National Literacies in Education: Historical Reflections on the Nexus of Nations, National Identity, and Education (Historical Studies in Education) 3031417615, 9783031417610

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HISTORICAL STUDIES IN EDUCATION

National Literacies in Education Historical Reflections on the Nexus of Nations, National Identity, and Education Edited by Stephanie Fox · Lukas Boser

Historical Studies in Education Series Editors

William J. Reese Department of Educational Policy Studies University of Wisconsin-Madison Madison, WI, USA John L. Rury, Education University of Kansas Lawrence, KS, USA

This series features new scholarship on the historical development of education, defined broadly, in the United States and elsewhere. Interdisciplinary in orientation and comprehensive in scope, it spans methodological boundaries and interpretive traditions. Imaginative and thoughtful history can contribute to the global conversation about educational change. Inspired history lends itself to continued hope for reform, and to realizing the potential for progress in all educational experiences.

Stephanie Fox  •  Lukas Boser Editors

National Literacies in Education Historical Reflections on the Nexus of Nations, National Identity, and Education

Editors Stephanie Fox Department of Education University of Vienna Vienna, Austria

Lukas Boser School of Education University of Applied Sciences and Arts Muttenz, Schwyz, Switzerland

ISSN 2945-7173     ISSN 2945-7181 (electronic) Historical Studies in Education ISBN 978-3-031-41761-0    ISBN 978-3-031-41762-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41762-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Andriy Onufriyenko / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

For Daniel In Memory of Bob Cowen

Foreword

Everyone is familiar with the old stereotype: the “absent-minded” professor with a nose in a book, closeted away in an ivory tower, and disconnected from the real world. But the research pursued by professors, independent scholars, and graduate students has often been shaped by the world in which they lived. To understand any historical account, know something about the historian and the context in which the history was written. As technology, government policies, and market forces transformed the world economy over the last generation, it encouraged some historians to look beyond their own borders to better illuminate the past and the present. They generated a remarkable range of innovative scholarship, from border- and trans-national studies to global histories. Even though the internet, social media, corporate expansion, and explosion of global trade produced a more interdependent world, nationalism remained persistently strong. The dream that liberal democracy would triumph everywhere after the Berlin Wall crumbled in 1989 proved illusory, especially as conservative movements elevated charismatic leaders to power. That happened in places without deeply rooted democratic traditions and in nations that had long served as models of liberal democracy. Why this occurred has now led some scholars to reassess the origins of nation-states and resurgent nationalism. This volume edited by Stephanie Fox and Lukas Boser reflects the increasingly global reach of research in the field of history of education and in allied areas of study. Its contributors have been meeting for a decade, demonstrating the powerful role that friendship, shared interests, international conferences, inclusive professional organizations, and other vii

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mutually reinforcing factors can play in contemporary scholarship. Their essays draw upon an eclectic set of primary and secondary sources, and they demonstrate the scholarly influence of Daniel Tröhler’s ideas about national identity and education. The contributors interrogate the meanings of “nationalism” and “literacy” across time and a remarkable array of geographical contexts, while they keep a discerning eye on both the past and the present. In a challenge to globalist theories of educational development, the essays in National Literacies in Education illuminate how schools—as well as informal agencies of education—have aimed to acculturate children since the nineteenth century. As Tröhler and other scholars emphasize, many nations by the late nineteenth century established compulsory school systems and turned to these institutions to address a host of social problems and to foster loyalty and devotion. Children were taught not only basic literacy and numeracy but also to love their homeland and master a common language. Contributors to this volume highlight yet other dimensions of nation-building as well. Even if lessons taught are not always learned, children have been trained to embrace a sense of national pride and patriotic zeal in a variety of ways. Together they help sustain national ideals despite the ongoing power of globalization. University of Wisconsin-Madison Madison, WI, USA The University of Kansas Lawrence, KS, USA

William J. Reese John Rury

Contents

Part I Introduction   1 1 Engaging  with National Literacies in Education  3 Stephanie Fox and Lukas Boser Part II National Literacies in Education Research  21 2 The  Subjective Necessity of National Literacy 23 William F. Pinar 3 Forms  of Confession Versus Forms of Governing. An Appraisal of a Double Analytical Concept as a Precondition for Educational Nationalism Research and Beyond 31 Mette Buchardt 4 Nations  and Comparative Educations: Reflecting Comparatively on Pedagogies, Performances, and Politics 41 Robert Cowen

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5 Answering  the Call for Research on Nationalism and Education with International, Historical, Multi-case Discursive Studies 55 Nicole Gotling Part III From People to National Citizens  67 6 Les Femmes Sont-Elles Françaises, Oui ou Non? Education, Political Exclusion, and the Question of Women’s National Identity in France 69 Sophie Pia Stieger 7 Same  But Different. Notions of ‘Feebleminded’ and ‘Imbecile’ Future Citizens in German-Speaking Countries at the Turn of the Twentieth Century 81 Michèle Hofmann 8 Reinventing  the Link Between Education and the Nation via Imagination and Emotions: The National Literacy of The Wonderful Adventures of Nils 95 Johannes Westberg 9 Kapara on You: National Literacy in Israel Between Judgment Day and Everyday Judgment111 Marva Shalev Marom Part IV The Nation in School and Curriculum 123 10 Curriculum,  National Identity, and National Literacy125 Berit Karseth 11 ‘National  Literacy’ in an Imperial Setting: The Strange Case of Istanbul’s Robert College143 Kevser Muratović

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12 National  Literacy and Institutional Models: The Case of Colegios Nacionales in Argentina Between the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries159 Felicitas Acosta Part V The Nation in a Globalized World 175 13 Testing  the Exception: The Curious Embrace of International Comparisons in American Education Discourse177 Ethan Hutt 14 Spectacular  Digitalization: Exploring the Role of Discourse and Education Technologies in (Re)producing the Imagined Community of the Nation189 Nelli Piattoeva 15 What’s  So New About ‘New’ Nationalism in Higher Education?203 Hans Schildermans Part VI Commentary 217 16 Reflections  on States, Schools, and National Literacies219 David Labaree Part VII Conclusion 227 17 The  Multiple Perspectives on National Literacies229 Stephanie Fox and Lukas Boser Index241

Notes on Contributors

Felicitas Acosta  is a full-time researcher at the Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento and a professor at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina. She teaches history of education, comparative education, and educational foundations. Her research interests focus on the expansion of schooling from a historical and transnational perspective, including international educational reforms, secondary education expansion, and, more recently, standardized assessments and innovative finance in education. In 2019, she was awarded the Margaret Sutherland Prize in Comparative Education by the Comparative Education Society in Europe (CESE). Since 2021, she has served as a member of the International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE) Executive Committee. She is also NORRAG NSI’s Spanish editor and the NORRAG regional coordinator for Hispanophone Latin America and the Caribbean. She has also served as a research consultant for international organizations such as ECLAC, IIEP, NORRAG, OEI/EUROsoCIAL, UNESCO, and UNICEF. Lukas  Boser, PhD, is a senior lecturer at the School of Education, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland, and at the University of Basel. His research interests cover theories and practices of measuring, as well as the education of national citizens in Europe during the long nineteenth century. He has been a guest professor at the University of Vienna, a visiting scholar at Stanford University, and an honorary fellow at the University of Wisconsin-­Madison. His most recent publications include a book chapter on how the stories of national heroes xiii

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were told in Swiss, Danish, and Scottish textbooks (together with Nicole Gotling and Veronica Maricic, 2023) and a book chapter on the use of educational statistics in nation-building processes (together with Rebekka Horlacher and Sébastien Akira Alix, 2023). Mette Buchardt  is a professor and Head of Centre for Education Policy Research, Aalborg University, Aalborg and Copenhagen, Denmark. Her research comprises the interdisciplinary field of welfare- and social-state history, church, and theology history and the history of education with an emphasis on the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. She specializes in the relation between education- and social reform in the European states, for example, modernization and secularization, and the influence of migration on welfare state development historically and at present. Buchardt has been holding visiting professorships and scholarships at, for example, the history departments at the University of Jyväskylä, Stockholm University, Umeå University, and Nordeuropa-Institut, Humboldt University; the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, University of WisconsinMadison; and the Section for Church History, University of Oslo. Robert Cowen  is an Emeritus Professor of Education at the Institute of Education, University College London (UCL). Before joining the Institute, he worked as a school teacher and, later, in teacher education in London and then as an academic, teaching sociology and comparative education, at American and Australian universities. His work as a specialist in comparative education has given him the chance to work in or visit for extended periods of time East Asia, Latin America, and the USSR as well as Europe. He has a strong interest in higher education systems––he edited the 1996 (World) Yearbook of Education––and he retains comparative higher education as one of his main interests. See R. Cowen (2013). A Universidade e atuais desafios: mercado, mobilidade e performatividade. (introduction by Luciola Santos). Curitiba: Editora CRV. His work is on the theoretical condition of comparative education. Illustratively, see R.  Cowen (2023), Comparative Education: Then, Now, and Next, International Encyclopaedia of Education (Fourth Edition), Oxford: Elsevier. 11–18. He is a former president and now an honorary fellow of the Comparative Education Society in Europe (CESE), and one of his professional pleasures and privileges is working on the editorial board of Comparative Education.

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Stephanie Fox  is a research assistant at the University of Vienna in the Department of Education. Her research interests deal with epistemological configurations of knowledge (production) and linguistics on a firstlanguage level as well as on an ideological level following the linguistic turn. She investigates power structures within and between institutions and nations, traveling ideas, and, related to this, with nations and nationalisms. In her work, she traces ideological languages in education research. She has been a research fellow at Stanford University (2019) and a lecturer at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. She received a Mobility Fellowship from the University of Vienna for a scholarship at the University of Chicago (2022). Her most recent publications are Linguistic Turn (Springer, 2023) and a chapter on national languages in education (2023). Nicole  Gotling  is a postdoctoral researcher with the Foundations of Education team at the University of Vienna and a project member at the University of Vienna’s Center for Teaching and Learning. Her research interests include, among others, the historical, international developments of modern nation-states; educational institutions and curricula; educational historiography and geo-­historiography; and reforms, and the intersection and entanglements of these. At the same time, she is also interested in analyzing educational theories and theorists in relation to their backgrounds and networks as well as in studying educational systems in and policies for various multilingual and multicultural contexts. Some of her most recent work can be found in the edited volumes Education, Curriculum and Nation-Building (2023) and The Nordic Education Model in Context: Historical Developments and Current Renegotiations (2023) as well as her doctoral dissertation (with the University of Vienna), Framing the National Mind of Students: A Textbook Case of the Prussian Wars (2022). Michèle  Hofmann  is the head of the research center Historical and Comparative Childhood and Youth Studies at the University of Zurich, Institute of Education. Before joining the University of Zurich, she worked as a senior researcher and lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland, School of Education. She holds a master’s degree in History and a PhD in History of Education from the University of Bern. She has been a guest lecturer at the University of Vienna, Humboldt University of Berlin, the University of Fribourg, and the University of Education in Ludwigsburg, as well as a visiting scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and at Stanford University’s

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Graduate School of Education. Her academic interests include the medicalization of education, the history of (special) education in Switzerland, the history of childhood, and historical research methodology. Ethan Hutt  is an associate professor and Gary Stuck Faculty Scholar in Education at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. His research focuses on the relationship between schools, the law, and education policy. In particular, his research explores the historical development, modern use, and ongoing effects of the metrics used to describe and evaluate schools and school systems. He is the co-author of Off the Mark: How Grades, Ratings, and Rankings Undermine Learning (But Don’t Have To) (2023). Berit Karseth  is a professor at the Department of Education, University of Oslo. Her main research and publications are in the fields of education policy, reforms, curriculum studies, and professions. Her contribution is on higher education as well as primary and secondary education. Karseth is, for the time being, the project leader of a large research-based evaluation of the ongoing curriculum reform in Norway, funded by the Directorate of Education and Training (2019–2025). She is also a coleader of the research project Policy Knowledge and Lesson Drawing in Nordic School Reform in an Era of International Comparison (POLNET), funded by the Norwegian Research Council (2018–2023), which has resulted in the open access book Evidence and Expertise in Nordic Education Policy. A Comparative Network Analysis (edited by B. Karseth, K. Sivesind, and G. Steiner-­Khamsi). Karseth was the elected dean of the Faculty of Educational Sciences at the University of Oslo from 2013 to 2016 and is the leader of the research group Curriculum Studies, Educational leadership and Governance (CLEG) at the same institution. She has also served as the president of the Nordic Educational Research Association (NERA). David  F.  Labaree  is Lee L.  Jacks Professor (emeritus) at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education. His research focuses on the historical sociology of American schooling, including topics such as the evolution of high schools, the growth of consumerism, the origins and nature of education schools, and the role of schools in promoting access and advantage more than subject-matter learning. He was president of the History of Education Society and member of the executive board of the American Educational Research Association. The author of eight books,

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his most recent is Being a Scholar: Reflections on Doctoral Study, Scholarly Writing, and Academic Life (2023). He blogs at https://davidlabaree.com/. Marva Shalev Marom  is an educational entrepreneur and a communityengaged scholar working with diverse communities in the IsraeliPalestinian landscape. She earned her PhD from Stanford University specializing in education and Jewish studies. Her dissertation is a collaborative exploration conducted with Ethiopian Israeli teenagers, on the intersection of Jewishness, Blackness, and Israeli nation-­statehood in their experience of Jewish-orthodox public schooling in Israel. She is the founder and leader of two leadership programs in Jewish and informal education, at the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies and Gordon Academic College of Education, respectively, which aim to rise to the tumultuous challenges of present-­day Israel from the depths of Jewish tradition and the breadth of diverse, community-­based educational models. Kevser Muratović  has studied educational sciences, Islamic sciences, and public law at the University of Tübingen, Germany. She is working at the University of Vienna as a research assistant in the department of education. There, she also pursues her dissertation project in the field of history of education. Her work focuses on the intersection of modern schooling, nation-building, and class formation in the Ottoman Empire during the long nineteenth century. In order to grasp the multi-layered and heterogenous context of empire, she deploys an interdisciplinary perspective. Thereby, her research especially concentrates on the enactment and materialization of educational discourses. In previous publications and presentations, she also addressed research topics like traveling ideas, policy transfer, and post-structural historiography. Nelli Piattoeva, PhD, is an associate professor at the Faculty of Education and Culture, Tampere University, Finland, and director of the Research Centre on Transnationalism and Transformation, Tampere University. Her research is motivated by the broad questions about what education does and is asked to do for society, leading to a focus on how education governs, and thence to enquiry into the actors and technologies that are implicated in governing. Her ongoing research examines how the historical role of education as a conduit of national socialization is reenacted today through discourses of digitalization and digital applications constituting contemporary school education. Piattoeva’s primary geographical

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context of research is Russia and the post-Soviet space. Her previous works have been published, among others, in Critical Studies in Education; Journal of Education Policy; Comparative Education Review; Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies; and Learning, Media and Technology. She is the associate editor of Critical Studies in Education. William  F.  Pinar  took his BS in Education at Ohio State University, graduating in 1969. He taught English at the Paul D.  Schreiber High School in Port Washington, New York, from 1969 to 1971, returning to Ohio State to finish his MA in 1970 and then PhD in 1972. He taught at the University of Rochester from 1972 until 1985, when he moved to Louisiana State University, where he taught until 2005, when he accepted a Canada Research Chair at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. In 2019, he was appointed as the Tetsuo Aoki Professor in Curriculum Studies. Among his recent publications are Moving Images of Eternity: George Grant’s Critique of Time, Teaching, and Technology (2019) and A Praxis of Presence (2023). Hans  Schildermans  is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Education, University of Vienna. He wrote Experiments in Decolonizing the University. Towards an Ecology of Study (2021). Currently, he is on the research project “A University for the People. Colonial Frictions, Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Creation of the Future” about the question of how ideas of the university have been articulated and implemented in relation to imaginations of the future and conceptions of the people in times of reform, drawing on three comparative case studies. He has an interest in the politics of (higher) education, critical university studies, educational philosophy and theory, and the historical epistemology of the educational sciences. Sophie Pia Stieger  is a research assistant at the University of Vienna in the Department of Educational Science, where she is also pursuing her doctorate. Her main research interest is the intersection between the history of religion and the history of science, in particular the formation of scientific disciplines during the Enlightenment. In the context of her PhD project, Stieger is exploring religio-­political configurations in eighteenthcentury France that enabled or hindered the emergence of soul-sciences like psychology and related conceptualizations of education. Johannes Westberg  is Professor of Theory and History of Education at the University of Groningen. He served as full professor of education at

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Örebro University, Sweden, 2016–2020. He is scientific leader of the graduate school in applied history of education, senior editor of the Nordic Journal of Educational History, and member of the editorial boards of History of Education and History of Education Quarterly. He has paid particular interest in the rise of mass schooling in the nineteenth century and the expansion of early childhood care and education since the 1960s. His publications include the monograph Funding the Rise of Mass Schooling (2017), the co-edited volume School Acts and the Rise of Mass Schooling (2019), and the conference issue “Rethinking the Social in the History of Education” in Paedagogica Historica (2023).

PART I

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

Engaging with National Literacies in Education Stephanie Fox and Lukas Boser

Traditional philosophy of science is relentlessly individualistic. It focuses on individual agents and on the conditions they should satisfy if their beliefs are to be properly supported. On the face of it, this is a curious limitation, for it is evident that contemporary science (and most science of the past) is a societal activity. Scientists rely on each other for results, samples, techniques, and many other things.

These lines are taken from the entry on ‘philosophy of sciences’ in the online version of the Encyclopedia Britannica (Kitcher, 2023). While we agree with this explanation, we find the reference to ‘many other things’ rather vague and would like to expand on this description further. Specifically, we posit that scientific endeavor greatly benefits from

S. Fox (*) University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] L. Boser University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Fox, L. Boser (eds.), National Literacies in Education, Historical Studies in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41762-7_1

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discussions, feedback, and exchange of ideas from diverse disciplines, as even disagreements and controversies can be viewed as opportunities for further exploration and a pursuit of novel research paths. From the wording used in this excerpt, it is also evident that it primarily relates to natural sciences such as physics, chemistry, and biology. Yet, scholars from other domains, such as the humanities or the social sciences—such as history, philosophy, sociology, or education—also rely on each other for the same reasons. This publication provides ample support for this claim. This book is the latest outcome of close collaboration among members of an intellectual community which was initiated nearly a decade ago. Since then, scholars from diverse fields have attended more or less regular meetings and conferences, but have also engaged in more direct personal and electronic communication to foster the advancement of knowledge. The results of this joint endeavor have been published in books, special issues, and journal articles. While the research topics and methodologies might have varied, the overarching message from this work is that much more needs to be learned about how and why public mass schooling has been involved in the making of national citizens of modern nation-states. In particular, the debate is still ongoing on the prior and current correlations of public mass schooling with—and consequences for—religion, culture, academia, or society. Research on these diverse aspects is grounded in the work of the Professor of Foundations of Education (Allgemeine Erziehungswissenschaft) in Vienna, Daniel Tröhler. Professor Tröhler has not only presented at or has organized most of the meetings mentioned above, but he has also published abundantly on the subject, edited books, and encouraged his colleagues and doctoral students to do the same. Over time, our intellectual community consisting of scholars from almost all over the world emerged. Having said this, let us elaborate a little further on the nature of this so-called ‘intellectual community’. In his book Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson famously explained that the imagined national community is, at its core, a group of ‘fellow readers’ (Anderson, 2006: 46). This definition is rooted in the premise that all but the smallest of communities are imagined, given that their members do not know each other personally and thus rely on certain concepts and ideas for the formation of their identity. As Anderson argues, such close personal bonds are not necessary, as community membership can be based on shared beliefs and worldviews rather than blood ties or personal acquaintance. The same can be said of an intellectual community as well, as those who read and discuss the same papers, books, and essays; who work on related or similar topics,

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and who present their findings at conferences, allowing others to critique their work through peer reviews, recommendations, and feedback, form a community, even if some of its members have never met. In a certain way, our intellectual community stands the tradition of the Republic of Letters. This concept dates back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the Republic of Letters operated as an intellectual community that transcended the walls of university buildings, learned societies, territorial borders, and language barriers. Still, to call such an initiative an international movement would be anachronistic, since modern nation-states did not exist at the time. Today, however, they do exist, and therefore the intellectual community collaborating on this book is truly international. While international cooperation is not a recent phenomenon, its value is increasingly being recognized in academia as it is perceived as an indicator of good quality of both the research process and its outcome. However, this is not the reason for emphasizing the fact that this book is the result of the collaboration of an international intellectual community. Rather, our aim is to highlight the value of its internationality in the pursuit of factors that have contributed to the emergence of different national educational systems and their influence on the way we live and think. Its further objective is to identify and compare the diverse ‘national thought styles’ in which our respective as well as collective research is embedded (Tröhler, 2018; Fox, 2020). In this context, we understand the nation as a multi-layered concept. On the one hand, it has produced the historical phenomena (i.e., national educational systems, national curricula, the formation and education of national citizens) that we can observe and analyze. On the other hand, it provides a political, ideological, and epistemological framework in which our analyses of those phenomena are embedded. Thus, the contemporary understanding of nation is both the enabling and the limiting factor when attempting to present and justify any argument and conduct research on this complex phenomenon. This conundrum has brought together the community that has produced this book, as we all have a shared interest in the entanglement of nation and education as historical phenomena––always sustained, challenged, and driven by Daniel Tröhler (for a more profound discussion of the research gap(s) the texts in this book address see the concluding chapter by Fox and Boser).

