculars is a growing phenomenon in urban post-socialist Romania. To a certain extent, this is a typical strategy of middle-class reproduction, more intensely pursued in contexts where middle-class reproduction is imagined as uncertain. However, in a post-socialist context, a sense of fragility permeates both the experience of the present and imaginings of the future. Despite its political idealisation and programmatic support, Romania’s middle class remains of modest dimensions and is extending itself to live a “good enough life.” Parents’ realisation that their children might experience even more difficulties than themselves prompt them to use their economic capital to acquire as many and varied cultural and social resources as possible. An ethnographic investigation of this experience from both the parents’ and children’s perspectives throws light on the ongoing processes of class formation under post-socialist conditions of possibility.