Subtitle: Textbook Narratives in Countries with a Legacy of Internal Armed Conflict, 1950 to 2011
published in Eckert. Die Schriftenreihe Studien des Georg-Eckert-Instituts zur internationalen Bildungsmedienforschung, Vol. 141, V&R unipress GmbH, Göttingen, 2016, pp.31-44
Education has long played multiple roles in molding national societies: as an agency of socialization for the young, a mechanism of stratification, and a tool for turning masses into citizens. In recent decades, however, scholars of globalization have documented the profound ways in which economic, political, and cultural globalization has impacted national education systems. [...] The present chapter examines this possibility through longitudinal analysis of a unique cross-national dataset coded from 573 secondary school social sciences and humanities textbooks from 80 countries, published between 1950 and 2011. [The author] argues that education systems in countries with a past of internal conflict face a tension between the valorization of multiple ethnic, racial, and religious minority groups contained within the nation on the one hand and the construction of a cohesive and unified nation on the other. The first part of [her] analysis examines the degree to which discussions of different population groups, their rights, and their marginalization permeate textbooks from countries with a legacy of intrastate war compared to countries without such a legacy. [She] finds that the recent rise of textbook narratives around diversity is rather less pronounced in postconflict countries. Given this finding, the second part of the analysis reveals that instead of incorporating recent multicultural narratives, textbooks in postconflict countries appear to place significantly stronger emphasis on celebrating a distinctive and unified nationality. These findings carry important implications for understanding the legacy of violent nation-state contestation in curricular materials in an era of pervasive educational globalization.
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