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Nation, Nationalism, and Education For researchers in the fields of history of education, comparative education, curriculum theory, or educational policy, nation seems to be an obvious research topic, given that since the nineteenth century, the nation-state has been an important reference point for the development of educational systems. Thus, it has also played an instrumental role in the formation of various educational institutions and their respective academic levels that are integrated into these systems, from kindergarten to higher education. Since the inception of the nation-state, national curricula have been adopted in many countries, including those that take great pride in their federalist school systems, such as Switzerland. Such a unified approach seems to suggest that national standards are beneficial in harmonizing schooling, and thus in influencing the educational attainment of a nation. This view is also supported by the fact that even universities, which are often international in scope, are nevertheless referred to as U.S., French, German, Swiss, Dutch, Canadian, British, and so on, academic institutions, which carries certain clout in the international community (for a more profound discussion of how universities are affected by nationalism and globalism see the chapter by Hans Schildermans). Such preconceptions prevail even if staff working at these universities are often foreign-­ born and do not think of themselves and their work in national terms. Still, they cannot deny that their work is financed by national research funds; that they are members of national research associations such as AERA, AECSE, BERA, LuxERA, DGfE, SGBF, and ÖFEB; and that they publish their results in national journals (Fox, 2023a). Moreover, as indicated above, the nation or nation-state not only provides the structural framework for research, but also shapes national frames of thought, or ‘national thought styles’ (Fox, 2020: 196), which are in turn influenced by nationalized histories. National(ized) thought styles (pre-)determine what constitutes important or good research in the first place and how scientists understand the research they do (as discussed by Robert Cowen in this book). This is not surprising, given that nation is a premise for social and cultural (and even ethnic or religious) organized life, which thus extends to formal education as well as academic research. In this context, nationalism––in its various forms––has for centuries served as an ideology that helps people from different social strata make sense of the meaning and role of nation in their lives. In the late nineteenth century, nation and

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nationalism were particularly important for structuring and understanding the social world in which people lived, as evident from Ernest Renan’s attempt to address his famous question ‘What is a Nation?’ in 1882 (Renan, 1882/2018). The motives behind this endeavor can be found in the growing national and nationalist aspirations in Europe at the time, yet Renan’s thoughts on the matter remain one of the most important frames of reference for discussions about the nature of nations and nationalism to this day. This is not a coincidence given that throughout most of the twentieth century, especially during World War I and World War II, nation remained an important social and political category, not least because it was an uncommitted nationalism that helped to fuel these wars. However, as observed by Umut Özkirimli, ‘it is striking that nations and nationalism have only been a peripheral concern of social and political theory for much of the twentieth century’ (2017: 4). This attitude changed in the 1980s, when the debate about nations and nationalism was ‘taken to a whole new level’ (ibid.) due to publications such as John Armstrong’s Nations before Nationalism (1982), John Breuilly’s Nationalism and the State (1982), Ernest Gellner’s Nation and Nationalism (1983), Hobsbawm and Ranger’s The Invention of Traditions (1983), and Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983), all printed within two years. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, scholarly interest in understanding the meaning and implications of nation and nationalism somewhat abated as, toward the end of the twentieth century social scientists, including historians of education, started to portray nation and nationalism as relics of a bygone era, implying that these concepts are mostly relevant at times of widespread political conflicts and wars (i.e., WWI, WWII, and the Cold War). Thus, during this period, rather than examining the factors that have contributed to the emergence of nations and nationalism, scholarly interest shifted toward overcoming a specifically national orientation of academic research. Consequently, precedence was given to the international and global circulation of academic publications and the interconnectedness of phenomena under investigation. This new strategy was further supported by the emergence of electronic media and communication technology, which seemingly transformed the entire world into a ‘global village’ (McLuhan, 1962/2011: 25) and apparently relegating the concept of nation into the distant past (for a critical discussion of this assumption see the chapter by Nelli Piattoeva). Yet, as the recent political events have shown, nationalism seems to be on the rise. Some would argue that it was always present but was not

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readily apparent. This is likely the case given that, even at times when nationalist discourses had seemingly been ‘superseded by those new realities of internationalism, multinationalism, or even “late capitalism”’, as Homi K. Bhaba noted in 1990, nations were still important as representations of social life and as systems of cultural meaning (Bhaba, 1990: 1–2). Accordingly, research on the mechanisms behind nationalism and its manifestations (Billig, 1995) or the formation of national identities (Thiesse, 2001) continued. Even Francis Fukuyama, who is credited with sparking a heated debate about whether or not 1989 marked the end of history, acknowledges the persistent interest in nation as the differentiating factor in the increasingly globalized world by writing that nationalism and religion would not disappear as powerful forces shaping the world politics (Fukuyama, 2018). In recent years, however, the tide has turned again not least due to the 2008 economic crisis and its consequences that gave rise to neo-nationalist movements in Europe, America, and Asia, the Alt-Right in the U.S., the AfD in Germany, and the PiS in Poland. As a result, nationalist-oriented politicians such as Donald Trump in the U.S., Victor Orban in Hungary, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom, Éric Zemmour in France, and Vladimir Putin in Russia have garnered considerable support from their electorate. As their voices became more prominent, while the influence and capacity of the international community and its organizations seemingly diminished, the global COVID-19 pandemic provided a convenient excuse for the closing of national borders and fierce competition for vaccines. These issues have been further exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, which has the potential to expand not only across Europe but also escalate into the next world war. These alarming developments prompted scholars around the world to reevaluate the concepts of nation and nationalism (see also Tröhler, 2022). As a result, nation and nationalism are experiencing a revival as research topics in the social and cultural sciences (e.g., Fukuyama, 2018; Assmann, 2020; Stynen et  al., 2020; Kivimäki et al., 2021). Schools are believed to play a crucial role in the acculturation of children into ‘national life’ (Hirsch, 1988: 110; see also the concluding chapter of this book authored by Fox and Boser). This prevalent view is aptly surmised by David Labaree who noted that ‘historically, public schooling has been the midwife of the nation-state, whose viability depends on its ability to convert the occupants of a particular territory into members of an imagined community, who come to see themselves for the first time as

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French, say, or American’ (Labaree, 2018: 9). In short, schools are supposed to provide an institutional environment for preparing future citizens for life in a modern nation-state. While formal education is not the only means for grooming future citizens, civic education imparted in schools is indeed ‘often part of a wider body of cultural knowledge encompassing history, art and the humanities’ (Bénéï, 2005: 9). Accordingly, scholars are interested in elucidating ‘the nature of the relationship between citizenship and education’ (ibid.; see also the chapters authored by Michèle Hofmann, Kevser Muratović, and Johannes Westberg; for the need of more such research see the chapter by Nicole Gotling in this volume). Thus far, this has been achieved by examining what happens in civics, history, and even physical education classes (Meissner, 2009; Busch, 2015; Dahn & Boser, 2015; Horlacher, 2016; Legris, 2017; Gardin & Lenz, 2018; Gotling, 2022), and analyzing school acts, curricula (Boser, 2016; Westberg et al., 2019; see also the chapter by Berit Karseth), textbooks, and public discourses on education (Harp, 1998; Williams, 2014; Gotling, 2020; Muratović & Gimpl, 2020; Hogarth et al., 2021, Kopińska, 2021).

Ideological Languages, Nations, and the Making of Citizens Although in the social, political, and educational sciences, interest in nation and nationalism has surged in recent years, this renewed focus has not led to new theories on these topics. In fact, to explain nations and nationalism, scholars still rely on the theories developed more than three decades ago. The books published by Gellner, Anderson, and Hobsbawm and Ranger celebrate their 40th anniversary this year, and Michael Billig’s seminal work Banal Nationalism (1995) is also more than a quarter-­ century old. The observation that the concepts presented in these books are still frequently used, often by mere mention of the book titles, led German Professor Aleida Assmann to lament that ‘nation discourse [is] degenerating into a zombie discourse’ (Assmann, 2020: 23; our translation). In other words, by referring to these well-known concepts and theories, Assmann argues that the discourse ‘moves in ossified formulations and in predictable trajectories’ (ibid.). Since even Benedict Anderson, who coined the term ‘imagined communities’ admitted that it has since become ‘a pair of words from which the vampires of banality have by now sucked almost all the blood’ (Anderson, 2006: 207), Assmann’s critique does not

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seem entirely unsubstantiated. However, this criticism seems unfair to all scholars who use venerable terms and concepts judiciously and yet seek to expand our theoretical understanding of nation and nationalism. Some scholars, certainly those with the right esprit, can actually be dancing in the dark. In producing this book, we and its other authors certainly do not intend to imply or even suggest that we will solve the problem described by Assmann and Anderson. Nor do we claim to have the silver bullets and garlic cloves that would be needed to dispel the zombies and vampires from the discourse on nation and nationalism. However, we do believe that through our individual and collective contributions we can promote a fruitful line of research that has developed over the past decade and in which many of the authors of this book have been involved without the need to resort to precious metal or acquiring bad breath. Although Marc Bloch warned us against the idol of origins (Bloch, 1992), historians are still tempted to look for origins of diverse phenomena that have evolved over time. In our case, if we want to time-stamp the origins of this specific line of research that has motivated our book, we can point to the inaugural lecture Daniel Tröhler gave in 2018, in a part of which he presented his next research project. Specifically, Tröhler stated that he would ‘devote the next few years to the question of how the nation becomes an essential part of our identity’ (Tröhler, 2018: 185; our translation). While Tröhler’s interest in this topic was not particularly original or innovative, it was highly timely given the rapid changes in the geopolitical arena that were taking place. Still, what national identities are and how they are shaped has already been discussed in a plethora of books, research articles, and essays, pointing some to question if more can be learned on these topics. All that were present at his inaugural lecture already knew that Tröhler did not intend to add more of the same to the existing body of research. Rather, he drew upon two of his previous research interests—the languages of education and the education of future citizens—when conceiving his new project, with the view that this would enable him to better understand religious and political languages. Thus, in taking this multifaceted approach, his goal was to shed new light on the phenomena such as nationalism as ideological languages, and to make them accessible and analyzable for both education and research on education (Fox, 2023b). Tröhler has always had strong research interest in the languages of education. Over the years, he has analyzed the languages used by some of the

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most eminent European educators, such as Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Jean-Jacques Rousseau using the theories and methods developed by the so-called Cambridge School of political history (Tröhler, 2006, 2012). In particular, his focus on Rousseau provides a good illustration of the reasons behind his longstanding interest in the languages used in education. In 1762, Rousseau published his famous book Émile or On Education. Only a few weeks later, the Archbishop of Paris, Christophe de Beaumont, issued an open letter condemning this book as blasphemous and false (Beaumont, 1762). That same year, Jean-Jacques Rousseau responded with a Letter to Christophe Beaumont, which was published in 1763. This apologetics begins with the following questions: ‘Why do I, Monseigneur, have to tell you something? What common language can we speak, how can we get along, and what is there between you & me?’ (Rousseau, 1763/2012; our translation). At first glance, Rousseau’s reference to ‘common language’ might seem a bit strange, since both letters were written in impeccable French. Therefore, in posing this question, Rousseau could not have referred to natural languages like English or French, but to another kind of language. As Tröhler has shown, using concepts developed by Cambridge historians John G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner, we can understand these other kinds of languages as ‘ideological’ languages (Tröhler & Fox, 2019). Indeed, it is precisely this ideological language, as Rousseau had pointed out, that differentiates the writer from the bishop. When Rousseau wrote about education, as Tröhler has shown, he used the (political) ideological language of classical republicanism. This was a language that a nobleman and Catholic bishop like de Beaumont could not understand, as Rousseau had rightly assumed. In his book Languages of Education. Protestant Legacies, National Identities, and Global Aspirations (2011), Tröhler described the theories and methodologies he used to analyze ideological languages in education. In this volume, for which he received the Outstanding Book Award of AERA’s Division B (Curriculum Studies), he characterizes his approach as follows: ‘[T]he approach is empirical, for it deals with actually used languages of education; it is historical, for these languages once emerged and were more or less dominant in the course different times and places and evolved over centuries; and it is analytical, for the identification of the different languages of education provides us with a means of reflection upon our own thoughts’ (ibid.: 1–2). The book subtitle also reveals that Tröhler has always had a strong interest in national identities, especially in the role of school curricula, in

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the formation of future citizens in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This particular topic was the subject of a bi-national research project Tröhler conducted with scholars from Switzerland and Luxemburg between 2013 and 2016 (Tröhler et al., 2017). Therefore, the project Tröhler announced in 2018 was the continuation of his longstanding research interest in ideological languages used in educational discourses, the shaping of national identities, and curricula as a means of creating future citizens. In pursuing this new research endeavor, Tröhler introduced the concept of ‘national literacies’ to bring together his various interests. Tröhler’s thesis is that modern education, by placing national literacies at the center of curricula, engages in the art of fabricating national minds.

National Literacies: An Innovative Approach? While Tröhler’s use of the term ‘national literacy’ is justified, it brings up the question of its meaning. Its definition can potentially be derived from those related to its individual components—‘nation’ and ‘literacy’. According to the Merriam Webster Online Dictionary, the word ‘literacy’ was first used in print in 1880—the same year that words like ‘semiotics’, ‘social psychology’, ‘pathogen’, ‘hyperinflation’, or ‘anti-Semitism’ found their way into the printed English language (Merriam Webster, 2023). If we search for ‘literacy’ on Google Ngram Viewer––a tool frequently used by Daniel Tröhler––we are provided with a curve depicting the use of the word in English texts over time. It shows that its prevalence in print rose steeply between the 1960s and the early 2000s (Google, 2023). However, following its peak in 2006, the curve rapidly declines until 2015, when it flattens out at a relatively high level. When the results for the use of ‘literacy’ in German texts are plotted in the same way, the resulting curve reveals a similar trend, with the exception of a rapid increase after 2015. We also find a similar looking curve for the frequency of ‘literacy’ usage in French, although in this case the increase starts a few years later. Moreover, if we examine the popularity of other words introduced in 1880, it becomes apparent that the steep rise in the Ngram curve over the last 140 years is unique to ‘literacy’. This widespread popularity of this concept is partly due to the recognition that diverse literacies exist, and each type has been a subject of educational sciences research. The most obvious literacies are related to reading and writing skills, but this set has recently expanded to include

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mathematical literacy (aka numeracy), quantitative literacy, financial literacy, digital literacy, and cultural literacy, to name a few. Many of these literacies are measured and assessed in large surveys such as PISA, and the (international comparison of) their results have a major impact on national school policies. Within literacy discourses, the term ‘national literacy’ was used before it was popularized by Tröhler. In fact, in the opening line of his book Cultural Literacy. What Every American Needs to Know, published in 1988, E. D. Hirsch Jr. wrote: ‘This book explains why we need to make some very specific educational changes in order to achieve a higher level of national literacy’ (Hirsch, 1988: 1). In this sense—and this is how the term has usually been used—‘national literacy’ refers to the literacy rate within a particular nation. Tröhler, however, defines ‘national literacy’ as the ability to make sense of national symbols, acts, and signs and thus to live a ‘meaningful life in [a] particular national context’ (Tröhler, 2020b: 21). According to this perspective, national literacy can be developed in the same way as mathematical or financial literacy, as it reflects a person’s ability to understand and to use—whether consciously or unconsciously— the ‘language’ pertinent to a particular domain, be it mathematics, finances, or nations and nationalism. According to this premise, by analyzing how students have been and are currently taught to make sense of national symbols, actions, and signs, we can learn more about the formation of national identities and the function of national languages. As we explained earlier, we understand nation and nationalism as multi-layered phenomena, and this is something we learned from Tröhler. In his work, he takes a twofold perspective on the intertwined layers comprising these concepts—portraying them as both individual identity of each citizen and the identity of a particular discipline as an academic subject. However, according to Tröhler, both perspectives are decidedly nationally framed, as the aim of the first approach is to elucidate how national literacies have been taught in schools throughout history in order to learn more about the formation of national identities and the function of national languages within society. In taking the second perspective, the disciplinary-educational, the objective is to identify, reveal, and examine national thought styles in education research and education theory. In times when nationalist movements are on the rise, understanding the emergence and prevalence of nationalism become a highly pertinent challenge for a discipline such as history of education (Tröhler & Maricic, 2023). Yet, while engaging with nationalism, educational

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historians often forget or even ignore its role in fabricating future citizens and thus perpetuating (academic) nationalisms (see Fox, 2020). When discussing the knowledge and the skillful use of national symbols, acts, and signs, in his research, Tröhler often refers to Michael Billig’s (1995) concepts of ‘flagging’ and ‘banal nationalism’ (e.g., Tröhler, 2018, 2019, 2020a; Tröhler & Piattoeva, 2019; Tröhler & Maricic, 2023). Another concept he frequently employs in his work is Ernest Renan’s notion that a nation is and needs an ‘everyday plebiscite’ (Renan, 1882/2018: 262; see also the chapter of this book authored by Marva Shalev Marom). As argued by Billig, the more or less banal symbols, acts, and signs are inextricable aspects of national or nationalistic languages, while the constant confrontation with these languages is the everyday plebiscite in which the nation is brought ‘to daily use’ (Billig, 1995: 95). Still, how this actually happens remains to be determined, as does the role of education in this process. With this challenge in mind, by drawing upon Daniel Tröhler’s concept of national literacies (and other related aspects of his work), we aim to breathe some life back into the anemic ‘zombie discourse’ on nations and nationalism. Waitin’ on a sunny day has finally come to an end!

The Raison d’Être of This Book At the beginning of this introduction, we pointed out that academic research is a social activity. We then focused on one scholar and his work, but we would now like to return to the idea that it is an intellectual community rather than a single individual that produces new knowledge and insights. Nonetheless, we are aware that the understanding of what national literacies are, how we can analyze them, and what we can learn from using this concept in our analyses owes much to Daniel Tröhler, as has been made clear in the previous sections of this introduction. But this concept has also been discussed, criticized, and thus further developed within the intellectual community represented in this book. Tröhler himself has edited numerous books and special issues of scientific journals to which many of us have contributed. Other authors who have produced different chapters of this book have been following Tröhler’s and our research for years and have helped us develop our ideas with advice and constructive criticism. This book, as it now stands, is another opportunity for our community to publish the latest state of our research. It is also a much-needed opportunity for expanding this line of research beyond

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Tröhler’s seminal work by adding new layers to it (as aptly explained in the chapter by Mette Buchardt) and by highlighting hitherto understudied aspects (as is done in the chapters authored by Sophie Pia Stieger and William F. Pinar). Working on this book was also a learning opportunity for us all, especially when the editors had to respond to critical reviews from experts outside the group but also when members of our community reviewed and critiqued texts written by their colleagues. At this point, we should perhaps also address the elephant in the room that reveals itself as soon as the reader compares the table of contents of this book with the introduction. It is true that Daniel Tröhler did not contribute to this volume, but this was a deliberate decision because it was written in his honor. First, it is Daniel’s 65th birthday, which (theoretically) marks the end of his academic career at the University of Vienna. In Europe, it is a common practice to mark the occasion of a renowned professor’s retirement with a more or less traditional Festschrift. However, as Daniel is not the type of person who appreciates such a ‘common practice’ approach to anything, we did not find a traditional Festschrift befitting, as it would bore him as well as those tasked with producing it. Instead, we chose to open up a discussion on the research he conducted during his time as a professor in Vienna. This decision was driven by the view that, in engaging intellectually and sometimes even critically with his work, we would do him much more honor than by putting him on a traditional pedestal. Daniel never intended to build an intellectual school, and this book is proof that this is indeed the case. Rather, the chapters comprising this volume demonstrate that he is the heart and the integral part of an intellectual community that discusses and works with ideas and concepts he has developed over the course of his long and prolific academic career. It is precisely for that reason that we are all incredibly grateful and indebted to him.

Book Sections In an introduction to an edited volume, the editors usually provide brief summaries of each chapter. We chose to refrain from this common practice (yet again) because we will deal with each individual contribution to the book in our concluding chapter. However, to hold the reader’s interest, we have already made references to each chapter in this introduction. The larger structure of the book includes four thematic sections— National Literacies in Education Research, From People to National

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Citizens, The Nation in School and Curriculum, and The Nation in a Globalized World—followed by a commentary by David Labaree and a concluding chapter by the editors. While these thematic sections correspond to Tröhler’s research interests, rather than addressing distinct research questions, the work presented within is intertwined, as there are some overlaps across sections but also some notable inconsistencies among chapters included in each section. This is largely due to the fact that the structure of the book did not emerge from the text itself, but was imposed by the editors. In fact, some chapters would fit nicely into multiple thematic sections, while others that are in the same section differ significantly in scope and focus. Ultimately, it was our decision to place them where they are. However superficial, fuzzy, and questionable the structure of this book may be, we believe that it was worth imposing it on the presented content because it provides a rough overview of the broad as well as empirically and theoretically rich topics covered in this book. Acknowledgments  At the beginning of this introduction, we stated that science is a social activity, and argued that this book is itself proof of the veracity of this claim. This assertion applies not only to the content of the book, but also to its production. Without the help of many friends, colleagues, and other professionals, we would not have been able to edit such a large and diverse volume and achieve satisfactory results. First and foremost, we would like to thank all the authors (listed here in alphabetical order), namely Felicitas Acosta, Mette Buchardt, Robert Cowen, Nicole Gotling, Michèle Hofmann, Ethan Hutt, Berit Karseth, Kevser Muratović, Nelly Piattoeva, William F.  Pinar, Hans Schildermans, Marva Shalev Marom, Sophie Pia Stieger, and Johannes Westberg. Most of them not only wrote formidable chapters, but also wrote reviews and had extensive discussions to improve the overall quality of the texts. Nicole Gotling also engaged in proofreading them to improve the book linguistically. We owe her our utmost gratitude for this invaluable contribution, as her impartial perspective and attention to detail have certainly elevated the quality of this volume. David Labaree also deserves our deep gratitude, for he graciously accepted our invitation to write a final commentary. Although he knew very well that this would be a ‘fool’s errand’, he was ready for the challenge. David, much like Daniel, is a cornerstone of this research community, and it is our great honor and privilege to work with him and have his insights featured in this book. Finally, we would like to thank William Reese and John Rury for including our book in their book series, and we would like to thank Milana Vernikova and Arun Prasath at Palgrave Macmillan for their support as well as very professional and seemingly effortless collaboration.

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References Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Verso. Armstrong, J.  A. (1982). Nations before nationalism. University of North Carolina Press. Assmann, A. (2020) Die Wiedererfindung der Nation. Warum wir sie fürchten und warum wir sie brauchen [Reinventing the nation. Why we fear it and why we need it]. C.H. Beck. Beaumont, C. d. (1762). Mandement de Monseigneur l’archevêque de Paris, portant condamnation d’un livre qui a pour titre: Emile, ou de l’éducation, par J.J. Rousseau, citoyen de Genève, à Amsterdam, chez Jean Néaulme, ... [The archbishop of Paris condemns a book entitled: Emile, ou de l’éducation, by J.J. Rousseau, citizen of Geneva, published in Amsterdam by Jean Néaulme, ...]. F. Simon. Bénéï, V. (2005). Manufacturing citizenship: Education and nationalism in Europe, South Asia and China. Routledge. Bhaba, H. K. (1990). Nation and narration. Routledge. Billig, M. (1995). Banal nationalism. SAGE. Bloch, M. (1992). The historian’s craft. Manchester University Press. Boser, L. (2016). Nation, nationalism, curriculum, and the making of citizens. In M.  Peters (Ed.), Encyclopedia of educational philosophy and theory (pp. 1502–1506). Springer. Breuilly, J. (1982). Nationalism and the state. St. Martin’s Press. Busch, M. (2015). Staatsbürgerkunde in der Weimarer Republik [Civic education in the Weimar Republic]. Klinkhardt. Dahn, N., & Boser, L. (2015). Learning to see the nation-state—History, geography and public schooling in late 19th-century Switzerland. IJHE.  Bildungsgeschichte—International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 5(1), 41–56. Fox, S. (2020). The entanglement of nation and epistemology: Glances into the backyard of academic dignity. Croatian Journal of Education, 22(Sp.Ed.2), 193–210. https://doi.org/10.15516/cje.v22i0.4126 Fox, S. (2023a). Nationale Sprachen (in) der Pädagogik. Diskursive Pfadabhängigkeiten pädagogischen Denkens in Deutschland [National languages in pedagogy. Discursive path dependencies of pedagogical thought in Germany]. In U. Binder, A. Böhmer, & J. Oelkers (Eds.), Sprache und Pädagogik (pp. 101–120). Waxmann. Fox, S. (2023b). Linguistic turn. In M. Huber, & M. Döll (Eds.), Bildungswissenschaft in Begriffen, Theorien und Diskursen (pp. 361–368). Springer VS. Fukuyama, F. (2018). Identity. Profile Book.

