Socio-cultural phenomenon of childhood in the aspect of ethnopedagogy

The paper is devoted to the functioning of the socio-cultural phenomenon of childhood in the Pskov folklore discourse. Pskov tales were chosen as the object of study, since narrative texts are the most important units of communicative dialectology, and it is the dialect system of the national language that explicates traditional culture. A fairy tale is a result of collective creativity and at the same time retains individual creativity features. The work was carried out in the aspect of philological regional studies problems – the study of Pskov folk speech and Pskov folklore. The paper examines the traditional model of the family and its hierarchy as a basis for folk culture constancy, forms a collective image of the child, focuses on the issues of ethnopedagogy. The specificity of the material sharpens the discursive aspect of the topic and allows one to study verbal forms of being in the sphere of «children’s», as well as the ways of its representation in the language. The authors come to the conclusion that fairy-tale texts reflecting the world of childhood are built according to the principle of oppositional relations, traditional for folklore genres. The dualism of good and evil, life and death, one’s own and another’s act as culturological constants around which private transformations are built, reflecting the semantics of the subculture of childhood: parents – children, daughter – son, native – non-native, large families – childlessness and other oppositions. The subculture of childhood of the rural population of the Pskov Region appears as a complex socio-cultural phenomenon, organized according to the principle of binary oppositions, which is an integral part of traditional culture.