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Gardin, M., & Lenz, T. (Eds.). (2018). Die Schule der nation. Bildungsgeschichte und Identität in Luxembourg [The nation’s school. Educational history and identity in Luxembourg]. Beltz Juventa. Gellner, E. (1983). Nations and nationalism. Blackwell. Google. (2023). Books NGram Viewer. https://books.google.com/ngrams/. Accessed 2 Apr 2023. Gotling, N. (2020). National textbook narratives and historiography: Presenting a same that is never the same. Croatian Journal of Education, 22(Sp.Ed.2), 65–82. Gotling, N. (2022). The Danish nation-state as crafted in textbook narratives: From democracy towards a Nordic model. In D.  Tröhler, B.  Hörmann, S. Tveit, & I. Bostad (Eds.), The Nordic education model in context: Historical developments and current renegotiations (pp. 36–56). Routledge. Harp, S. L. (1998). Learning to be loyal: Primary schooling as nation building in Alsace and Lorraine, 1850–1940. Northern Illinois University Press. Hirsch, E. D., Jr. (1988). Cultural literacy. Vintage Books. Hobsbawm, E., & Ranger, T. (Eds.). (1983). The invention of tradition. Cambridge University Press. Hogarth, C., Matthiesen, C., & Bakken, J. (2021). Advancing citizenship through language arts education: Conceptions of rhetoric in Scandinavian national curricula. Journal of Curriculum Studies, online publication, 25 October 2021. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2021.1989050 Horlacher, R. (2016). Physische Bildung als Nationalerziehung. Die Turnbewegung in der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts [Physical education as national education. The gymnastics movement in the first half of the 19th century]. In L.  Boser, P.  Bühler, M.  Hofmann, & P.  Müller (Eds.), Pulverdampf und Kreidestaub. Beiträge zum Verhältnis zwischen Militär und Schule in der Schweiz im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (pp. 79–102). Bibliothek am Guisanplatz. Kitcher, P.  S. (2023). Philosophy of science. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. https://www.britannica.com/topic/philosophy-­of-­science. Accessed 22 Mar 2023. Kivimäki, V., Suodenjoki, S., & Vahtikari, T. (Eds.). (2021). Lived nation as the history of experiences and emotions in Finland, 1800–2000. Palgrave Macmillan. Kopińska, V. (2021). Towards an exclusive community? Political shift and changes to the school core curricula in Poland: A discourse analysis. Journal of Curriculum Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2021.1995051 Labaree, D. (2018). Public schools for private gain: The declining American commitment to serving the public good. Phi Delta Kappan, 100(3), 8–13. Legris, P. (2017). La citoyenneté au coeur de l’histoire écolaire. Controverses autour d’un projet de réforme des années 1970–1980 [Citizenship at the heart of history education. Controversies around a reform project of the years 1970–1980]. Traverse. Zeitschrift für Geschichte, 24(1), 87–97.

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McLuhan, M. (1962/2011). The Gutenberg Galaxy. The making of typographic man. University of Toronto Press. Meissner, A. (2009). Die Nationalisierung der Volksschule. Geschichtspolitik im niederen Schulwesen Preussens und des deutschsprachigen Österreich, 1866 bis 1933/38 [The nationalization of the elementary school. History policy in the lower school system of Prussia and German-speaking Austria, 1866 to 1933/38]. Duncker und Humblot. Merriam Webster. (2023). Time traveler. https://www.merriam-­webster.com/ time-­traveler/1880. Accessed 2 Apr 2023. Muratovic, K., & Gimpl, F. (2020). Doing nation in empires: The emergence of Turkey and Austria. Croatian Journal of Education, 22(Sp.Ed.2), 151–169. Özkirimli, U. (2017). Theories of nationalism. A critical introduction (3rd ed.). Palgrave Macmillan. Renan, E. (1882/2018). What is a nation? And other political writings. Columbia University Press. Rousseau, J.-J. (1763/2012). Jean-Jacques Rousseau Citoyen de Genève, à Christophe de Beaumont, Archevéque de Paris, Duc de St. Cloud, Pair de France, Commander de l’Ordre du St. Esprit, Proviseur de Sorbonne, etc. [Jean-Jacques Rousseau Citizen of Geneva, to Christophe de Beaumont, Archbishop of Paris …]. Rousseauonline, 7 October 2012. http://www.rousseauonline.ch/Text/lettre-­ a-­christophe-­de-­beaumont.php. Accessed 1 Apr 2023. Stynen, A., Van Ginderachter, M., & Núñez Seixas, X.  M. N. (Eds.). (2020). Emotions and everyday nationalism in modern European history. Routledge. Thiesse, A.-M. (2001). La Création des Identités Nationales [The creation of national identities]. Éditions du Seuil. Tröhler, D. (2006). Republikanismus und Pädagogik. Pestalozzi im historischen Kontext [Republicanism and pedagogy. Pestalozzi in historical context]. Klinkhardt. Tröhler, D. (2011). Languages of education: Protestant legacies, national identities, and global aspirations. Routledge. Tröhler, D. (2012). Rousseau’s Emile, or the fear of passion. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 31(5), 477–489. Tröhler, D. (2018). Internationale Provokationen an nationale Denkstile in der Erziehungswissenschaft: Perspektive der Allgemeinen Pädagogik [International provocations to national thought styles in education: Perspectives of Allgemeine Pädagogik (foundations of education)]. IJHE.  Bildungsgeschichte— International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 8(2), 173–189. Tröhler, D. (2019). Die Ausbildung zukünftiger Lehrpersonen im Schnittfeld von nationalen Denkstilen und hegemonialen Aspirationen [Educating future teachers at the intersection of national thinking styles and hegemonic aspirations]. In S. Doff (Ed.), Spannungsfelder der Lehrerbildung. Beiträge zu einer Reformdebatte (pp. 172–191). Klinkhardt.

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Tröhler, D. (2020a). National literacies, or modern education and the art of fabricating national minds. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 52(5), 620–635. Tröhler, D. (2020b). Nation-state, education and the fabrication of national-­ minded citizens (introduction). Croatian Journal of Education, 22(Sp. Ed.2), 11–27. Tröhler, D. (2022). Magical enchantments and the nation’s silencing: Educational research agendas under the spell of globalization. In D. Tröhler, N. Piattoeva, & W. F. Pinar (Eds.), World yearbook of education 2022: Education, schooling and the global universalization of nationalism (pp. 7–25). Routledge. Tröhler, D., & Fox, S. (2019). Der ‚linguistic turn’ und die historische Bildungsforschung [The ‘linguistic turn’ and historical educational research]. Enzyklopädie Erziehungswissenschaft Online. https://doi.org/10.3262/EEOxx Tröhler, D., & Maricic, V. (2023). Education and the nation: Educational knowledge in the dominant theories of nationalism. In D. Tröhler (Ed.), Education, curriculum and nation-building. Contributions of comparative education to the understanding of nations and nationalism (pp. 7–33). Routledge. Tröhler, D., & Piattoeva, N. (2019). Nations and numbers. The banal nationalism of education performance data. IJHE.  Bildungsgeschichte—International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 9(2), 245–249. Tröhler, D., Tosato-Rigo, D., Crusaz, K., & Hürlimann, K. (2017). Verfassung, Bürgerschaft und Schule. Editorial [Constitution, citizenship and education. Editorial]. Traverse. Zeitschrift für Geschichte, 24(1), 9–13. Westberg, J., Boser, L., & Brühwiler, I. (2019). School acts and the rise of mass schooling. Palgrave Macmillan. Williams, J. H. (Ed.). (2014). (Re)constructing memory. School textbooks and the imagination of the nation. Sense Publisher.

PART II

National Literacies in Education Research

CHAPTER 2

The Subjective Necessity of National Literacy William F. Pinar

‘[T]he concept of “national literacy” in the field of curriculum studies’, Daniel Tröhler (2020) explains, ‘means to focus on the particular “cultural context of a single country” that can also be labelled as the “nation”, understanding “nation” as a dominant cultural thesis (or discourse) about who “we” are and who others are not’ (634). In Canada, the dominant culture is Anglophone but Canadian identity is sometimes partly predicated upon being ‘not-American’. That culture’s dominance may be fading, in part due to constant critique, in part due to the country’s endorsement of multiculturalism, in part due to ongoing immigration. Many Francophones remain defiant and the First Peoples decry even multiculturalism, summarizing all non-Indigenous residents as ‘settlers’. National identity is also racialized—in Canada as the ‘Great White North’—and gendered, the two intertwined in the United States where race has always been structuring of, as well as structured by, gender (Pinar, 2001). In each instance, those who are not members of the dominant culture necessarily nurture a ‘double consciousness’, a concept invoked by

W. F. Pinar (*) University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Fox, L. Boser (eds.), National Literacies in Education, Historical Studies in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41762-7_2

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the African-American activist-historian W.E.B.  Du Bois. Hazel Carby reminds that the concept, expressed in the first chapter of Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk, is a ‘product of a world’ (Carby, 1998: 37), in that it has allowed the Black man (quoting Du Bois) ‘no true self-consciousness but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world’ (ibid.). Carby argues for a revision of the concept to acknowledge that ‘gender is an ever-present, though unacknowledged, factor in this theory’, that racial self-consciousness is also ‘a gendered self-consciousness’ (ibid.). Certainly, that was the case for Du Bois’ African-American contemporary, the philosopher Alain Locke, about whom Stewart notes: ‘Locke decided to believe in a positive double consciousness—that he could will himself to be both queer and race conscious in America, and succeed’ (Stewart, 2018: 769). It may be that the marginalized must, by subjective necessity, achieve national literacy. For the marginalized, national literacy can be a prerequisite for survival. National literacy denotes decoding the subjective, social, and cultural contours of one’s place of birth and/or residence, as survival requires self-­ understanding as well. Freire (1968) famously conceived of literacy as decoding patterns of oppression to encourage their contestation. Even among the privileged—always a relative status—national literacy can become imperative, as class, gender, and racial distinctions (focused in) familial lineage can be in play when working for upward mobility, even when preserving what one has already. Discovering (as is said in North American vernacular) ‘where one is coming from’ can be key to decoding identity, especially when identity overdetermined by race, class, gender— all filtered through family, school, neighborhood, homeland. What I am terming—after Jane Addams (1892)—as the subjective necessity of national literacy can also be considered crucial for scholars regardless race or gender, certainly for curriculum studies scholars but perhaps for historians as well. Tröhler knows that ‘inquiry needs to address the researcher as well—not in order to eliminate the researcher’s own world view and epistemological frame but in order to become aware of it’ (2011a: 193). Such self-address requires historicizing ‘not only a topic but the construer of the topic as well’, Tröhler’s words, to which he adds: ‘Doing history is essentially the self-discovering of one’s own standpoint’ (ibid.). It becomes clear that ‘one of the advantages of history is not only the acquisition of knowledge but also the question of self-awareness’ (ibid.), an insight Tröhler emphasizes by quoting Quentin Skinner: ‘To

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learn from the past—and we cannot otherwise learn at all—… is to learn the key to self-awareness’ (cited in Tröhler, 2011a: 193). That past is national, despite the fact that, as Tröhler points out, ‘one would never define oneself as national or even nationalist, although knowledge production and science communication are still just as nationalist as education policy’ (2022: 19).1 To unpack one’s nationalism2 requires, first of all, acknowledging that coming-of-age in specific countries structures one’s subjectivity, how one experiences being-in-the-world.3 Excavating one’s nationalization—a term akin to socialization in its subjective scope4—is in part autobiographical, an exercise Tröhler himself undertakes to make a point about the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).5 Such an undertaking is not only autobiographical and even epistemological, it would also appear to be religious, certainly the case for many of us who have come of age in the West, influenced culturally as the West has been by Christianity, Catholic and Protestant. Tröhler reminds that Protestantism6—in contrast to Catholicism—tends to ‘focus on the 1  Tröhler (2011b: 70) demonstrates that the ‘educational ambition of the Cold War, the OECD, and PISA has made apparent how little the education sciences have emancipated themselves form their religious and national roots’. Indeed, the ‘education sciences have nostalgically celebrated taken-for-granted convictions of their own national histories’ (ibid.: 56). 2  Tröhler (2020) notes that in curriculum research when nationalism is discussed, as a rule, it is often characterized as a problem, to be corrected through teaching tolerance, ignoring the fact that it tends hide itself in everyday practices, becoming banal (see also Tröhler, 2022: 9; Pinar, 2011). 3  As Tröhler (2011a: 175) notes, in Pragmatism the ‘crucial notion here is ‘experience’. In the Pragmatic conviction, people stand in everyday connections of experience; they interact, communicate, and cooperate’. I add to that depiction a phenomenological concern with ‘lived’ experience; the final phrase (‘being-in-the-world’) comes from Heidegger. 4  Tröhler (2020) suggests that national literacy entails the capacity to decode national symbols, understanding how they function to assure collective identity. 5  ‘Allow me to go back to my own youth’, Tröhler (2011a: 203) begins, concluding: ‘All these skills—the basic ones that are needed—are largely neglected by PISA, because it is obviously not interested in the present lives of students but in speculating on future lives’ (ibid.: 204). 6  Within Protestantism, Tröhler (2013: 9) points out, the ‘difference between German Protestantism (Lutheranism) and Swiss Reformed Protestantism (Zwinglianism and Calvinism) led to two different educational ideologies. Whereas Luther’s unworldly political and social ideology led to the political indifferent and contemplative educational ideology of Bildung, Swiss Reformed Protestantism developed an educational program heading at active citizenship as a reaction to these fundamental transformations’.

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individual soul rather than on the institution’ (2011a: 134). That distinction blurs (although not does disappear) when Tröhler quotes the prophetteacher7 Dewey: ‘Democracy will come into its own, for democracy is a name for a life of free and enriching communion. It had its seer in Walt Whitman. It will have its consummation when free social inquiry is indissolubly wedded to the art of full and moving communication’ (cited in Tröhler, 2011a: 111). Such ‘communion’—while existentially more social (and specifically communicative as Tröhler points out8) than it is solely institutional9—seems a shared organized experience. In secular terms— ‘what seems to be secular proves to be—on a quite invisible background— liberal reformist Protestantism’ (2011a: 116), as God has been replaced by the ‘common good’, at least in the ‘classical republican’ version, communion sabotaged by the ‘possessive individualism’ (ibid.: 33) encouraged by capitalism.10 ‘Educating the young towards self-examination’, Tröhler (2011a: 35) explains, ‘appeared as key to the resolution of the conflict between ideals of classical republicanism and the modern economy, as guarantor of an ordered modernity that does not fall prey to the passions but instead will ensure economic progress and social justice’. When distinctions disappear between oneself and others, order may be imposed but modernity (insofar as it enacts an Enlightenment faith in reason and progress through delineation of difference) dissolves. Demonization of difference dominates. In 1915, for instance, Werner Sombart wrote that—this is Tröhler’s paraphrase—‘each individual person can perfect himself only in the framework 7  Such a characterization could follow Dewey’s characterization of the teacher in My Pedagogic Creed, in which Tröhler (2011a: 112) quotes Dewey: ‘I believe that in this way the teacher is always is the prophet of the true God and the usher in of the true kingdom of God’. 8  ‘In Dewey’s view’, Trohler (2011a: 111) explains, ‘the project of communion and immediacy must start with education, namely, education in the home within communal “face-toface relationships”’ (Dewey’s phrase). 9  This distinction blurs as well when Tröhler (2011a: 51) quotes from George Herbert Mead’s review of Jane Addams’ 1907 book The Newer Ideals of Peace, endorsing her main thesis, namely that ‘government must arise out of these immediate human relations’ (government here as analogous to the Catholic Church), human relations defined by Mead as ‘sympathetic contact with men, women, and children’, perhaps a more Protestant than Catholic conception. 10  In contrast to individuality, the concept of possessive individualism—associated with the Canadian political philosopher C.B.  Macpherson—emphasizes freedom from constraint, converted by capitalism into the right to exploit labor and land for maximum profit.

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of the typical characteristics of his folk’, adding: ‘True individuality is… the German who serves Germanness’ (2011a: 153). (Tröhler dates a ‘decidedly nationalist education theory in Germany’ to the year 1806, when Napoleon ended the ‘Holy Empire’ [2011a: 154].) In 1914, Rudolf Eucken had claimed—consonant with Bildung11—that the ‘greatness of the German character’ lay in that it was a ‘folk of deep inwardness’, which, in the face of the ever more commercialized countries contained ‘world historical importance’ (cited in Tröhler, 2011a: 54). In Germany, Tröhler points out, the ‘Western world was seen as materialistic, which was quite often equated with democracy’ (2011a: 145). Pragmatism, too, protested capitalism (the commercialization of everything) and also owed its genesis to Protestantism (Tröhler, 2011a: 97). Tröhler shows that in the field of psychology Pragmatism contradicted ‘causal empiricism, and in the field of philosophy it was the tool against (German) rationalism or idealism’ (ibid.: 117). ‘Pragmatism was harshly rejected in Germany’ while accepted in Switzerland (Tröhler, 2011a:117), the home of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, whom Tröhler characterizes as a ‘figurehead within a sweeping cultural change that can be called the educational turn’, an ‘evolution that occurred in Northern and Western Europe as well as in the USA between the middle of the eighteenth and first third of the 19th century, when variously perceived social problems came to be interpreted as educational problems’ (ibid.: 113). Tröhler demonstrates that ‘this phenomenon continues unabated and finds expression in the framework of the World Bank, the United Nations, UNESCO, and the OECD. It is based on the premise that the central problems of the present and planning for the future are in fact basically educational concerns’ (2013: 3). Over a century ago that ‘turn’ expressed itself in ‘American Pragmatism [which] is basically egalitarian, communal, and in this sense democratic’ (ibid.: 4). Indeed, as Tröhler (2011a: 144) points out: ‘The Americans had never been unworldly scholars but socially engaged professors who were involved with their environment’. That involvement has taken innumerable turns, several of which even many Americans judge unwelcome, one early twentieth-century instance of which was behaviorism, the goal of which was the ‘prediction and control of behavior’ (Tröhler, 2011a: 145). Its major exponent was John 11  The term, Tröhler (2011a: 152) reminds ‘coined by Goethe and particularly only to the Germans that refers to the cultivation, the forming of the inner spiritual life of man’.

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B.  Watson who, Tröhler notes, was ‘socialized in the context of the Southern Baptist Convention’ (ibid.: 137). Tröhler reminds that ‘behaviorism never developed in Germany’ (ibid.: 147), perhaps because the project of socio-political control12 in Germany needed no disguise.13 In America that project posed as ‘psychology’. Today, and not only in America, it takes the form of cognitive psychology,14 a ‘turn’ one can trace to the nineteenth-century American psychologist James McKeen Cattell who, Tröhler (2011a) points out, ‘in silent opposition to [Wilhelm] Wundt … did not use the word “soul” but instead “brain”’ (ibid.: 137). Yet another form the educationalization of the world took was (ongoing, indeed intensifying) technologization. Tröhler points out that ‘[w]hereas European intellectuals were skeptic or even hostile toward technological innovation, the Americans interpreted it as a part and an expression of sublime political and moral development’, although many Americans did come to appreciate that ‘technology and mass production… had some problematic effects’, that realization reached as early as the ‘end of the nineteenth century’, when the ‘mismatch between technological and industrial progress and the ideal of a mutually interacting democracy society became apparent’ (ibid.: 99). That late nineteenth-century national crisis caused by technological and industrial progress prompted Pragmatists to respond. Tröhler points out that the ‘overcoming of the weakness of democracy in view of the capitalization of life did not lead Dewey into agrarian nostalgia’, but ‘instead, he fostered two strategies for the stabilization and development of democracy’, one affirming the ‘crucial role of academic knowledge’, especially knowledge that, like a ‘seismograph’, registered shifts within society (2011a: 176). Key was knowledge’s dissemination throughout society, ‘enabling citizens to discuss their social and political affairs 12  That behaviorism was a project of socio-political control is a point made by the great Finnish curriculum theorist Tero Autio (2006). 13  Tröhler (2011a: 143) asserts that ‘If there were any political aspects [of Bildung, they] were racial… and always anti-democratic’. 14  Tröhler (2011a: 201) points out that the ‘educationalization of the Cold War in the United States marked a transformation of the dominant reference discipline for education, for it switched from philosophy to psychology, more precisely from a popular interpretation of Pragmatism to cognitive psychology, which was at its outset in the late 1950s—cognition theory being the most important reference of PISA today, as the stakeholders admit themselves. The rise of cognitive psychology came along with the rise of new governance ideologies of the Cold War’.

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without being in danger of manipulation by the “captains of industry”, as long as communication between the citizens is ensured’ (ibid.) Through communication—the second strategy—knowledge could be shared and, in turn, acquired (ibid.: 177). Dewey could not have foreseen how social media today weaponize communication, eviscerating the sincerity and authenticity prerequisite to democratic dialogue (Pinar, 2023). In our era it is a subjective necessity to study history to come to some self-awareness of who and where one is, what (historical) time it is. Secularism sheds the soul but spirituality still circulates, as does soul’s substitute—the psyche15—so Bildung, as one’s ‘subjective way of existing in a culture’, and specifically a ‘national culture’, might still encourage the human subject, ‘through its own power’, to grapple with ‘everything that comes to it from the outside towards forming a unified life’ (Tröhler, 2011a: 163). Unlike the German version, in my version of Bildung the Volk is not required; indeed, it can easily function an anti-educative influence insofar as it stimulates ethnically focused social cohesion, compulsory political solidary, one’s compatriots fantasized as a ‘manifestation of God’ (ibid.: 168). Even the republican idea—that the human subject is a ‘political being by nature, a being who can find full development only in the polis’ (Tröhler, 2013: 44)16—does not require us to expunge experience, plurality or negotiation in order to affirm ‘inwardness… sentiment’, and ‘personhood’ (Tröhler, 2011a: 168). After all, as Tröhler appreciates, American Pragmatism was (is) ‘conservative and progressive at the same time: conservative, because it carried on the Puritan vision of the congregation, progressive, because it tried to enhance more democracy’ (ibid.: 175). ‘The nation has become an ugly duckling’, Tröhler (2022: 16) observes, ‘something one prefers not to have too much to do with, especially not with regard to how it influences one’s own thinking’. ‘The only way out of our own personal and academic socialization’, Tröhler (2011b: 70) knows, ‘is to contextualize ourselves’. Cultural, academic, personal socialization all occur in time and place(s), and even when one is stateless, within nation-states. Contextualizing ourselves requires decoding our conditioning that occurs through curriculum, through family and friends, 15  ‘No one has ever seen a society’, Tröhler (2022: 10) notes, ‘just as no one has seen the soul, which in the course of the nineteenth century was nobly called “psyche” to cover its theological origins’. 16  Tröhler is here discussing Pestalozzi.

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the very banality of our national formation. One’s life that cannot become even slightly sensible (i.e., intelligible) unless national literacy—as Tröhler so insightfully performs it—is a key component of a reconceptualized curriculum. It is, I suggest, a subjective necessity.

References Addams, J. (1892). The subjective necessity of settlements. In J. Addams (Ed.), Philanthropy and social progress (pp. 1–26). Thomas Y. Crowell & Co, 1893. https://wwnorton.com/college/history/archive/resources/documents/ ch24_05.htm#:~:text=The%20Subjective%20Necessity%20for%20Social%20 Settlements%20%281892%29%2C%20Jane,of%20the%20most%20prominent%20and%20tireless%20social%20reformers Autio, T. (2006). Subjectivity, curriculum, society: Between and beyond German Didaktik and Anglo-American curriculum studies. Lawrence Erlbaum. Carby, H. (1998). Race men. Harvard University Press. Freire, P. (1968). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Seabury. Pinar, W. (2001). The gender of racial politics and violence in America: Lynching, prison rape, and the crisis of masculinity. Peter Lang. Pinar, W. (2011). Nationalism, anti-Americanism, Canadian identity. In L. Yates & M.  Grumet (Eds.), World yearbook of education 2011: Curriculum in today’s world: Configuring knowledge, identities, work and politics (pp.  31–43). Routledge. Pinar, W. (2023). A praxis of presence in curriculum theory: Advancing Currere against cultural crises in education. Routledge. Stewart, J. C. (2018). The new negro: The life of Alain Locke. Oxford University Press. Tröhler, D. (2011a). Languages of education: Protestant legacies, national identities, and global aspirations. Routledge. Tröhler, D. (2011b). The global language on education policy and prospects of education research. In D. Tröhler & R. Barbu (Eds.), Education systems in historical, cultural, and sociological perspectives (pp. 55–73). Sense Publishers. Tröhler, D. (2013). Pestalozzi and the educationalization of the world. Palgrave Macmillan. Tröhler, D. (2020). National literacies, or modern education and the art of fabricating national minds. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 52(5), 620–635. https:// doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2020.1786727 Tröhler, D. (2022). Magical enchantments and the nation’s silencing. Educational research agendas under the spell of globalization. In D. Tröhler, N. Piattovea, & W. F. Pinar (Eds.), World yearbook of education 2022: Education, schooling and the global universalization of nationalism (pp. 7–25). Routledge.

CHAPTER 3

Forms of Confession Versus Forms of Governing. An Appraisal of a Double Analytical Concept as a Precondition for Educational Nationalism Research and Beyond Mette Buchardt

Introduction The field of education is generally under-researched in the scholarship of nation-state building and nationalism. As pointed out by Daniel Tröhler (e.g., 2020b), education often appears in the margin as a taken-for-granted example not analyzed in depth. For scholars aiming at advancing the state of the art concerning the history of the nation and nationalism and their dialectic relations to the crafting of education systems, Tröhler’s work is central, not least due to the way it enables us to understand the relation between nation-state crafting, emergence and form of education systems,

M. Buchardt (*) Aalborg University, Aalborg/Copenhagen, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Fox, L. Boser (eds.), National Literacies in Education, Historical Studies in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41762-7_3

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and educational thought and religion in the meaning of confessions. This essay will discuss and put into focus the conceptualization of the relation between forms of governing and forms of confession as generating factors in what Tröhler describes as ‘the languages of education’ (prominently Tröhler, 2011) as a fruitful theoretical precondition and analytical tool not to be overlooked in these overlapping research fields. But the double analytical concept also carries huge analytical potential for other social- and cultural-history research programs beyond the history of the nation and the history of education, such as, for instance, the history of institutional secularization and welfare-state history. The double concept of ‘forms of confession’ and ‘forms of governing’ as an analytical tool for exploring the national and globalized ‘languages of education’—and the theoretical framework behind it—contributes to understanding the historical development of the relation between religion and the education system, including the shifting educational, social epistemologies dominant in a state, including nation-state, system, as an ongoing transformation process. This essay will revisit the double concept and analytical distinction tool and discuss its further and future potential for historical research.

Visiting the Concept of ‘National Literacies’— Revisiting ‘Languages of Education’ and Beyond After decades where the scholarship of nation-state building and nationalism has been rare in the history of education, recent research has taken up the challenge to explore nation-state development through schooling. Besides Tröhler (e.g., Tröhler, 2020a, b; Tröhler & Maricic, 2023), Gotling, for instance, has analyzed nation building through using the historiography communicated in textbooks as sources for making visible the creation of nationalistic narratives (e.g., Gotling, 2020). Drawing on the history of emotions and revisiting Billig’s discourse psychological term of banal nationalism (Skey & Antonsich, 2017), Hoegaerts has reconstructed historical classroom practices as part of the emotional embodiment of patriotism leading to national character building (Hoegaerts, 2020). In the same vein, but with a different empirical focus, for instance, Eiranen’s Helsinki-focused study of families as a breeding ground for nation building and learning the nation-state (Eiranen, 2019) is opening up new perspectives. What is brought forward in these examples of new historical scholarship addressing the nexus between education and the nation-state and nationalism can be understood as the magnitude of what Tröhler

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defines as national literacies. Drawing on Renan, Tröhler describes this as ‘a constant process of being re-built’ (2020b: 632) and thus as a broader pedagogical, societal process of creating citizens for the nation, which is equipped with national grammar and also taking the form of daily life and banal nationalism. The concept of national literacies thus becomes a central analytical tool for understanding the role of schooling in the creation of nation-states and what—with an elaboration of Taylor—could be defined as national imaginaries (Taylor, 2007). The concept of national literacies targets and explores, on the one hand, the role of education systems, including on the micro- and daily life level, and on the other hand, the educational character of nation building. Another dimension of the concept of national literacies is that it relates nationhood to language, an ideological language to be learned. National literacies grasp what makes the nation operational. Not least that dimension of the concept recalls a conceptualization developed earlier by Tröhler, namely that of ‘languages of education’. The conceptualization is unfolded in the 2011 monograph Languages of Education. Protestant Legacies, National Identities, and Global Aspirations. Combining Pocock’s understanding of ideology with a Saussurean understanding of the relation between langue and parole: the former being the structuring rules and conventions behind the signifiers, the latter being the concrete language in use, Tröhler’s concept enables us to understand the historical and epistemological background of the global frictions and fights about how to reform education worldwide as struggles between national languages of education. A poignant example of this is the way the concept makes it possible to analyze the structures behind the global competition between, for example, Anglo-Saxon educational discourses centering on practiced epistemologies such as ‘curriculum’ and ‘competence’, and continental German educational discourses centering on principal and operational educational concepts such as ‘Bildung’ and ‘Didaktik’. However, and now turning to what I understand as the structures and conventions behind these—often competitive—languages that Tröhler’s analysis makes visible, the work goes importantly deeper. A major point is, for instance, how U.S. republicanism combined with Calvinist religious language can be understood as generating mechanisms in Anglo-Saxon educational theory in opposition to and clashing with the more Lutheran-­ influenced German educational language, framed by a monarchical form of state and absolutist form of governing. While this summarizing

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interpretation does not at all give credit to the complex historical analysis in Languages of Education. Protestant Legacies, National Identities, and Global Aspirations, a major outcome of the work is that not only can the dominating languages of education be understood as framed by and contributing to national identities (or—with a later concept of Tröhler’s drawing on Fleck—national styles of thought, e.g., Tröhler, 2018, 2019), but the languages of education should also be seen as embedded in sometimes different and sometimes similar Protestant theologies, centering on soul and salvation. However, the theoretical outcome of the analysis exceeds this central historical finding. I will thus argue that the concept of languages of education creates a double analytical concept, offering methodological tools to not only understand phenomena such as educational theory, education politics, and educational micro-practices historically in light of their respective forms of confession and forms of governing but also to explore other phenomena related to the ‘state’ as stretched in the tension between dominating forms of governing the state and dominating confessional languages in the context where the phenomenon occurs. Hence, the double analytical concept under or behind the concept of ‘languages of education’ has the huge potential of being applied outside the field of education scholarship.

‘Languages of Education’ Beyond Education: The History of State-Religion Relations as Example Especially in one of my own research fields: the history of state-religion relations and transformation, I have frequently found it useful to include the understandings and theoretical powers of analyzing the relation between forms of governing and forms of confession, drawing on Tröhler’s work. To briefly summarize: The modernization of the European states from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century meant different models for state-religion relations. Changing the education system became a political tool in this context, as did, for instance, marriage laws and the economic situation around church property (Buchardt, 2021a, b, 2023). In some states, the reforms that we may describe as institutional secularization, meaning divisions between state institutions and church institutions, also targeted the local clergy who were increasingly losing their role as teachers, administrators, and so on. That was, for instance, the case in the Nordic states such as Denmark and Sweden. Following the Lutheran Reformation during the sixteenth

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century, many church properties had already been expropriated and become state property. Also, the—now—Lutheran churches themselves became the churches of the monarch and, due to the absolutist models of governing that developed in the following centuries, thus in reality the property of the state. This was to change increasingly when, for instance, Denmark changed its form of governance from absolutism into a constitutional monarchy combined with parliamentarism from the late nineteenth century onwards. The case of Denmark’s reforms was not a question of property expropriation, which had in its own way already taken place, but was, for instance, that the clergy were increasingly stripped of their role as local state administrators. Pastors were still servants of the state but with a decreased role confined to the church institution. The Lutheran church became more like a jewel in the crown of the parliamentarism-­ based nation welfare state, which was about to develop, as was monarchy itself (Buchardt, 2017). If we turn our glance from the Lutheran monarchical Nordics to France in the late nineteenth century under the reign of the Third Republic, it was exactly the right of the church to property, including schools, that was considerably restricted by the Laïcité reforms, starting out in the early 1880s with major education reform acts and culminating with the Laïcité Act of 1905. Moreover, religious instruction was removed from schooling, and the clergy’s right to teach was considerably restricted. Instead, religion as a historical and cultural phenomenon became a subtopic in, for example, history. A new moral and civics education course also included duties to God along with duties to the nation, denoting fundamental ideas recurring across and outside dominating religious confessions, such as Catholicism and Calvinism, and also Lutheran-influenced French Protestantism. The reform thus made ‘religion and Christianity turned history’ part of subject matter areas such as civilization history and morality and as such supported education as a universalist national self-­perception of the future republican citizen. Whereas the reforms in France can be seen as a solution to the double confessional situation, similar reform work actually took place in the Lutheran-dominated states of Sweden and Denmark. Religious education was kept in school but increasingly reformed into being a tool for transmitting Christianity as the culture and history of the respective nations and its ‘people’ (‘folk’): different models, quite similar results (Singer, 1975; Mayeur & Rebérioux, 1987; Mayeur, 2004; Cabanel, 2016; Buchardt, 2013, 2020a, b, 2023).

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The models for changing religion-state relations in France and the Nordics, in other words, both differed and were similar. An important point of similarity is the way religion was changed into a tool, a faded but useful jewel for the new national democracies under construction. Important points of difference are the degree to which separation was introduced under the modernization reforms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We might say that double confessional France was more radical than the Nordics with regard to church-state-division models, but we might also say that the Danish and Swedish realms had made even more radical changes earlier by annexing the church as part of the state. Drawing on a global history methodology, we can understand the differences, similarities, and not least simultaneity in the reforms as the global challenge of religious diversity and social cohesion finding different national answers and varying local appearances (Conrad, 2012; Buchardt & Fox, 2020). Such a methodological approach does not necessarily have to embrace the (ideological) concept and politics of globalization, but it should rather be understood as a methodology to reach beyond Eurocentric and imperialist as well as imperialism-critical notions and ‘what is taken for granted’ about birthplaces and the creation of ideas and strategies and their worldwide dissemination. But we might also nuance and sharpen the comparison by means of the double concept of ‘forms of confession’ and ‘forms of governing’ as derived from Tröhler’s theoretical framework on the global and national ‘languages of education’. If doing the latter, and thus picking up on Tröhler’s distinction, the differences between the states in question become possible to understand in light of the double confessional situation of France, under the domination of the Catholic church and with a frictional relation to shifting forms of monarchism and republicanism since the late eighteenth century, versus the Lutheran Nordics, with their earlier state control of religion dating back to the sixteenth-century Lutheran reforms. Also, we might cross-­ analyze the cases in order to explore how different kinds of democratic models—French republicanism versus Nordic constitutional monarchism combined with parliamentarism—have been influencing structures and conditions for developing different models for religion-state relations, which again are not only different from each other but showing remarkable similarities as well.

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Concluding Remarks No matter what, the example of the timewise simultaneously imposed reforms of state-religion relations in France and the Nordics points to the fruitfulness of using forms of governing versus forms of confession when exploring transnational and global challenges and occurrences. This is to revisit what is considered radical opposites in order to reconsider their forms and strategies and have a closer look at what were considered ‘problems’ and how they were sought to be solved. That is the case whether the object to be analyzed is ‘education’ or rather goes beyond ‘it’. This invites further visits in and use of Tröhler’s double analytical concept of forms of confession versus forms of governing in order to understand and compare historical developments, be it of national languages of education or beyond.

References Buchardt, M. (2013). Religion, education and social cohesion: Transformed and traveling Lutheranism in the emerging Nordic welfare states 1890s–1930s. In M. Buchardt, P. Markkola, & H. Valtonen (Eds.), Education, state and citizenship. A perspective in the Nordic welfare state history (Vol. 4, pp.  81–113). NordWel Studies in Historical Welfare State Research. Buchardt, M. (2017). Lutheranism and the Nordic states. In U.  Puschner & R.  Faber (Eds.), Luther. Zeitgenössisch, historisch, kontrovers (pp.  285–295). Peter Lang. Buchardt, M. (2020a). Church, religion and morality. In D.  Tröhler (Ed.), Bloomsbury histories of education: A cultural history of education in the age of enlightenment. A cultural history of education, Vol. 4 (pp.  25–46). Bloomsbury Academic. Buchardt, M. (2020b). Educational biblical nationalism and the project of the modern secular state. Croatian Journal of Education, 22(Sp.Ed.2), 133–150. Buchardt, M. (2021a). Educating migrant children and women in the political projects of the welfare nation-state and secularization: The Danish ‘extreme case’ in light of the French. In D. Tröhler, N. Piattovea, & W. F. Pinar (Eds.), World yearbook of education 2022: Education, schooling and the global universalization of nationalism (pp. 251–266). Routledge. Buchardt, M. (2021b). The political project of secularization and modern education reform in ‘provincialized Europe’: Historical research in religion and ­education beyond secularization, r.i.p. IJHE Bildungsgeschichte – International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 11(2), 164–170.

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Buchardt, M. (2023). The Nordic model and the educational welfare state in a European light: Social problem solving and secular-religious ambitions when modernizing Sweden and France. In D.  Tröhler, B.  Hörmann, S.  Tveit, & I. Bostad (Eds.), The Nordic education model in context: Historical developments and current renegotiations (pp. 107–124). Routledge. Buchardt, M., & Fox, S. (2020). Social histories of Bildung between universal and national ambitions and global emergences. IJHE Bildungsgeschichte  – International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 10(2), 133–137. Cabanel, P. (2016). Ferdinand Buisson. Père de l’École Laïque. Labor et Fides. Conrad, S. (2012). Enlightenment in global history: A historiographical critique. American Historical Review, 117(4), 999–1027. Eiranen, R. (2019). Emotional and social ties in the construction of nationalism: A group biographical approach to the Tengström family in nineteenth-century Finland. Studies on National Movements, 4(2019), 1–38. Gotling, N. (2020). National textbook narratives and historiography: Presenting a same that is never the same. Croatian Journal of Education, 22(Sp.Ed.2), 65–82. Hoegarts, J. (2020). Learning to love: Embodied practices of patriotism in the Belgian nineteenth-century classroom (and beyond). In A.  Stynen, M.  Van Ginderachter, & X. M. N. Núñez Seixas (Eds.), Emotions and everyday nationalism in modern European history (pp. 66–83). Routledge. Mayeur, F. (2004). Histoire Générale de l’Enseignement et de l’Éducation en France. De la Révolution à l’École Républicaine (1789–1930). Perrin. Mayeur, J.-M., & Rebérioux, M. (1987). The Third Republic from its origins to the Great War, 1871–1914. Cambridge University Press. Singer, B. B. (1975). Jules Ferry and the laic revolution in French primary education. Paedagogica Historica, 15(2), 406–425. Skey, M., & Antonsich, M. (Eds.). (2017). Everyday nationhood. Theorising culture, identity and belonging after Banal nationalism. Palgrave Macmillan. Taylor, C. (2007). A secular age. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Tröhler, D. (2011). Languages of education. Protestant legacies, national identities, and global aspirations. Routledge. Tröhler, D. (2018). Internationale Provokationen an nationale Denkstile in der Erziehungswissenschaft: Perspektive der Allgemeinen Pädagogik. IJHE Bildungsgeschichte – International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 8(2), 173–189. Tröhler, D. (2019). Die Ausbildung zukünftiger Lehrpersonen im Schnittfeld von nationalen Denkstilen und hegemonialen Aspirationen. In S.  Doff (Ed.), Spannungsfelder der Lehrerbildung. Beiträge zu einer Reformdebatte (pp. 172–191). Klinkhardt. Tröhler, D. (2020a). Nation-state, education and the fabrication of national-­ minded citizens (introduction). Croatian Journal of Education, 22(Sp. Ed.2), 11–27.

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Tröhler, D. (2020b). National literacies, or modern education and the art of fabricating national minds. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 52(5), 620–635. Tröhler, D., & Maricic, V. (2023). Education and the nation: Educational knowledge in the dominant theories of nationalism. In D. Tröhler (Ed.), Education, curriculum and nation-building. Contributions of comparative education to the understanding of nations and nationalism (Oxford studies in comparative education, D. Phillips, Ed.) (pp. 7–33). Routledge.

CHAPTER 4

Nations and Comparative Educations: Reflecting Comparatively on Pedagogies, Performances, and Politics Robert Cowen

Introduction As someone who specializes in comparative education, I was delighted to be asked to write for this volume. The Editors’ request was to ‘identify and unmask’ modes of ‘national literacies’. That is a complex challenge, but at least the starting point is straightforward: comparative educationists compare nations and educations. Unfortunately, that is one of those casual generalizations that creates more confusion than it resolves. What does ‘compare’ mean? Classify, as you might classify butterflies or plants? List similarities and differences, then use J. S. Mill to identify ‘causes’? Maybe put nations in rank order, comparing like PISA? Compare what, exactly?

R. Cowen (*) University College London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Fox, L. Boser (eds.), National Literacies in Education, Historical Studies in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41762-7_4

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Yes. One view of comparative education is that it ‘compares’: juxtaposing narratives about any two (or more) nations and educational systems between Afghanistan and Zimbabwe. Indeed, that jejune definition is sometimes used to identify, among published articles, those which are ‘really’ comparative education and those which are not. Fortunately, comparative education is a bit more complicated than that (Manzon, 2011). My own view of comparative education is that it investigates the transfer, translation, and transformation of educational ideas and institutions inter-­ nationally (as they move, they morph) and traces the flow and compressions of domestic and international power into educated identities (Cowen, 2021). And to disturb clichés about comparison and juxtaposition and nations in a second and different way: no: Comparative educationists usually do not ‘compare nations’. Comparative education galloped off in the wrong direction from the word ‘go’. In more academic language, Sir Michael Sadler’s infamous question (asked in 1900)—‘how far can we learn anything of practical value from the study of foreign systems of education?’— was intellectually corrosive. It legitimated educational policy reform as the core concern of (English-language) comparative education while it was becoming a university subject between 1900 and 1970. Academic comparative education began to fail to distinguish between nationalism, the nation state, the construction of national identity, and the nation as a cultural fact—a point made by Daniel Tröhler, writing as a historian (2020b: 622). The fatuous generalizations about ‘national character’ offered by Vernon Mallinson (1957) mark the nadir of discussion (in comparative education) about the nation. It has not only taken a whole volume (Tröhler, 2023) but even a World Yearbook of Education to rescue the theme (Tröhler et al., 2022), and we also have available an exciting new work by Stephanie Fox (2020) on national epistemologies and major essays by Tröhler, including ones showing the intricate and changing interconnections between notions of the nation, comparative education, and imperialism (2020a, b, 2022).

Approaches This chapter will try to find a way to think about the theme of this book using comparative education itself as an illustration. The first problem is how do we get from intuition to analysis. Thus, initially, some ways-to-see are suggested. Then, two forms of comparative education are contrasted and discussed.

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We enjoy cultural differences. We enjoy differences in architecture, public and private; in food and wine; between the detective-heroes of Raymond Chandler and Michael Dibdin, Jo Nesbø and Georges Simenon, and the music of Led Zeppelin and Abba, or Verdi and Wagner. National cultural differences are part of our traveler’s tales (‘yes, I did find one good restaurant in London’). However, the analytic move from national cultural differences to national academic literacies in particular fields of study is harder, although the hints are there. Recently, I wanted to classify the faux-comparative work of PISA and the World Bank, so I invented the term ‘solutions-­ comparative-­ education’—and was embarrassed. As a schoolboy, I had taken pleasure in discovering words such as antidisestablishmentarianism (and I was even more pleased when my school let me study German). So why was I embarrassed? I found the answer in a review of two large books on the history of education: ‘… entries are almost all written in clear and accessible style, eschewing the impenetrable theory that bedevils the work of many social scientists. Historians know better’ (Phillips, 2022: 282). Here, captured by David Phillips, was my inner censor—the rules of written text: Sir Ernest Gowers’ advice to the British Civil Service about how to write ‘be short, be simple, be human’ and Churchill’s ‘short words are best’. In other words, here, ‘national academic literacy’ will be taken to mean: how do you write in a culturally appropriate style—as if you were English? Charmingly, a strong hint of what to look for is offered in a short and succinct illustration of two national styles of academic literacy—in a superb paper written by a Japanese academic. The point is that there are national differences in rules of text. One example—delicate and sustained—is provided by Akiko Hayashi who suggests: …not that there is a single Japanese way of doing comparative educational research, but rather that there are ways of doing research that reflect Japanese habits of mind, aesthetics, language, and culture …[these] …include: slowing down (youyu), caring for (daijini) and not being wasteful (mottenai) with data, taking a long perspective (nagaime), and focusing more on collectivities (shuudan-sei) and contexts (kanjin shugi) than on individual actors. (Hayashi, 2021: 148)

Hayashi, very alert to different national rules of text, adds that ‘Japanese comparative educational scholars … sometimes put forward linear

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arguments, eschew the use of anecdotes, and end with a conclusion that reviews key points and delineates implications’ (2021: 157). Clearly, by chatting about architecture and food, detective stories and music, I have violated what Hayashi is too subtle to call Western rules of academic text, which, with the addition of one word (culturalist), are the English rules of academic text in comparative education. Let us return to linearity.

Abstractions How do particular forms of comparative education knowledge become selected, sustained, and shape academic identities? Replacing one word in a phrase used by Daniel Tröhler (2020b: 624) when he was discussing Billig’s concept of banal nationalism pins the puzzle: by being ‘everyday practices of … [academic]… identity formation… which are unobtrusive and unrecognizable because of their everyday nature’. It has already been suggested that there are rules of text within fields of study. How are they transmitted? The pedagogic conduit for those rules of text includes ‘term papers’ or ‘course work’, MA dissertations and PhD theses (though that vocabulary reverses in the USA to become PhD dissertations). We also constrain and construct educated identities in the pedagogies of the seminar, the tutorial, and the lecture. They require performances. Typically, in the seminar, what is demanded is academic disputation, but the verbal performance must select from the available literature. Certain names and concepts are welcome; others will be met with silence or, more likely, explicit critique or rejection. The tutorial demands acknowledgment, an almost confessional acknowledgment, of academic imperfections (such as failure to do the references properly). In contrast, the professorial lecture requires—even if it does not always get—a display of erudite and charismatic academic domination (Cowen, 2000). The rules of text tell you ‘how to write right’, as it were. The pedagogies of the seminar and the tutorial offer a chance to talk the talk. As with Eliza Doolittle and Professor Higgins, proper performance needs practice. More generally, that is to say for a wide range of national academic literacies, the crucial pedagogy is the preferred epistemic frame (PER) which can be positivist, Freirean, culturalist, neo-institutionalist, post-modern, and so on. Rolland Paulston (2009), in a tour de force, mapped a variety of preferred epistemic frames in comparative education. In a particular time and place, any one frame can act as the Gestalt definition of comparative education.

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The high drama among our pedagogies is provided by the formal epistemic reproof (FER): when a thought-style is violated. An FER is usually published in the journals, but it is not a routine event (such as a normal review of a book). A formal epistemic reproof identifies a heresy. These basic pedagogies (rules of text, tutorials, etc.) act cumulatively as academic Enigma machines, carrying the codes of identity of academic specialists in particular places—including nations. The pedagogies are the routines of practice through which an academic identity is acquired, and you are declared to be ‘literate’ in comparative education on the basis of, apparently objective, judgments about successful acquisition. The research that would be needed to demonstrate the rules of text and face-to-face pedagogies has, for comparative education anyway, not yet been done (though the research techniques are available). Thus, the next practical step in the analysis is to re-think the available literature to see if the creation and transmission of preferred epistemic frames can be identified, contrasted, and interpreted for comparative educations in the USA and England. (The USA and the UK would be kinder on the eye and the ear—but the UK contains four nationalities.) There is not enough room to discuss the details of a range of formal reproofs, but they need to be noted. Heresies always clarify what is assumed to be true.

Narrations Good narratives often begin with ‘Once upon a time’, which normally guarantees an attentive audience (of at least one). But, here, the phrase highlights a problem. Comparative education has different national ‘academic literacies’ in different places, such as Southern Europe (Palomba & Cappa, 2018), and different histories. Such histories at first glance look simple: institutionally, for example in the USA, the first taught course in comparative education was offered at Teachers College, Columbia University, in 1900, and Isaac Kandel gained his PhD there as early as 1910. The consolidation of advanced courses and post-bachelor degrees was done mainly at the International Institute of Teachers College in the decade before the Second World War (Bu, 2020). In England, the consolidation of such courses took place after 1950 at the University of London Institute of Education (Cowen, 2020). However, institutionalization, in itself, was not (and is not always) enough to clarify a national ‘academic literacy’ in particular fields of study.

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In the cases of the USA and England, what came first was a surreal Wild West decade. The squabbling settlers had arrived before law and order was fully established—and this particular Wild West was surreal because it was, more or less, in the middle of the Atlantic. George Bereday, Max Eckstein, and Harold Noah had left England for the USA; Andreas Kazamias had moved there from Greece; and in England, the squabbling settlers were Edmund King and Brian Holmes, who disagreed with ‘the Americans’ (and each other). Everyone identified or created a different preferred epistemic frame—largely because their academic identities via their English bachelor degrees were so different: classics, physics, economics, and so on. More generally, with the exception of Kazamias whose flirtation with the social sciences was brief, this generation denied that comparative education was best done by using history. What became the English preferred epistemic frame is what Bill Halls called a ‘culturalist’ perspective, emphasizing languages and cultural understanding (and reflecting the availability of modern foreign language teachers as potential comparative educationists). The culturalists included Valerie Dundas-Grant, Arthur Hearden, Edmund King, and Vernon Mallinson as well as Bill Halls himself, with his empathy for France and his translations of Durkheim (Phillips, 2020). There were also academics born elsewhere (Nicholas Hans, Russia; Joseph Lauwerys, Belgium; Janusz Tomiak, Poland) teaching comparative education in London. They had research degrees but—clichés being clichés—their languages and their ‘foreignness’ meant they were legitimated, anyway, as comparative educationists. In principle, a culturalist epistemology might have developed in the USA. Among the pioneers, there was sufficient ‘embodiment’: people with appropriate sensitivities. In the postwar generation, Bereday was Polish and multilingual, Noah and Eckstein were English and had attended the lectures of Hans in London, and Kazamias was a Cypriot Greek. Earlier immigrants, such as Robert Ulich, and persons from immigrant families, such as William Brickman, had the languages and a preference for working with history. Kandel, born in Romania of British parents and later a student of Michael Sadler in Manchester, had worked in Germany and was remarkably multilingual. He had many of the sensibilities of a ‘culturalist’ (Epstein, 2020; Pollack, 1989). How was this potential not realized? Why did this possibility not define US comparative education? Comparative education is severely affected by international politics. Like educational systems themselves, the preference for an epistemic frame

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within comparative educations reflects the intersection of international and domestic politics, and not merely the ‘embodied’ epistemic positions of individual scholars (Cowen, 2018). English comparative education reflected proximity to Europe. (England still does not have a group of specialists in comparative education with strong area expertise on Japan or Latin America.) From the 1950s to the 1970s, the ‘normal puzzles’ of English comparative education—postwar policies for the democratization of educational systems, including secondary school reform, teacher education, and the expansion of university systems—made Western Europe, politically, the logical place to investigate. Until the word ‘globalization’ became fashionable, the focus remained Europe, newly interesting because of the European Union and its educational policies. It needed the international politics of globalization to permit a sociological voice—for example, in the work of Roger Dale, Susan Robertson, and Jenny Ozga—to become a long overdue addition to the English comparative literature. The international political relations of the USA were very different. There was, in the USA in the late 1950s, a considerable panic over the apparent technological progress of the USSR, highlighted in the mass media by photographs of a dog in space—in a Soviet satellite—and the theme of ‘Ivan and Johnny’ (one of whom could read and the other allegedly could not). At the national political level, the theme of Cold War competition with the USSR affected presidential elections and thus the Cuban missile crisis and the beginnings of military involvement in Southeast Asia and Vietnam. There was a general shift to positivist views in the social sciences and the economics and sociology of development (Heyck, 2015), and the political shock and epistemic change had important side effects in education as the USA responded to what was called ‘communism’ (not least by Senator McCarthy). The impact on education included Eisenhower’s efforts to strengthen the moral defenses of the USA through educational reform and a rush into what Gita Steiner-Khamsi has called ‘Sovietology’. A second impact was to try to get precise comparative (here, meaning inter-national) measurements of educational outcomes. Science, technology, and mathematics were suddenly important, and so there was major interest in Japan and in testing, not least through the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement. The third effect was a new US emphasis on Latin America and increased involvement with Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Concepts and theories of development by Alex Inkeles, Talcott

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Parsons, and Walt Rostow became important. Institutionally, the work of C. Arnold Anderson and Mary Jean Bowman in Chicago became very visible, and Stanford developed a strong interest in Latin America. The pointlessness of ‘history’ was confirmed. The spaces which comparative education looked at changed. The older model of comparative space—Bereday’s ‘northern crescent’ (Europe, the USSR, Japan, and back to North America)—collapsed. The new world was binary (communist and democratic) with the supra-national labeling of space: developing and developed; industrialized and newly industrialized; modern and traditional; and First and Third World. Theories of modernity—the structural functionalist sociology used to analyze modern societies, the sociology of development used to deal with ‘the Third World’, and the messianic vision of a social science of variables without the names of countries—became the preferred epistemic frame for US comparative education. This epistemic shift within US comparative education (from history to sociology and ‘modernization’ and development) is analyzed very well by Silova and Brehm (2009)—ironically, in the journal European Education. American comparative education became very different from English comparative education. In these contrasts between English and US comparative education and the impact of changes in international politics, the theme of ‘sociology’ has surprising longevity. English comparative education, in its pioneering moment, had already refused conventional sociology and sociological theory. Hans wrote as if he were a historian, Holmes invented his own very idiosyncratic ‘sociological’ perspective, and Edmund King wrote a book on social change which contained no sustained analysis of Durkheim or Weber or any other serious sociologist. Sociology, which is one of the two major sources for formal academic reproofs (the other is interpretations of international politics), would seem, a priori, to be local, domestic, and harmless. Of course, radical proposals in comparative education are put forward from time to time. Not too long ago, Colin Brock in England argued that geography should become a major theoretical approach to comparative education, and Patricia Broadfoot defined ‘learnology’ and suggested it should replace comparative education. Both proposals were met with a loud silence. In contrast, Edmund King issued a very high decibel formal epistemic reproof to Margaret Archer (1979) about her use of historical sociology to interpret four educational systems. The point here is not who was right. (Archer’s analysis was offered with her usual impeccable scholarship.) The

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point is that a culturalist thought style had been violated, a heresy had been committed. For an analysis of the reproof and the responses, in which the word ‘theology’ was used as an accusation, see Epstein (1983). The tension over sociological theory and comparative work continues, though the locus has tended to be mid-Atlantic. There was a sharp rejection of the neo-institutionalism of Meyer and Ramirez by Carney et al. (2012) and by Silova and Brehm (2015). To the general theme of ‘abusing ancestors’, Epstein and Carroll (2011) have also issued formal epistemic reproofs defending historical functionalism against European forms of postmodernist theory. However, there is an even larger tension which has lasted even longer— and which is now attracting formal epistemic reproofs. The tensions cluster around the word ‘international’. One meaning is education to create ‘international understanding’ of other peoples. The theme was sharpened by UNESCO in 1946; is obvious in the writing of Robert Ulich; and informs the contemporary writing of specialists, such as Douglas Bourn in University College, London. The second tension over the word ‘international’ was the struggle to insert it into the titles of academic societies. This renaming did not happen in Japan or Italy or even in Spain (despite Spain’s links with Latin America). It occurred in Britain and the USA. In Britain, this was an early metaphorical Brexit: a break with the Comparative Education Society in Europe (CESE), which had been founded in 1961. After further name changes, the British Society became the British Association of International and Comparative Education (BAICE). In the case of the USA, the academic society was originally called the Comparative Education Society. It was later renamed as Comparative and International Education Society (CIES). The renaming of both societies can be taken in two ways: either (i) the societies are committed to international understanding and harmony, or (ii) the titles CIES and BAICE mark a re-positioning of ‘education and development’ closer to the aid and foreign policies of the UK and US governments. The tension of course comes from history, two political histories, and how they can be construed. In the case of England, the ‘international’ came before the ‘comparative’. More precisely, a department called ‘education in the colonies’ was founded at the Institute of Education in London in 1927. The ‘comparative education department’ was created in 1947. The accusation of colonialism is perfectly appropriate for the English and their empire. The problematic has been how to deal with it analytically and intellectually

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afterward. (The best current work is a very recent paper discussing mutations of names and epistemic principles [Unterhalter & Kadiwal, 2022] around ‘education in the colonies’ and its later nomenclature within the Institute of Education.) In the USA, the problem (despite, say, the Philippines) has been how to accept the accusation of colonialism, given the ideological self-positioning of ‘America’: the Revolution and Independence, Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations, saving Europe again in the Second World War, and American politics up to and including Eisenhower. The formal epistemic reproofs were offered by Keita Takayama (2018) in his analysis of the early history of Teachers College and by Takayama et  al. (2017) to both English and US ‘comparative-­and-international’ education.

Reflections This chapter has been analyzing, comparatively, two forms of comparative education. In Akiko Hayashi’s (2021) words: ‘what were the key points and… implications?’ The pioneering moments should be distinguished from the everyday practices which sustain a style once it is emergent. The pioneering moment is the apex of ‘embodied’ comparative education: it is the easiest time to label particular approaches in the field of study with the names of people. However, the pioneering moment also offers contradictory choices. Second, the shift from the pioneer moment to stabilization involves confirming the rules of text, how to talk the talk, routinizing ‘originality’, and showing through choice of literature at the MA level that the field of study has achieved a direction of development, a linearity. The pedagogies for these transmissions stretch from intense personal and normally private face-to-face messages (e.g., in the tutorial) to intense impersonal and very public messages via formal epistemic reproof (FER) in the journals. Third, the crucial pedagogy is the preferred epistemic frame (PEF). While it is being stabilized, there will be vociferous assertions by individuals about the importance of their own PEF; perhaps disputes within specialist departments, between universities, or within the professional societies (Masemann et al., 2007); and certainly in the journals; but stabilization does occur. Subsequently, the new epistemic equilibrium is affected by international (and domestic) politics which mean that a PEF used in universities can alter with relative suddenness. Except in extreme political

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circumstances (e.g., Nazi Germany), possible PEFs compete continuously for attention in the literature even after institutionalization of one thought style has been achieved. Thus, under the impact of international politics, what counts as ‘academic literacy’ in comparative education is likely to fracture and the process begins again: international politics and national politics help to shape choices, again, among ‘candidate’ epistemic frames. Meanwhile, almost invisible tensions in the pedagogic process are occurring. Tension is implicit in every subtheme within the analysis which has so far been offered. The rules of text, the tutorial, the seminar (and the professorial lecture, if it is good enough), and the preferred epistemic frame, at the existential level, affect those who are being taught comparative education. Since some time ago, Sonia Mehta (2004) drew attention to the pedagogic silencing of subaltern voices; Akiko Hayashi, who fluently commands at least two ‘national academic literacies’ in comparative education, has already been cited; and Keita Takayama (2020) has written a powerful (and comparative) analysis of his own existential experiences of at least three national epistemologies in comparative education. The counterpoint is clear: there is a serious but invigorating puzzle about how to teach—especially comparative education—well when some students are having to shift national thought styles. Other implications? Perhaps we have tended to invoke too much our iconic pioneers—personalizing the development of comparative education without seeing, certainly without emphasizing, that national thought styles exist. Probably, we have overlooked the importance of formal epistemic reproofs. These are always embarrassing (like family rows at Thanksgiving or Christmas), although they are more important than a family squabble. They tell us what counts as heresy. Thus, we know what the true church is, and we know our own identity as the chosen. However, from time to time, the heretics succeed. Then there is a re-­ formation, a shift in what is seen-in-the-world, and a different preferred epistemic frame is created or embraced. We are probably entering such a moment now. Currently, there is a major shift in international politics that includes a return to the nineteenth-­ century Great Game, the shock of a war in Europe, increasing doubt about the virtues of neoliberalism, and a sharp reminder that pestilence globalizes itself. At the moment, the strongest formal epistemic reproof about the identity of US and English comparative and international education is the charge of colonialism. The denouement is of ourselves. The suggestion is that we are the heretics: that is, we should see ourselves as

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heretical in terms of the ideals of at least two eighteenth-century revolutions and the rights of man, and we should see that there is a contradiction between our high discourses and our practical politics in comparative-­andinternational-education. Here, we have a major non-­linearity, as confusing as if we are trying to finish—or, at the very least, understand—an unfinished Jackson Pollock painting. However, if you think about it another way, that is what we are doing: the painting is the international politics and the educational patterning of the last 250 years, and we are still trying to make sense of that: comparatively, historically, sociologically, and so on. No one is going to stop that world whirling around—it merely sped up a bit in the last couple of years. Nor—I judge—will our epistemic whirligig stop doing what whirligigs do (and that includes sometimes flying off out of control). All of that makes this whirling-and-whirligig moment almost magical and full of opportunity. Acknowledgments  I am very grateful to Maria Manzon at Sophia University, Japan. I had to write this chapter while in Brazil, and I needed some elusive academic material. Her kindness and generosity of spirit are remarkable.

References Archer, M. S. (1979). Social origins of educational systems. Sage. Bu, L. (2020). Paul Monroe. In E. H. Epstein (Ed.), North American scholars of comparative education: Examining the work and influence of notable 20th century comparativists (pp. 23–36). Routledge. Carney, S., Rappleye, J., & Silova, I. (2012). Between faith and science: World culture theory and comparative education. Comparative Education Review, 56(3), 366–393. Cowen, R. (2000). On pedagogic forms, educational space and political principles. In J. Bouzakis (Ed.), Historical-comparative perspectives: Festschrift for Andreas M. Kazamias (pp. 363–375). Gutenberg. Cowen, R. (2018). Embodied comparative education. Comparative Education, 54(1), 10–25. Cowen, R. (2020). Joseph Lauwerys 1902–1981. In D.  Phillips (Ed.), British scholars of comparative education: Examining the work and influence of notable 19th and 20th century Comparativists (pp. 53–70). Routledge. Cowen, R. (2021). Educated identity: Concepts, mobilities and imperium. In S. Carney & E. Klerides (Eds.), Identities and education: Comparative perspectives in times of crisis (pp. 27–46). Bloomsbury Academic.

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Epstein, E. H. (1983). Currents left and right: Ideology in comparative education. Comparative Education Review, 27(1), 3–29. Epstein, E. H. (Ed.). (2020). North American scholars of comparative education: Examining the work and influence of notable 20th century comparativists. Routledge. Epstein, E. H., & Carroll, K. T. (2011). Erasing ancestry: A critique of critiques of the postmodern deviation in comparative education. In J. C. Weidman & W. J. Jacob (Eds.), Beyond the comparative: Advancing theory and its application to practice (pp. 31–48). Sense Publishers. Fox, S. (2020). The entanglement of nation and epistemology: Glances into the backyard of academic dignity. Croatian Journal of Education, 22(Sp. Ed.2), 193–210. Hayashi, A. (2021). Some Japanese ways of conducting comparative educational research. Comparative Education, 57(2), 147–158. Heyck, H. (2015). Age of system: Understanding the development of modern social science. Johns Hopkins University Press. Mallinson, V. (1957). An introduction to the study of comparative education. Heinemann. Manzon, M. (2011). Comparative education: The construction of a field. Springer and Comparative Education Research Centre, The University of Hong Kong. Masemann, V., Bray, M., & Manzon, M. (Eds.). (2007). Common interests, uncommon goals: Histories of the World Council of Comparative Education Societies and its members. Comparative Education Research Centre, The University of Hong Kong and Springer. Mehta, S. (2004). ‘Post’ cards from a pedagogical edge. In S. Mehta & P. Ninnes (Eds.), Re-imagining comparative education: Postfoundational ideas and applications for critical times (pp. 19–41). Routledge. Palomba, D., & Cappa, C. (Eds.). (2018). Comparative studies in education in Southern Europe. Comparative Education, 54(Sp.Ed.4). Paulston, R. G. (2009). Mapping comparative education after postmodernity. In R.  Cowen & A.  M. Kazamias (Eds.), International handbook of comparative education (pp. 965–990). Springer. Phillips, D. (Ed.). (2020). British scholars of comparative education: Examining the work and influence of notable 19th and 20th century comparativists. Routledge. Phillips, D. (2022). The Oxford handbook of the history of education; Handbook of historical studies in education: Debates, tensions, and directions. Comparative Education, 58(2), 281–284. Pollack, E. W. (1989). Isaac Leon Kandel: A pioneer in comparative and international education. PhD dissertation, Loyola University. Silova, I., & Brehm, W.  C. (2009). Education and geopolitics in a changing Europe: Forty years of scholarship in European education. European Education: Issues and Studies, 41(2), 7–30.

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Silova, I., & Brehm, W. C. (2015). From myths to models: The (re)production of world culture in comparative education. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 13(1), 8–33. Takayama, K. (2018). Beyond comforting histories: The colonial/imperial entanglements of the international institute, Paul Monroe, and Isaac L. Kandel at Teachers College, Columbia University. Comparative Education, 62(4), 459–481. Takayama, K. (2020). An invitation to ‘negative’ comparative education. Comparative Education, 20(1), 79–95. Takayama, K., Sriprakash, A., & Connell, R. (2017). Toward a postcolonial comparative and international education. Comparative Education Review, 61(1), 1–24. Tröhler, D. (2020a). Knowledge, media and communication. In J.  Harford & T. O’Donoghue (Eds.), A cultural history of education in the modern age (Vol. 6, pp. 35–57). Bloomsbury Academic. Tröhler, D. (2020b). National literacies, or modern education and the art of fabricating national minds. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 52(5), 620–635. Tröhler, D. (2022). From national exceptionalism to national imperialism: Changing motives of comparative education. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 43(3), 441–459. Tröhler, D. (Ed.). (2023). Education, curriculum and nation-building. Contributions of comparative education to the understanding of nations and nationalism. Routledge. Tröhler, D., Piattoeva, N., & Pinar, W. F. (Eds.). (2022). World yearbook of education 2022: Education, globalization, and the universalization of nationalism. Routledge. Unterhalter, E., & Kadiwal, L. (2022). Education, decolonisation and international development at the Institute of Education (London). London Review of Education, 20(1), 1–16.

CHAPTER 5

Answering the Call for Research on Nationalism and Education with International, Historical, Multi-case Discursive Studies Nicole Gotling

Nationalism and education are both fields that have provided extensive scope for theorization and research. Yet, even though there has been well more than a century’s worth of scholarly publications that have been concerned with the modern conceptualizations of these, there is still a relative dearth of research that has delved into the intersection of nationalism and education (Tröhler & Maricic, 2023). This dearth does not point to the unimportance of this intersection, but rather to the fact that it has been ignored for far too long. One of the most prominent contemporary scholars of education and the nation, Daniel Tröhler, has, for years, been discussing and calling for more research on the entangled histories of

N. Gotling (*) University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Fox, L. Boser (eds.), National Literacies in Education, Historical Studies in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41762-7_5

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nationalism and its intersection with education while also explaining why it is important and relevant to do so (e.g., Tröhler, 2016, 2022). One of the aspects integral to this intersection is the role that modern nation-states have given to educational institutions of making the nation-­ states’ future citizens. The nation-state’s need of making a certain kind of citizen who accords with its own particular ideals is essential to the longevity of the nation-state itself since it is essentially the national, even patriotic citizen who has the role of legitimizing and upholding the national state and its sovereignty (e.g., Friedrich, 2014; Piattoeva, 2010). In order for these citizens to know their nation and even see the state and their roles within it, they must become nationally literate in what this means according to their own nation-state (e.g., Dahn & Boser, 2015). Citizens must become, be, and remain fluent in the national discourse particular to their state (Tröhler, 2020a, b). To ensure that future citizens would become nationally literate and stay loyal and responsible in their duties to their nation-state, nation-state-builders have consistently educationalized the task, even reforming or recreating their national state educational institutions and curricula for these purposes (e.g., Westberg et al., 2019; Tröhler, 2016). This process of educationalization is one that has worked to make students, the future citizens, nationally literate in the discourses of their own nation-state. This understanding that nation-state-builders and actors have so regularly turned to education and used educational means to make their future national citizens underlies the call to focus more research on the intersection of nationalism and education. To research both fields and where and how they intersect and apply to each other will highlight how incredibly interwoven the ideas, acts, and phenomena of nationalism and education really are—especially as they concern the nation-state and its ideal loyal citizens. Furthermore, researching this intersection makes visible not just the intrinsic connections but also the similar or idiosyncratic modes and means by which, amongst other things, modern nation-state-builders engineered and purposed their educational institutions and related phenomena for making national, and nationally literate, citizens. Such research on the intersection of nationalism and education can focus on a single case study, but where it becomes incredibly enlightening to the various possibilities and realities of nationalism and education is through cross-case comparison. Nation-states, along with their educational institutions and visions of the ideal citizen, have not been realized in similar ways at fixed points in time and then remained simple, static entities, but they have each

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emerged, developed, and interacted with and alongside each other over time. Consequently, their changing and idiosyncratic trajectories and particularities stand out all the more when viewed together. Finally, that nationalism, citizenship, and educational phenomena, which are attached to becoming nationally literate, are being understood not as static but as actively and socially constructed, interacting, and changing, and thus as producing and reproducing each other, points to the need to view them as discourses. As will be elaborated in the following section, the many phenomena of nationalism, citizenship, and education (especially curricula) each continuously reciprocates, reifies, reproduces, and (re-)legitimizes the other. These necessary and necessarily continuous interactions and developments not only relativize the many interdependent phenomena, but the discourses (re-)construct each other in such a way that they remain relevant and valid over time as people, priorities, and ideals change. For instance, just as national citizens are defined by the state and are made nationally literate thanks in large part to how the national educational institutions are organized and experienced, one of the most important roles of the nationally literate citizen is to uphold and validate the sovereignty of their particular nation-state and its ideals at the time. Therefore, research at this nexus can show how nationalism and education are working as discourses that (re-)produce, enact, and reify themselves and each other. That the phenomena (and histories) of nationalism and education are so clearly intertwined and interdependent gives strong support to Tröhler’s general call for more research on the intersection(s) of their entangled histories. More specifically, calls for research on this nexus state that the research would be best served if it is international, historical, and comparative in scope so that the national and educational idiosyncrasies are most evident (Cowen, 2022; Tröhler, 2021, 2022). In the next sections, this paper proposes how research at the crucial intersection of nationalism and education, which also inherently includes the national and nationally literate citizen, can (and should) be framed and designed as discursive, historical, and comparative. The next section provides a further discussion on the reasons for understanding nationalism, citizenship, and education, especially curricula, as discourses. This is then followed with a section on why this type of research benefits from being comparative in aspect, both across multiple cases and across time with a longue durée perspective from historiography of education, and findings from such a recent study help to exemplify these suggestions.

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Understanding Nationalism, Citizenship, and Curricula as Discourses for Research That these phenomena of nationalism, citizenship, and curricula are understood as discourses rather than static is important to remember for research designs and processes. The understanding of these phenomena as discourses opens the research to a wealth of possibilities. It is not only that it lends itself better to the framing of research data for discourse analysis, but also to a wider range of what can be considered in the study in the first place. To start, nationalism is understood here as a discourse that is institutionally and socially constructed, and nationalism as a discourse works in the three interrelated spheres of identity, time, and space (Özkırımlı, 2010: 209–210). Thus, research into nationalism allows for the analysis of many different, interrelated foci at different levels and disciplines. Additionally, research into nationalism can and should look into the different levels of its own phenomena: not just the obvious tools of nation-­ states, such as their national flags and anthems, but also how citizens create, reproduce, and share their everyday practices, which are often banal, vague, and undefined yet still significant and seemingly natural (e.g., Gotling, 2022: 22–24; Hobsbawm, 2021: 149–150; Özkırımlı, 2010; Billig, 1995). At the same time, we should keep in mind that the discursive practices of becoming nationally literate and of our everyday discursive worlds of nationalism are not just about learning to perform and recognize the nation-state, but also about learning how to represent ourselves; to take on and ascribe certain identities to ourselves and others; to uphold and aim for certain values and goals; and to choose, use, and give meaning and importance to language and words. In line with recognizing nationalism as a discourse, since the nation-­ state’s citizens are continuously producing and reproducing the national in their everyday lives, this also means that citizenship and the citizens’ role and duties are also practiced in a non-static discourse, renegotiating what these mean so that the citizen and state continue to legitimize and support each other (e.g., Piattoeva, 2010: 29–30). As already discussed, it is in large part through national educational institutions that citizens become nationally literate, learning not only how to recognize and perform their nation-state but also their role as citizens and their duties to their nation-state. Citizens are discursively defined and created by the

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state, educated into a nation, and perform (or at least are expected to perform) as a citizen of the nation-state. Again, education is a critical aspect in this making of the nationally literate citizen, and education and the curricula attached to the national educational institutions should also be considered in their discursive senses rather than as static entities. Curriculum is itself a social construction (Goodson, 1992: 66), but this social construction entails much more than just its ‘social surface’. While research may focus on one aspect of curriculum, such as the ‘official knowledge’ (see Apple, 2000) in the intended curriculum, curriculum indeed is much more wholistic and encompasses the whole range of students’ life worlds and experiences. Since curriculum is practiced and experienced across multiple spheres of student life, it should actually be seen as a discourse and in the sense of its verb form, currere (see Pinar, 2004, 2010), thereby also lending itself well to the other various discourses. Since currere represents the whole active, discursive, experienced lifeworld of each student, and it can be understood well in relation to other socially constructed discourses, it works well to frame educational research. Approaching educational research through the wider frame of currere is helpful in that it opens research up to the multiple aspects of curricula and allows the researcher to reconstruct a multi-­layered picture of the students’, the individuals’, social and educational experiences (2004: 35–37, 58). These layers of curricula may, for example, focus on students’ ‘lived sense of temporality’ or identity, and thus in this way, research can be connected back to those layers inherent to national discourse.

The Benefits of Designing and Conducting Multi-­case Comparative Research from a Longue Durée Perspective Even as discourses, nationalism, citizenship, and education and curricula have been intertwined and related throughout their entangled histories. This makes them open to a wide-range of research possibilities, which can often be worked out through case studies. Yet, while the (national) idiosyncrasies of these discourses can be drawn out through case studies, they become especially evident through multi-case comparisons. That these entangled national, citizenship, and educational phenomena are not static but change over time also implies the need for a research design that is

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more historical and longitudinal in scope. The nuanced workings of the intertwined discourses become more visible in comparison across borders and time. The strength of multi-case comparisons is added to when they portray more than just a snapshot of time but divulge a bigger picture through research that encompasses the historiography  of  education’s longue durée perspective. From this specific longue durée  perspective, the national discourses emerge alongside the sociocultural changes that occur over long swathes of time and not only in the shorter snapshots of pre-determined importance (see, e.g., Osterwalder, 2011: 7; Braudel, 1958). Not all research needs to look outside of a singular, specific historical time period (i.e., the medium-term époque or short-term temps court). However, in the designing of research, the longue durée analysis of multiple cases allows room for making cases more easily comparable than might otherwise be possible within more specific, shorter timeframes, especially since cases have their own idiosyncratic historicities, and they often do not employ the same phenomena in the same way at the same time. A longue durée perspective is also able to bring to light historical connections that might not have been otherwise considered together. The historical, national, and international developments that have influenced and have been influenced by national and educational discourses can thus be even better understood within the interwoven histories of these ideologies, politics, economics, and so on. Recent historical, comparative research on Prussian-German, Danish, Austrian, and French national educational historiographic trajectories provides an example of the discourses that become visible through a multi-­ case, longue durée study (Gotling, 2022). The study followed the trajectories of the four nation-states and their educational institutions, curricula, educational historiographies, history and geography textbook narratives, and concepts of the ideal citizen across the nineteenth century up until the Second World War. Such an international research design would not have been possible without the longue durée perspective from the  historiography  of  education. The longue durée was essential since a large part of the research concerned the reconstruction of the national and educational discourses alongside the creation and materialization of each as a nation-state and of their educational institutions and curricula, all of which emerged at different times and developed in different circumstances. The longue durée also allowed the research to follow the ‘social surfaces’ (Pinar, 2004: 38) of the curricular and national discourses in the educational historiographic trajectories over several decades, thereby

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showcasing when there were significant or notable shifts especially in the national, citizenship, and educational discourses and implying a potential evident change to what it meant to be a nationally literate citizen. It is after each case’s trajectory has been fully fleshed out that they become best comparable in relation to the other trajectories. This same multi-case, longue durée study not only provided insight into the similarities and differences of the national agendas of the four nation-­ states and how they were discursively realized and materializing over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but it also pointed to broader international phenomena (Gotling, 2022). For one, the educational historiographies showed the development of historical alliances over the course of numerous wars: from the World Wars back to the Prussian Wars and from the Prussian Wars back to the Napoleonic Wars, and it is here, thanks to this longue durée perspective, that the scope of the effects of the Napoleonic Wars on this long century became evident. These wars did not just shape historical alliances and show up in (educational) historiography, but they were the starting point from which other ideological, socio-political, and economic developments, which are often seemingly nation-state-specific, could be seen to have developed similarly across borders and indeed be international. While the era of nationalism and national liberalism that led up to the European revolutions of 1848 have already been widely acknowledged, others are often not compared outside the nation-state or region. Yet, there were multiple findings that showed why it is relevant to do so. For example, the multi-case comparisons of the four nation-states’ educational institutions divulged, amongst other things, the late nineteenth-century Kulturkampf not just as a Prussian-German or Austrian phenomenon, but as nearly synchronous across all four regions in the post-Prussian War decades as the Prussian-German Empire, Denmark, Austria, and France were attempting to reorganize their educational institutions (as well as other social spheres). Similarly, while the valuation and organization of more unified school systems are often lauded as a feature of the twentieth-century Nordic education model (e.g., Tröhler et  al., 2023), that Prussian and Austrian ministries of education also attempted major school unification reforms during early twentieth-century eras of social democratic politics has not typically been seen in relation to the reforms in the Nordic countries, but similarities between the efforts and debates were apparent in the multi-case comparison. The multi-case, longue durée study did not just contribute to internationalizing the picture of national ideological and socio-political

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developments. In comparing the nation-states’ educational historiographies not just across cases but also along their own national trajectories over multiple decades and numerous sources, some unexpected discoveries on the nature of the particular nation-states could also be made which would not have been as obvious within just a short period of focus or between fewer cases (see Gotling, 2022). One of the most interesting discoveries was that there was no direct correlation between the stability of the nation-state’s narrative and the extent of centralization of the nation-state’s institutions. It could be assumed that more centralized nation-states, with their highly centralized institutions, would produce relatively uniform, stable discursive narratives that would not demand a high number of textbook authors or edited editions, and vice versa, that highly decentralized nation-states would publish a high number of variable textbooks and narratives. However, the study found that there was actually no such correlation, and indeed, the most decentralized nationstate, Denmark, had the most stable educational historiographic and narrative trajectory over the breadth of the longue durée  period studied. A finding such as this can only come to light when the narrative has been reconstructed over a longer period of time and in comparison to the narrative trajectories of other nation-states, especially those which have differently structured state institutions. These findings can be added to with each additional case: in other words, the more the merrier. When looked at in terms of national literacy and a nation-state’s national agenda, values, and ideals for their citizens that are embedded in the nation-state’s educational institutions and curricula, the use of conducting a multi-case comparative study to draw out the national idiosyncrasies also becomes apparent (see Gotling, 2022). There were goals or values shared between the various cases studied, of course, and these were not adherent to the historical international alliances. However, no two cases showcased the same amalgamation of goals, values, and ideals for their national agenda. Through education, citizens were to become nationally literate in their nation-state’s own unique discourse.

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Calling for More Comparative, Historical, Multi-­case Research at the Nexus of Nationalism and Education The study represented here has exemplified the benefits of conducting research focused on the nexus of nationalism and education. The importance of studying this intersection stands out even more when considering that the phenomena of nationalism and education are discourses which are interconnected and practiced in such a way that they continuously inform, validate, and reify themselves and their said phenomena and products. Nation-states, national educational institutions, and national citizens have been formed within this intersection. Our worlds have been socially constructed, and people have learned to be, behave, and think—in essence, to become not just national but nationally literate citizens—according to a specific amalgam of the intersecting national, citizenship, and educational discourses, among others, within which they have lived. With such relevant, essential phenomena to be found within our entangled national-­ educational histories, it is no wonder that scholars such as Daniel Tröhler (2022) and Robert Cowen (2022) have been calling for more research on this particular intersection. Yet, there is an aspect to this call that has been largely missing over the recent years of increased research on nationalism and education: the research should also be more historic and international in scope. Any research on the nexus of nationalism and education contributes to the larger picture. However, for a greater and more meaningful understanding of the intertwined histories of nationalism, education, and, ultimately, individual nation-states and international relations, it is not enough to conduct single case studies or even compare just two cases side-by-side. The nexus of nationalism and education should be compared across multiple cases which can in turn be aided through a longue durée design. Multiple layers of findings are possible with research that is designed with a longue durée perspective  from historiography of education and that is international (i.e., multi-case), historical, and comparative within the frame of discourse analysis. Most prominently, such a design highlights not just the entangled histories of nationalism and education, but it also brings out the nuances of these entanglements and the idiosyncrasies between each nation-state case’s own historic national-educational trajectory and their national and nationally literate citizen, especially in comparison to others. The more cases that are added to the research, the more

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historical and international it becomes, the more each case of nationalism, citizenship, and education can be better understood. Since researching the intersection of the fields of nationalism and education is highly important to understanding ours and others’ modern lives, we should strive to understand how these fields intertwine and inform each other and each nation-state’s historic trajectory.

References Apple, M. W. (2000). Official knowledge: Democratic education in a conservative age (2nd ed.). Routledge. Billig, M. (1995). Banal nationalism. Sage. Braudel, F. (1958). Histoire et sciences sociales: La longue durée. Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 13(4), 725–753. Cowen, R. (2022). Nations in the world: Interpreting the world yearbooks. In D.  Tröhler, N.  Piattovea, & W.  F. Pinar (Eds.), World yearbook of education 2022: Education, schooling and the global universalization of nationalism (pp. 267–283). Routledge. Dahn, N., & Boser, L. (2015). Learning to see the nation-state––History, geography and public schooling in late 19th-century Switzerland. IJHE Bildungsgeschichte––International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 5(1), 41–56. Friedrich, D. S. (2014). Democratic education as a curricular problem: Historical consciousness and the moralizing limits of the present. Routledge. Goodson, I. F. (1992). On curriculum form: Notes toward a theory of curriculum. Sociology of Education, 65(1), 66–75. Gotling, N. (2022). Framing the national mind of students: A textbook case of the Prussian Wars. Educational historiographies and narratives in Prussian, Danish, Austrian, and French history and geography textbooks, from the Prussian Wars until the Interwar Period. Doctoral dissertation, University of Vienna. Hobsbawm, E. (2021). On nationalism. Hachette. Osterwalder, F. (2011). Education programmes, education reforms, and the longue durée in historiography of education. In D. Tröhler & R. Barbu (Eds.), Education systems in historical, cultural, and sociological perspectives (pp. 7–20). Sense Publishers. Özkırımlı, U. (2010). Theories of nationalism: A critical introduction (2nd ed.). Palgrave Macmillan. Piattoeva, N. (2010). Citizenship education policies and the state. Russia and Finland in a comparative perspective. Doctoral dissertation, University of Tampere.

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Pinar, W.  F. (2004). What is curriculum theory? Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers. Pinar, W. F. (2010). Currere. In C. Kridel (Ed.), Encyclopedia of curriculum studies (pp. 177–178). Sage. Tröhler, D. (2016). Curriculum history or the educational construction of Europe in the long nineteenth century. European Education Research Journal, 15(3), 279–297. Tröhler, D. (2020a). National literacies, or modern education and the art of fabricating national minds. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 52(5), 620–635. Tröhler, D. (2020b). Nation-state, education and the fabrication of national-­ minded citizens (introduction). Croatian Journal of Education, 22(Sp. Ed.2), 11–27. Tröhler, D. (2021). From national exceptionalism to national imperialism: Changing motives of comparative education. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 43(3), 441–459. Tröhler, D. (2022). Magical enchantments and the nation’s silencing. Educational research agendas under the spell of globalization. In D. Tröhler, N. Piattovea, & W. F. Pinar (Eds.), World yearbook of education 2022: Education, schooling and the global universalization of nationalism (pp. 7–25). Routledge. Tröhler, D., & Maricic, V. (2023). Education and the nation: Educational knowledge in the dominant theories of nationalism. In D. Tröhler (Ed.), Education, curriculum and nation-building. Contributions of comparative education to the understanding of nations and nationalism (Oxford studies in comparative education, D. Phillips, ed.) (pp. 7–33). Routledge. Tröhler, D., Hörmann, B., Tveit, S., & Bostad, I. (Eds.). (2023). The Nordic education model in context: Historical developments and current renegotiations. Routledge. Westberg, J., Boser, L., & Brühwiler, I. (Eds.). (2019). School acts and the rise of mass schooling. Education policy in the long nineteenth century. Palgrave Macmillan.

PART III

From People to National Citizens

CHAPTER 6

Les Femmes Sont-Elles Françaises, Oui ou Non? Education, Political Exclusion, and the Question of Women’s National Identity in France Sophie Pia Stieger

The manufacturing of loyal citizens who are committed to the nation-state is a profoundly educationalized project. This is, for example, evidenced by the observation that ‘almost every time a constitution tried to (re-)formulate a new social ideal for the (nation-)state, a new school law followed as a rule within five years’ (Tröhler, 2016: 208). In education research, it is broadly understood that the establishment of public schooling and national curricula in the long nineteenth century aimed to create a sense of national belonging that went beyond mere legal citizenship. Yet citizenship and national membership are often still tacitly equated, to the detriment of scholarly attention on the latter. Tröhler (2016, 2020a, b) suggests shifting the focus from the educational production of national citizens to

S. P. Stieger (*) University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Fox, L. Boser (eds.), National Literacies in Education, Historical Studies in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41762-7_6

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the production of national citizens with a distinct national identity and a specific ‘national literacy’ that allows them ‘to “read” the constant national symbols, and understand and interpret them as an assurance of their collective identity’ (Tröhler, 2020a: 631). This approach helps to draw out the particularities of different configurations of citizenship and nationhood: For a ‘French citoyen is not a US citizen, a US citizen is not a British citizen, a British citizen is not a German Bürger, and a German Bürger is not a Swiss Bürger’ (Tröhler, 2016: 285). However, there is yet another facet that complicates the link between national identity and citizenship. Citizenship and nationhood are not only constructed differently in different historical and local contexts but also along other lines of demarcation, such as gender. The case of women in France, the very place that is considered the cradle of the modern nation-state, illustrates that not all of those of whom national-mindedness was expected were citizens in the same way—nor was their education the same. In the following, I explore the history of female education in nineteenth-­ century France in light of the contradictory status of French women as ‘citizens without citizenship’ who were simultaneously included and excluded from the French nation. First, I will sketch the history of girls’ education in nineteenth-century France to show that gendered ideas of citizenship entailed different educational strategies. Until the end of the century, public and state-supported schooling was geared towards producing future male citizens, while female education was mostly left to the Catholic Church. This historical trajectory gave a peculiar, gendered dimension to the ideological battle between les deux Frances, as the second part of the article will show. For secularist Republicans, women’s perceived lack of national solidarity and alliance with the wrong—namely Catholic and monarchic—vision of the French nation became a pressing issue for which education seemed to be both a cause and a solution. In the concluding chapter, I will revisit the history of girls’ education and women’s political exclusion in France against the backdrop of Tröhler’s research perspective and probe his concept of ‘national literacy’ (Tröhler, 2020a, b) for its potential to open up new fields of inquiry.

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No Citoyennes in France? A Short History of Women’s Rights and Girls’ Education in the Nineteenth Century With the extension of citizenship to all tax-paying Frenchmen, the French Constitution of 1791 tied together ‘the nation’ and ‘the state’ in a way that was fundamentally different from their relation under the Ancien Régime (Weil, 2005: 23–37; Heuer, 2007). Citizenship was redefined through national membership, and the nation came to be seen as a sovereign entity made up of French citizens. What that meant for the women in France, however, remained unclear. The generic terms ‘citizen’ and ‘French’ were used ambiguously, and often, legislators were ‘clarifying whether laws applied to one or both sexes only when pushed to do so by those affected by the measures in question’ (Heuer, 2007: 8). The Napoleonic Code (1804) brought some clarity by officially distinguishing the qualité de française from citizenship and stipulating that women had the former but not the latter. French women officially became non-­citizens who were only part of the nation because the men they ‘belonged to’ were a part of it. Women were not allowed to vote, their Frenchness was lost when they married a foreigner, they could not gain French citizenship through naturalization and when all French citizens were banned from emigrating in 1811, the law did not include women (Offen, 2017: 64–71; Heuer, 2007). The initial plans of some revolutionaries to establish free public schooling for children of both sexes had failed. Because of the abolition of the Catholic institutions that had formerly provided girls’ education, there were even less educational opportunities for girls in the years after the revolution than under the Old Regime (Offen, 2017: 127–129; Rogers, 1994: 149). When Napoleon came to power and created the first state-­ supported secondary education system in France, he limited it to boys. It will come as no surprise that many deemed a state-supported school system for girls unnecessary since it was seen as a tool to produce capable citizens, which would be wasted on women and girls. This did not mean that girls’ education was irrelevant. While they did not have to be prepared for citizenship directly, girls had to learn to be good mothers and wives of (future) French citizens (Rogers, 2005; Foley, 2004). Religious education was deemed appropriate for this, and by lifting the ban on religious orders, Napoleon made it possible for the Catholic Church to reclaim its hegemony over girls’ education (McMillan, 2000: 54–55; Rogers, 1994,

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2005). This set the course for a long-lasting alliance of Church and state in the education of French girls. Under the Restoration (1814–1830) and the July Monarchy (1830–1848), the relegation of women to the private sphere of family life was reinforced, and so was the dominance of religion in girls’ education (Rogers, 2005: 48–58, 62–67; Foley, 2004: 106–121). The Guizot Law of 1833 obliged every commune of a certain size to establish a primary school for boys to ‘increase a sense of unity under French nationhood’ (Weber, 1976: 331) by teaching them moral values, reading and writing in French, and arithmetic based on the newly unified metric system. The number of boys’ schools doubled within a little over ten years after that. Three years later, the Pelet ordinance also advised establishing girls’ primary schools, but it was neither compulsory nor backed by state funding and was only enacted sporadically. It is estimated that by the end of the 1830s, around 40 percent of French girls did not receive any formal schooling; in rural areas the numbers were as high as 80 percent (McMillan, 2000: 59; Clark, 1984: 9). The girls who did receive schooling continued to do so in private institutions led by lay people or teaching orders. The teaching content and quality were not uniform in these institutions, but they all shared a focus on domesticity and propagated religious education for girls. Although there were some concerns that convent schools wanted to recruit nuns, the official aim of girls’ education was to produce good housewives and mothers (Rogers, 2005; Foley, 2004: 28–55). As the journalist and editor Paulin Limayrac wrote: ‘The most suitable role for women is in the family. The domestic home is their true patrie; public life is for them a foreign land’ (1843: 52). The mother/wife was not only seen as the moral center of her own family [la petite patrie], but as an instrument for the regeneration of the French nation as a whole. Hence, although they were not citizens in their own right, women were still considered indispensable for the moralization of the nation. The 1848 revolution was a window of hope for women’s equal citizenship. Instead, with the introduction of universal manhood suffrage independent from property ownership, women’s political inequality became solely based on sex. Under the Second Republic, tous les français could vote, and women were once again excluded (Offen, 2017: 72–82; McMillan, 2000: 84–93). Two years after the introduction of the new constitution, the education system was reformed. The Falloux Law (1850) renewed the order to create primary schools for all children and put the task officially in the hands of the Church. This encouraged the expansion

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of girls’ schools but also aroused resistance in republican-minded circles that wanted secular education for boys (Offen, 2017: 136–144; Rogers, 2005: 201–203). The Second Republic did not survive long, and from 1852 to 1870, France was an empire again. The Second Empire did not grant women citizenship either, but especially from the 1860s onwards, the heightened interest in state-organized national education also extended to girls. In 1864, Victor Duruy, the relatively liberal minister of education at the time, initiated a nationwide survey on boys’ secondary education that also included some questions about the state of girls’ education. Based on the results—which he judged somewhat unfairly, according to Rogers (2005: 162–168), Duruy proclaimed that secondary education for girls did not exist in France. He regarded the religious education girls received at home, in the Church, and in lay schools as insufficient. Besides gender- and area-specific skills (e.g., agricultural record keeping and farmyard-­management in rural areas or commercial writing in industrial settings), all girls everywhere in France need to be taught the French language and the history of France (Duruy, 1867a). Duruy obviously considered it important to impart knowledge about the nation on girls. The very first sentence of the education law he passed in 1867 proclaimed that ‘every commune of five hundred inhabitants and above is required to have at least one public [meaning state-controlled] school for girls’ (1867b: art. 1). Although Duruy never intended to ban religion from girls’ education, he did want to bring their schools under state control. After all, he argued that ‘our contemporary difficulties stem from the fact that we have left education in the hands of people who are neither of their time nor of their country’ (Duruy, 1863, cited in Rogers, 2005: 203). Whether the nuns, priests, and religious laypeople who taught the girls were ‘neither of their time nor of their country’ is debatable, but what Duruy got right was that girls’ education at every level was firmly in their hands (Offen, 2017: 135–144; Rogers, 2005).

Choosing Sides Between Les Deux Frances: Girls’ Education and the Struggle Over Women’s Allegiance Those who envisioned France as a Catholic nation saw religious girls’ education as a valuable tool of the state that was in harmony with women’s place in nature and society (e.g., Dupanloup, 1867; Mongellas, 1831;

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Rémusat, 1824). This, however, clashed with another vision of France as a republican nation-state with a secular school system. Throughout the century, clerics and anti-clerics, monarchists and republicans had fought over the future of France. When the latter gained new momentum in the 1860s, the Church’s hegemony in girls’ education was increasingly treated as an obstacle instead of a mutually beneficial alliance between the state and religion (Offen, 2017: 234–251; Rogers, 2005; 201–225). The condemnation of the Catholic Church as an enemy of republicanism raised suspicion that women were a ‘conservative and irrational’ force, and they feared that the—imagined or real—alliance of women with religion would drive a wedge between members of the family and, thus, the whole nation. So, when the Republicans came to power during the Third Republic (1870–1940), it was of the utmost urgency that they reform girls’ education to wrest the women of France out of the grip of the Church. The ardent French nationalist Jules Michelet, who became somewhat of an anticlerical lay saint in the Third Republic, had already warned republican-minded men in 1845 that ‘our wives and daughters are raised, governed by our enemies’ (Michelet, 1845: 6). Indeed, women and girls were seen both as important targets and tools of the Church’s re-­ Christianization campaign after the revolution. After all, the girl who is raised to be a good Christian woman becomes an educator herself, upholding the religiosity of her family and passing on Christian values to marginalized groups through charity work. That the Church’s engagement in female education exceeded that of the state certainly contributed to what some scholars have identified as the feminization of French Catholicism during the nineteenth century (Rogers, 2005: 91–95, 135–159; McMillan, 2000, 53–56). Neither the coupling of French republicanism and secularism nor the association of women with religion was new, but in the last two decades of the century, they, for the first time, led to actual educational reforms. In 1880, the See Law called for a state-run secondary school system for girls like that existing for boys, and the Ferry Laws (1881, 1882) made state-controlled primary education free and compulsory for all children. As Rogers aptly notes, the ‘state’s decision finally to intervene in girls’ secondary education represented a political decision, governed far more by national and Republican preoccupations than by a liberal concern to educate women as individuals’ (2005: 206). The education reforms were driven by the fear of women belonging to the ‘false France’ of priests and nuns and their assumed lack of republican sentiments as well as by the

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assumption that women could be utilized as an educational force to produce citizens loyal to the Republican nation. As a director of secondary education put it: ‘The absence of secondary education for women maintains intellectual anarchy in the nation. Most women remain unfamiliar with the ideas and the sentiments of modern and Republican France’, which causes a problem, since ‘It’s the French female teacher, the French mother, who will form future robust generations of citizens and soldiers’ (Foncin, 1880, cited in Rogers, 2005: 206). This is clearly reminiscent of earlier lines of argument: Girls needed a national and civic education, not because they were citizens themselves but mothers of citizens, not because they were to be prepared for full participation in the French nation, but because it was feared that they were too religious and would therefore lead their family—and by that the whole nation—down the wrong path. Ten years before passing his famous Ferry Laws, Jules Ferry had put this concern into the following words: The bishops know it well: the one who holds the wife, he holds everything, firstly because he holds the child, then because he holds the husband […] This is why the Church wants to retain women, and that is also why democracy must take them away from her; democracy must choose, under penalty of death; we must choose, Citizens: women must belong to Science, or belong to the Church. (1870: 305)

It is obvious that the ‘citizens’ Ferry addressed here were not the women in question. Ferry and others painted the Catholic Church as a powerful antithesis to science, standing in the way of the republican nation-state crafting project, whose hold over women and girls needed to be loosened—not by making them full citizens like their male counterparts, but through a ‘rational’ scientific education that would supersede their ‘irrational’ religious training. Thus, while education reform was high on the republican legislators’ agenda, women’s political rights were not (Offen, 2018: 55–59). Women had played a crucial role in the development of French Republicanism, and quite a few of them took on the role of the ‘republican mother’ and ‘assumed responsibility for creating a domestic environment permeated with Republicanism and raising children with Republican values’ (Foley, 2004: 131)—but the dominant narrative was that making women equal citizens would be dangerous. After all, the republican model of citizenship required rational individuals able to decide the best for the nation, and women were not only seen as

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rationally inferior ‘by nature’ but also because of their religious upbringing (ibid.: 132–144). At the beginning of the century, gendered ideas of citizenship were a reason for excluding girls from public education and handing them to the Church—now, the results of this decision were used to further exclude women from political participation. Calls for equal citizenship were repeatedly rejected based on the assumption that giving women the right to vote or hold political office would strengthen the Church and harm the French Republic (Scott, 2017: 30–43; Foley, 2004: 136–152). This fear lingered for a long time: In 1907, for example, the French prime minister and Radical Republican, Georges Clemenceau, cautioned that ‘[t]he number of women who escape from the domination of the clergy is ridiculously low. If the right to vote were given to women tomorrow, France would all of a sudden jump backwards into the Middle Ages’ (cited in Foley, 2004: 151).

The Case of French Women and Girls: Complicating the Relationship Between National Literacy and Citizenship Against the background of the assumption that mass schooling was implemented to produce citizens loyal to their nation-state, it is not too surprising that state interventions to expand public education for girls in France had been carried out only half-heartedly and with moderate success. After all, French women were not citizens. This, however, led to the establishment of a decentralized, private education system for girls run primarily by religious orders and (often equally religious) lay women that existed alongside a state-run school system for boys (Rogers, 2005). In the second half of the nineteenth century, the dominance of the Church that was enabled by the state’s neglect of girls’ education backfired. When the political climate changed, women’s—imagined or real—allegiance with the Catholic Church over the Republican vision of the nation-state became a problem. Education was identified as a cause for this predicament, and education would also be the cure. From the 1880s onwards, girls received public education by the state, which (slowly) ended the Church’s monopoly over their upbringing, but it would take another half-century until French women finally got the vote in 1945 (Offen, 2018). This subordinate position of women in a republic that prided itself in consisting of

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equal individuals, as well as the lopsided inclusion of women in the nation with simultaneous exclusion from citizenship, led to contradictions that did not go unnoticed. The republican image of the French nation-state conflated fatherland, nation, and citizenship, and it was feminists especially, who were themselves committed to this ideal, who also pointed out its cracks. The founder of the political journal La Citoyenne, Hubertine Auclert, who is believed to be the first woman to call herself a feminist, criticized that ‘[w]omen helped the men to take the Bastille, and to make the revolution, but they gained no advantage from either […] The Code makes women slaves […] a nation of serfs within a nation of free men’ (Auclert, 1881, cited in Offen, 2018: 47, my emphasis). Women were both included in the nation and excluded from participating fully in it; they had national duties but received no rights in return. This undermined the official republican ideal of the nation-state—after all, the Republicans had written not only fraternité, but also egalité and liberté on their banners. The slightly more moderate feminist Léon Richer, to whom I owe the quote in the title of my article, got to the heart of the problem when he asked in his Code des Femmes: ‘Are women French, yes or no? They are not French citizens, that is true; but they are French persons […] Where is the logic in that?’ (1883: 15). How apparent the mismatch between national membership and citizenship was when it came to women and girls is exemplified by Greville’s widely used Instruction morale et civique des jeunes filles (1882). In the first chapter, women, men, and children are defined as individuals who, if they are united under the same laws, form a nation; the nation in turn is defined as the fatherland of which ‘we are all citizens’ (Greville, 1882: 2)—but this did not fully apply to girls. Girls were taught that ‘France is our fatherland, we are French citizens’ (ibid.: 69)—although they were not. They were taught that they must learn ‘as much as possible about everything concerning the country, its geography, its customs, its products, in a word everything’ because ‘the most united country is the one whose citizens know each other best’ (ibid.: 73), and they were told that there existed only one class of people under the new Republic, namely ‘the citizens, all equal before the law’ (ibid.: 77)—which again, was not true for them. The history of women’s rights and girls’ education in nineteenth-­ century France illustrates the fragility and inner contradictions of the French Republican configuration of citizenship and nationhood. It also adds another important layer to the question of schooling and the production of national identities. Going back to Tröhler’s suggestion to give

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more attention to ‘national literacy’, to the educational production of nationally minded citizens who are able to decipher their nation and its symbols and who see themselves as part of a national collective, I would add that this function of education is not limited to citizens. The case of girls’ education in France shows that nationality and citizenship can be divided even further apart. It shows that the nation-state’s need to produce national literacy and instill loyalty towards the nation also encompasses non-citizens—especially if their loyalties are presumed to lie elsewhere, possibly threatening the dominant definition of the nation. Although they were not citizens, French women and girls were crucial in the struggle between different visions of what France should be—and their education played a decisive role. While much has been written about French women’s political exclusion from citizenship or state education, what that meant for their inclusion in the nation—or different discourses of the nation—remains an open question. The research lens of national literacy thus opens up a plethora of further questions: How did women and girls come to think of themselves as French and as belonging to a national collective when they were still excluded from state schooling? How did the national education they received—if they received any—differ in lay, church schools and state schools? How did the national education of bourgeois girls differ from those in working class milieus? How did their curricula look in comparison to their male peers or in comparison to girls from other nations? In which ways did belonging to the French nation mean different things for men and women? Which intersections of ‘doing nation’ and ‘doing gender’ can be found in educational settings? In which institutions, based on what curricula and through which everyday practices of banal nationalism did French girls and women become nationally literate? And to which national symbols and histories, to which version of the nation did they learn to commit? Complications between the apparently neat fit of nation and state are, of course, not limited to France or to women. Still, the case of French women as non-citizens—questioned through the lens of national literacy—beautifully exemplifies the breakdown of the idealized nation-state in the face of the reality that there are people who are not (fully) included in the hegemonic construction of the nation and the norm of the citizen. The manufacturing of loyal citizens is a profoundly educationalized project—and so is the mitigation of tensions and contradictions produced by the dominant vision of the nation-state and those excluded from it.

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References Clark, L. (1984). Schooling the daughters of Marianne: Textbooks and the socialization of girls in modern French primary schools. Suny Press. Dupanloup, F. (1867). Femmes Savantes et Femmes Studieuses. Charles Douniol. Duruy, V. (1867a). Circular of 30 October 1867. In F.  Dupanloup (Ed.), La Femme Chrétienne et Française; Dernière Réponse à M. Duruy et à Ses Défenseurs par Mgr l’Évêque d’Orléans (pp. 148–154). Charles Duniol. Duruy, V. (1867b). Loi sur l’Enseignement Primaire. Bulletin Officiel du Ministère de l’Intérieur. Ministère de l'intérieur. Ferry, J. (1870). De l’égalité d’éducation. Conférence populaire du 10 avril 1870. In P.  Robiquet (Ed.), Discours et Opinions de Jules Ferry. Vol. I.  La Seconde Empire—La Guerre et la Commune (pp. 283–305). Armand Colin. Foley, S. K. (2004). Women in France since 1789. Palgrave Macmillan. Gréville, H. (1882). Instruction Morale et Civique des Jeunes Filles. E.  Weill & G. Maurice. Heuer, J. N. (2007). The family and the nation. Gender and citizenship in revolutionary France, 1789–1830. Cornell University Press. Limayrac, P. (1843). Des femmes moralistes: Le mariage au point de vue chrétien. Revue des Deux Mondes, 1(4), 50–70. McMillan, J. (2000). France and women 1789–1914. Gender, society and politics. Routledge. Michelet, J. (1845). Le Prêtre, de la Femme, de la Famille. Hachette. Mongellaz, F. d. (1831). De l’Influence des Femmes sur les Mœurs et les Destinées des Nations, sur Leurs Familles et la Société, et de l’Influence des Mœurs sur le Bonheur de la Vie. L.-G. Michaud. Offen, K. (2017). The woman question in France, 1400–1870. Cambridge University Press. Offen, K. (2018). Debating the woman question in the French Third Republic, 1870–1920. Cambridge University Press. Rémusat, M. d. (1824). Essai sur l’Éducation des Femmes. Chez L’Advocat. Richer, L. (1883). Code des Femmes. E. Dentu. Rogers, R. (1994). Competing visions of girls’ secondary education in post-­ revolutionary France. History of Education Quarterly, 34, 147–170. Rogers, R. (2005). From the salon to the schoolroom. Educating Bourgeois girls in nineteenth-century France. Pennsylvania University Press. Scott, J. W. (2017). Sex and secularism. Princeton University Press. Tröhler, D. (2016). Curriculum history or the educational construction of Europe in the long nineteenth century. European Educational Research Journal, 15(3), 279–297. Tröhler, D. (2020a). National literacies, or modern education and the art of fabricating national minds. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 52(5), 620–635.

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Tröhler, D. (2020b). Nation-state, education and the fabrication of national-­ minded citizens (Introduction). Croatian Journal of Education, 22(Sp. Ed.2), 11–27. Weber, E. (1976). Peasants into Frenchmen. The modernization of rural France 1870–1914. Stanford University Press. Weil, P. (2005). Qu’est-ce qu’un Français? Histoire de la Nationalité Française Depuis la Révolution. Gallimard.

CHAPTER 7

Same But Different. Notions of ‘Feebleminded’ and ‘Imbecile’ Future Citizens in German-Speaking Countries at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Michèle Hofmann

Following along the lines of the famous saying that ‘citizens are made not born,’ and assuming that formal education plays an important role in this process (Tröhler, 2020a), the question arises whether all children can be ‘made’ citizens through schooling. If one understands curricula as cultural constructions that include particular visions of ideal children and ideal citizens (Tröhler, 2019), this question particularly concerns intellectually ‘abnormal’ children who became objects of educational efforts in the second half of the nineteenth century. During this period, in various European countries, special educational institutions for ‘imbecile’ children and separate school classes for ‘feebleminded’ children were set up to complement primary school and mainstream classes. Using the information pertaining

M. Hofmann (*) University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Fox, L. Boser (eds.), National Literacies in Education, Historical Studies in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41762-7_7

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to different German-speaking countries, I will analyze what notions of the future citizen underlay the educational efforts for intellectually ‘abnormal’ children and to what extent certain national literacies were promoted through these initiatives.

Establishment of a Separate Special Educational Space The general tendency towards more state-organized formal schooling in the nineteenth century (Westberg et al., 2019) overlapped with a growing interest in ‘abnormal’ children and the question of their educability. In the second half of the nineteenth century, in the German-speaking world, the conviction prevailed that compulsory education should also apply to intellectually and physically ‘abnormal’ children. For this purpose, special educational facilities were set up to complement conventional primary school. Thus, educating ‘abnormal’ children in separate classes and special institutions became the norm which lasted well into the twentieth century. The champions of special educational measures concurred that these measures served the best interests of ‘abnormal’ children, citing their welfare to justify such separation. They argued that taking the needs of these children into consideration was only possible in small, separate classes, where education could be focused on ‘their peculiarities.’ This view was aptly surmised by Konrad Auer (1896: 157), a secondary teacher from the canton of Glarus, who argued at a delegates’ meeting of the Swiss Teachers’ Association that, in regular school classes with sixty or more children, it was simply not feasible to pay special attention to individual pupils. As this perspective took hold, not only did new school types emerge, but due to the creation of this new educational space, the characteristics of the existing primary school also changed. With the creation of special educational facilities for ‘abnormal’ pupils, the primary school became the mainstream school—admitting only students whose intellectual development was considered ‘normal.’ Among the different groups of intellectually and physically ‘abnormal’ people identified and categorized since the turn of the nineteenth century were the so-called ‘idiots.’ In the German-speaking world, a uniform medical classification of ‘idiocy’ (Idiotie) was established in the second half of the nineteenth century (Hofmann, 2017a). Under this umbrella term, three degrees of intellectual impairment were identified: ‘feebleminded’

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(intellectually disabled to a lesser extent, schwachbegabt), ‘imbecile’ (intellectually disabled to a greater extent, schwachsinnig), and ‘stupid’ (profoundly intellectually disabled, blödsinnig). 1 The question of educability was central to this classification, as only individuals belonging to the first two categories were considered to be educable. The classification of ‘idiocy’ provided both the framework for the claim that there was a need for three types of care and educational facilities and for the establishment of these different types of facilities. In so-called asylums, ‘stupid’ children received food and care, but no formal education. ‘Imbecile’ children were to be sheltered and educated in special institutions, and ‘feebleminded’ children were assigned to special classes. In 1889, the Swiss Conference on Idiocy was founded with the aim of developing more diverse educational measures for ‘imbecile’ and ‘feebleminded’ children. The Swiss organization was modeled on the German Conference on Idiocy, which had already been established in 1874. This initiative prompted the founding of the Austrian Conference on Idiocy in 1904. The growth of the new educational facilities for the ‘feebleminded’ in the German-speaking world can be illustrated by some facts from Switzerland. Shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, according to the available statistics, more than 30 asylums and institutions for ‘stupid’ and ‘imbecile’ children and more than 100 classes for ‘feebleminded’ children existed in Switzerland, serving almost 4000 boys and girls (Graf, 1916)—a substantial number for such a small country. Although not all children who were considered ‘idiotic’ made use of these services, an institutional setting for those children was in the making and was further developed in the following decades (the same was also true for the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire). As far as ‘imbecile’ and ‘feebleminded’ children are concerned, this setting can be understood as an expansion of the educational space and as a part of mass schooling.

1  The English terms are my own translations and do not fully convey the meaning of the nineteenth or twentieth-century German terms. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, other terms were in use in the English-speaking world, due to which ‘feeblemindedness’ or ‘imbecility’ would have much subtler meanings.

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‘Feebleminded’ and ‘Imbecile’ Future Citizens As mentioned above, a uniform medical classification of intellectual ‘abnormality’ was established in the German-speaking world after the mid-nineteenth century. That is, the same nomenclature was used for the phenomenon of intellectual disability in the German Empire, the German-­ speaking parts of Switzerland, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Still, the common nomenclature was not the only denominator that can be used to characterize the German-speaking as a transnational knowledge space, as topics debated at the national conferences on idiocy were also very similar, and tended to be closely related to the special educational facilities. As these conferences often addressed developments in the other German-speaking countries, regular attendees got to know each other well. The conference reports further show that they also used these opportunities to exchange ideas, but also arranged visits to special educational facilities and read texts published by their peers. A further commonality among the three countries stems from the fact that both regular schools as well as special educational facilities for intellectually ‘abnormal’ children were tasked with creating citizens (Bürgerinnen und Bürger). Considering that what on the surface appears to be the same is not always the same, it is important to identify the national idiosyncrasies when it comes to turning ‘feebleminded’ and ‘imbecile’ children into citizens. In what follows, I will primarily focus on the German-speaking part of Switzerland (the Swiss cantons that together formed a federal, democratic state). Beyond the Swiss case study, 2 I will use exemplary sources to cast a glance at Germany and Austria, which were both empires at the time. In this context, I will ask what kind of future should ‘feebleminded’ and ‘imbecile’ children be prepared for in different political systems. What notions of citizen played a role when it came to educating these children in Switzerland, Germany, and Austria? What were (ideal) citizens, even if they were intellectually impaired, supposed to know? How can we think of this knowledge as a contribution to national literacies in their respective countries? In sum, by looking at the ‘margins’ of educability, I will seek to gain new insights into the concepts and practices of fabricating future citizens in the German-speaking world at the turn of the twentieth century.

2

 For a first version of this case study, published in German, see Hofmann (2017b).

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Democratic Switzerland The special institutions for ‘imbecile’ children and special classes for ‘feebleminded’ children were established in Switzerland from the mid-­ nineteenth century onwards with the aim of enabling these children to lead a ‘dignified existence,’ as a member of the Swiss Society for the Common Good put it (Kaufmann, 1898: 150). Such an existence was equated with social usefulness on the one hand and with morality on the other. According to the first aim, the children should be equipped with skills needed for independent and productive life. The second aim was to educate ‘morally good people’ (Kölle, 1901: 101). Inherent in both objectives was the intention to educate ‘imbecile’ and ‘feebleminded’ children and youths during their schooling to become useful and moral citizens, and even brave soldiers. The champions of special educational measures considered special institutions and special classes to be part of compulsory schooling (e.g., Auer, 1905: 19). Accordingly, the same subjects were taught in these special facilities as in the regular school. Both in special institutions and in special classes, religion, reading, writing, arithmetic, and manual skills were important school subjects. Manual skills were oriented towards future occupations and were accordingly gender-specific, including activities such as basket weaving and brush tying for boys and sewing and knitting for girls. In institutions for ‘imbecile’ children, such practical training also included household chores and gardening. These everyday tasks were put at the service of an education in self-reliance and morality. The pupils were to learn such things as ‘not to plunder the fruits in the garden’ (Hausordnung, 1896: 2), to dress and wash themselves independently, to comb their hair and brush their teeth, to pray in the morning, before eating and before sleeping, to ‘eat their food properly’ (ibid.: 5), to ‘go to the bathroom as little as possible during lessons’ (ibid.), and to leave the classroom ‘in an orderly fashion’ at the end of a lesson (ibid.). As with regular school curricula, the teaching staff was required to exert a ‘morally and religiously good influence’ on the children through ‘conduct and words’ (ibid.: 2). In Protestant regions, the aim of such an education included the expectation that ‘feebleminded’ and ‘imbecile’ children be confirmed at the end of their schooling. To aid in this process, in 1885, the institution for ‘imbecile’ children in Regensberg, Canton of Zurich, set up a special confirmation class. The local pastor took on ‘the task of preparing the young

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people for confirmation in two weekly lessons’ (Dritter Jahresbericht, 1885: 6). In the annual reports, the Regensberg secretary henceforth regularly informed the readers how many pupils had been confirmed on Palm Sunday. In the late nineteenth century, the pupils of the Regensberg institution were taught in four classes according to their level of achievement (Fünfter Jahresbericht, 1888: 7–9). The maximal level of achievement that the youths could reach by the end of their compulsory schooling was equivalent to that of a fourth grader in a regular school, that is an intellectually ‘normal’ pupil aged ten. A Regensberg pupil who had ‘really reached’ the institution’s highest level of achievement was considered ‘useful for life’ (Schmid, 1886: 76–77). In the second half of the nineteenth century, institutions for ‘imbecile’ children and special classes for ‘feebleminded’ children used regular school teaching materials which were often supplemented by those created by their teachers. However, the demand for special teaching materials adapted to the children’s needs, reading books in particular, grew rapidly. In response to this need, in 1903, the first three issues of a special reading book for intellectually ‘abnormal’ children were released under the title My Little Reading Book (Mein Lesebüchlein, 1903). The fourth and last booklet was published in 1908 (Mein Lesebuch, 1908). The four issues contained the reading material for the entire educational curriculum offered to intellectually ‘abnormal’ children and youths. All four booklets provided numerous texts with religious references and included more illustrations, some of which were larger, than other Swiss reading books at that time. The texts were either written specifically for the Little Reading Book or were taken from other textbooks. Only short texts had been adopted, which were identical to the original versions, or contained very few linguistic simplifications. The range of topics in the first three booklets corresponded to that of the lower grade reading books in regular school. The reading material in these booklets was arranged according to seasons and mainly featured animals, plants, and everyday situations, that is texts that related to the pupils’ immediate, tangible world. In contrast, the texts in the fourth booklet dealt with topics that went beyond the pupils’ immediate living environments. Through these texts, the older pupils were to learn, for example, what a thermometer is, acquire health knowledge, and learn about the lives of their ancestors, who were idealized as free, nature-loving Alpine dwellers and brave Confederates. This choice of topics shows that the

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young people who were able to reach the special institutions’ highest level of achievement (which, as mentioned, corresponded roughly to the fourth grade in regular school) were to be familiarized with the content taught in primary school in the middle and especially in the higher grades. The fourth booklet was intended to provide the intellectually ‘abnormal’ pupils with ‘the most essential knowledge about their fatherland,’ as Paul Beglinger (1909: 89), who taught students attending the Zurich special classes, explained at the 1909 Swiss Conference on Idiocy. Beglinger’s remark illustrates the prevailing view at the time that there was such a thing as minimal or basic patriotic knowledge. This knowledge was indispensable for every Swiss citizen, and in providing it, the fourth booklet went beyond that what regular fourth graders were learning at the time— after all, it was only the reading books for the middle and higher grades that contained implicitly and explicitly formulated ideal concepts of citizenship (e.g., Schweizerischer Jugendfreund, 1900). Knowledge of patriotic history and geography had been considered important in discourses on building a republican-minded self-image as a citizen of a state since the eighteenth century (Gugerli & Speich, 2002: 22–28; Zimmer, 2003: 55–65). In the nineteenth century, this content also found its way into Swiss regular school curricula. The aim was to impart virtues and instill love of the fatherland in children and youth (Dahn & Boser, 2015). In the lessons on patriotic history and geography, the national pedagogical recruit examinations that had been conducted by the Swiss military since 1875 served as an important point of reference. These examinations were intended to reveal what the young men learned at school, that is, whether they had the knowledge a soldier was supposed to possess. The recruits were tested not only on reading, writing and arithmetic, but also on topics related to ‘fatherland studies’ (Vaterlandskunde)— an amalgam of geography, history, and civics (Boser et al., 2019: 81–82). The range of subjects included in these tests shows that the patriotic knowledge of the young men was also examined. Yet, the pedagogical recruit examinations were compulsory not only for the intellectually ‘normal’ young men, but also for those who had attended a special class or a special institution. Only those whose intellectual abilities did not allow them to participate in the examination were exempt, as it was certain from the outset that they were not eligible for military service (Nager, 1909: 121, 126). Franz Nager, high school principal and long-time expert on pedagogical recruit examinations, explained at the

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1909 Swiss Conference on Idiocy how ‘feebleminded’ and ‘imbecile’ conscripts were assessed. Those recruits who, even after the test procedure and the task had been explained to them individually one more time, had difficulty with the written test would be tested orally. The oral examination included the ‘easiest questions from fatherland studies’ (ibid.: 123). As mentioned above, the fourth booklet of the Little Reading Book provided the intellectually ‘abnormal’ pupils with something like a minimal amount of patriotic knowledge deemed acceptable for a national citizen. This knowledge was also formulated in a handwritten manual for the pedagogical recruit examinations. The manual, which is now in the Swiss Federal Archives, specifies what was to be tested as the minimal knowledge in the recruit examinations at the turn of the twentieth century (Bundesarchiv, n.d.). The intellectually ‘abnormal’ conscripts were supposed to have ‘some knowledge of the immediate surroundings of their place of residence,’ to be able to name ‘some men from Swiss history’ or tell ‘something about the freedom fights (Morgarten, Laupen, Sempach, Näfels, etc.)’ (ibid.). If they possessed such knowledge, in other words, if they could answer the most basic questions from fatherland studies, they were considered capable of becoming good soldiers (Hafter, 1909: 129). Being a citizen and being a soldier were inseparable parts of Swiss men’s identity at that time. This unity was conveyed by the soldat-citoyen concept, indicating that civic knowledge was synonymous with soldierly knowledge. The soldat-citoyen was a ‘true’ citizen who knew and exercised his rights and fulfilled his duties with pride and zeal. These duties included armed defense of the fatherland and the willingness to sacrifice one’s life for this fatherland. These traits were to be inculcated in male students during compulsory schooling, and the pertinent knowledge gained at school would be later tested at the recruit examinations (Lüsebrink, 1996; Boser, 2016). Thus, these examinations confirm that the future citizen was an important reference not only for the education of ‘normal’ but also of intellectually ‘abnormal’ young people in Switzerland at the turn of the twentieth century. Imperial Germany and Austria As already mentioned, the same nomenclature was used for the phenomenon of intellectual disability in the German-speaking world, and corresponding with this nomenclature, the same types of facilities emerged. Furthermore, the topics debated at the German and Austrian Conferences

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on Idiocy were very similar to those covered at the Swiss conferences. Hence, it is not surprising that, when it came to preparing ‘feebleminded’ and ‘imbecile’ children for their future lives, the aims were mostly the same. There were, however, two important differences, which will be discussed after delineating the similarities. As in Switzerland, the goal of educating ‘feebleminded’ and ‘imbecile’ children in Germany and Austria was to allow them to become useful and moral members of society. Usefulness meant, above all, that they should learn a trade to be able to earn a living (e.g., Reichelt, 1880; Pulzer, 1909). Thus, in addition to gaining the necessary knowledge, such as reading, writing, and arithmetic, these children were expected to develop manual skills (e.g., Hovorka, 1910). Another important school subject was religion, intended to lay the foundation for making ‘feebleminded’ and ‘imbecile’ children moral human beings (e.g., Barthold, 1875). In the Protestant regions of the German Empire, for ‘normal’ and intellectually ‘abnormal’ children alike, confirmation was to be the conclusion of their religious education. At the third German Conference on Idiocy, Pastor Gottlieb Schall (1880: 19) outlined ‘the minimum of requirements which we have to make of a confirmand.’ He considered ‘the knowledge of the main facts of biblical history and of a certain number of sayings and songs’ as ‘conditio sine qua non’ to be confirmed (ibid.: 20). In the German Empire, several reading books that were specifically designed for teaching in special educational facilities were published. The importance of religion as a school subject is clearly expressed in these books as well, since they included numerous texts with religious references (e.g., Fuchs, 1910). Apart from the religious content, the German textbooks share other similarities with the Swiss Little Reading Book, as they comprised several booklets. Akin to the Swiss edition, the German booklets for the lower grades were arranged according to seasons and contained texts related to the pupils’ immediate, tangible world, whereas the reading material in the booklets for the upper grades dealt with topics that went beyond the pupils’ immediate living environments. Similarly, in the German Empire, ‘feebleminded’ and ‘imbecile’ youths who were able to reach the special educational facilities’ highest level of achievement were to be familiarized with the content taught in regular school in the middle and especially the higher grades. Just as with the Swiss youths, the German pupils in the upper grades were expected to, among other things, acquire health knowledge. Like the Little Reading Book’s fourth issue, the German booklets for the upper grades included some basic patriotic knowledge.

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It is in this patriotic knowledge that the first of two national idiosyncrasies becomes apparent. As mentioned above, ‘feebleminded’ and ‘imbecile’ youths in Switzerland learned about the lives of their ancestors, who were idealized as free, nature-loving Alpine dwellers and brave Confederates. In contrast, patriotic content in the German textbooks focused on the victory of the German troops in the Battle of Sedan, the founding of the German Empire on 18 January 1871, the emperor as the brave commander-in-chief who cares about the welfare of his soldiers, and the imperial family (e.g., Schulze, 1913). The second national idiosyncrasy concerns military service. While in Switzerland, whenever possible, intellectually ‘abnormal’ young men had to participate in the pedagogical recruit examinations and were admitted to the army, the situation in the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire was different, as participants at the German and Austrian Conferences on Idiocy concurred that ‘feebleminded’ and ‘imbecile’ young men should be excluded from military service (e.g., Reichelt, 1883; Mattauschek, 1909). Their arguments for such stance were based on the decisions made by the other respective country, but not Switzerland. The conference participants justified intellectually ‘abnormal’ young men’s exclusion from military service by stating that this would compromise their welfare, as they might be subjected to harsh reprimands, punishments, or even mistreatment from superiors or ridicule and teasing from comrades. They further argued that their enlistment would pose a threat to the army due to the disruption of military training and the weakening of the armed forces, among other factors. Therefore, the participants were in favor of eliminating these young men from the conscription process. This was to be ensured by keeping inventories of pupils who had attended a special institution or a special class.

Conclusion From the perspective of education offered to ‘feebleminded’ and ‘imbecile’ children at the turn of the twentieth century, the German-speaking world can be understood as a transnational knowledge space. As was shown in the preceding discussions, this space was created by the champions of special educational measures from the German Empire and the German-speaking parts of Switzerland and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who used a common nomenclature to refer to the different groups of ‘idiot’ children, engaged in a cross-border exchange, and implemented

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the same types of special educational facilities. In all three countries, these facilities served the purpose of turning intellectually ‘abnormal’ children into useful and moral members of society, that is, citizens with a sense of responsibility toward their fatherland. Within the transnational knowledge space, however, national idiosyncrasies can be identified, which I think are intriguing from the viewpoint of national literacy. As the reading books published in this period in the German-speaking Switzerland and the German Empire show, some basic patriotic knowledge was also part of the canon ‘feebleminded’ and ‘imbecile’ future citizens were expected to possess. Yet, the knowledge that was to be imparted to Swiss pupils differed from that deemed important for their German counterparts. The country-specific patriotic knowledge in the reading books indicates that, like their ‘normal’ peers, intellectually ‘abnormal’ children were also to become ‘nationally-minded citizens’ who were ‘able to “read” the constant national symbols, and understand and interpret them as an assurance of their collective identity’ (Tröhler, 2020b: 631). In other words, there was a minimal level of a specific national literacy that these children needed to acquire during their school years to become full members of society. The idiosyncrasies were not limited to the patriotic knowledge, but also extended to the effects that such knowledge or national literacy should have on the boys. While the idea that school curricula would allow the pupils to become useful and moral members of the national society was shared in the German and the Austro-Hungarian Empires as well as in republican Switzerland, in the latter the anticipated effects of being nationally literate went a step further. In republican Switzerland, the notions of a citizen and a soldier were inextricably linked. Accordingly, if a national literacy was taught in schools in order to create national citizens, it had to prepare boys for being soldat-­ citoyens (which was equivalent to being a full citizen). In practice, this is exactly what happened. While ‘abnormal’ boys in the German and the Austro-Hungarian Empires were excluded from military service as a matter of principle, in Switzerland, due to patriotic knowledge taught in Swiss special classes, those boys were able to participate in the pedagogical recruit examinations and hence to became members of the national armed forces, just like any other useful and moral citizen of the Swiss nation.

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Schmid, C. (1886). Wie kann den zurückgebliebenen schwachsinnigen und idiotischen Kindern zu ihren Menschenrechten verholfen werden? Schweizerische Lehrerzeitung, 31(6), 44–46, 31(8), 61–63, 31(10), 76–77, 31(11), 84–86. Schulze, E. (1913). Deutsches Lesebuch von Steger und Wohlrabe: Ausgabe für Hilfsschulen. Vol. 2: Oberstufe. Hermann Schroedel. Schweizerischer Jugendfreund: Illustriertes Lesebuch für die Oberstufe der Volksschule. (1900). Schultess & Co. Tröhler, D. (2019). Curriculum history. In J. L. Rury, & E. H. Tamura (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of the history of education (pp.  523–538). Oxford University Press. Tröhler, D. (2020a). Nation-state, education and the fabrication of national-­ minded citizens (Introduction). Croatian Journal of Education, 22(Sp. Ed.2), 11–27. Tröhler, D. (2020b). National literacies, or modern education and the art of fabricating national minds. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 52(5), 620–635. Westberg, J., Boser, L., & Brühwiler, I. (Eds.). (2019). School acts and the rise of mass schooling: Education policy in the long nineteenth century. Palgrave Macmillan. Zimmer, O. (2003). A contested nation: History, memory and nationalism in Switzerland, 1761–1891. Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 8

Reinventing the Link Between Education and the Nation via Imagination and Emotions: The National Literacy of The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Johannes Westberg

The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige) is one of those Swedish children’s books that have seen true international success. It was authored by Selma Lagerlöf (1858–1940), who received the Nobel Prize in 1909, originally as a two-volume book published in 1906 and 1907. The Wonderful Adventures of Nils was translated into 60 languages and was the only book originally published in Swedish included in the list of the 100 most memorable books of the twentieth century compiled by Le Monde (Landahl, 2016: 215–16). Similar to the work of Astrid Lindgren, this book has received the status of not only a classic literary effort, but also that of a national symbol. The latter was

J. Westberg (*) University of Groningen, Groningen, the Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Fox, L. Boser (eds.), National Literacies in Education, Historical Studies in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41762-7_8

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indicated by the fact that Lagerlöf’s main character was portrayed on the 20 SEK banknote that was produced between 1997 and 2008. As a national symbol, The Wonderful Adventures of Nils has certainly been thoroughly examined from a range of perspectives, including that of Lagerlöf’s literary career (e.g., Nordlund, 2005) and in relation to nation building, national identities, and the nationalist movement. Revealing publications have indicated how this book produced and reproduced discourses on the nation (Sundmark, 2008; Elenius, 2002), the Swedish nature and national geography (Erlandson-Hammargren, 2006; Thomsen, 2004), and how her descriptions of Sweden and its technical development were intended to foster national sentiments (Axell & Hallström, 2015). Important insights into this process have also been provided by studies exploring the international translation and reception of the book (Bergenmar, 2018; Desmidt, 2003). In this chapter, I intend to focus on some aspects of this creation of national identities by exploring what may be termed national literacies. When applying the term of national literacy, Daniel Tröhler has encouraged us to use this term in a broad sense. Literacy does not only denote the ability to read and write about the nation and have the required level of knowledge about the nation. Instead, national literacy also denotes the ability to understand and interpret national symbols and link these to a collective identity as national citizens. National literacy thus highlights the fundamental skill that ‘tells us whether we are at home or abroad or whether we are among our national peers or surrounded by foreigners’ (Tröhler, 2020: 13). As a result, this concept of national literacies certainly stresses the relationship between modern educational systems, nationalism, and nation-states. In this chapter, I intend to delve deeper into this entanglement of education and nationalism using The Wonderful Adventures of Nils as an example. Two questions consequently stand out: How was Lagerlöf’s famous book the result of the creation of a modern educational system in Sweden? And: How was Lagerlöf’s book intended to promote national literacy among school children? In order to provide preliminary answers to these questions, the term national literacy has encouraged me to place less emphasis on the content of The Wonderful Adventures of Nils and more focus on how the book came to be, how it was intended to be used, and with what purpose. The decisions taken to produce the book and the teacher’s guide Handbook to The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (Olander, 1918) will therefore be of more importance than the book itself.

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When examining the intended use and purpose of Lagerlöf’s bestseller, this handbook is certainly of particular interest. It was written by Valborg Olander, a teacher and textbook author. As an intimate friend and collaborator of Lagerlöf, Olander was, using Lagerlöf’s own formulation, ‘a real author’s wife’ (Söderlund, 2007: 399), assisting Lagerlöf with editing and proofreading her books and letters and supporting her with all sorts of emotional labor and administrative work. As such, Olander has been described as Lagerlöf’s indispensable co-author (Söderlund, 2007). Regarding The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, Olander was involved both as an intermediary in the commission of the book, as co-author/editor, and in managing Lagerlöf’s correspondence. The letters that Lagerlöf received and the lively debate that followed on the publication on how to use The Wonderful Adventures of Nils in the classroom were the immediate background to Olander’s handbook (Olander, 1918; Bergenmar & Karlsson, 2022: 6). By examining the intended use of this exceptionally successful primer, this chapter highlights the educational setting of national literacies. While The Wonderful Adventures of Nils certainly was part of Lagerlöf’s authorship and the early twentieth-century national discourse—on the brink of the period that Eric Hobsbawm termed ‘the apogee of nationalism’ (Hobsbawm, 1992: 131)—The Wonderful Adventures of Nils was closely tied to the development of national educational systems: a structural part of the expanding primary school system in Sweden. In addition, this chapter highlights the complexities of national literacies. Lagerlöf’s book was not primarily intended to teach children about the wonders of Sweden in an easily accessible way, but to promote their ability to use their emotions and imagination when engaging with various aspects of the Swedish nation and in their education to become Swedish citizens. As evident from this chapter, national literacies are, as Tröhler (2020) argues, quite a complex set of skills and abilities. Although contemporary literacy critics described Lagerlöf’s book as a literary and educational innovation (Nordlund, 2005: 98–99), it was nevertheless a part of broader trends. Her bestseller was part of a context where geography was used to make the nation visible for school children (Dahn & Boser, 2015), where traveling was an educational tool (Félix, 2020), and where recurrent narratives of young children traveling and learning about their nation were published. These included Bruno’s influential Le Tour de la France par Deux Enfants, published in 1877 (Cabanel, 2007). As is evident from below, The Wonderful Adventures of Nils also

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provides insights into the development of early twentieth-century progressive school primers (Parlevliet & Amsing, 2021) and the emotional dimension of nationalism (Zembylas, 2022; Stynen et al., 2020). As such, Lagerlöf’s bestseller is an excellent starting point for examining national literacies in relation to progressive education as well as affective nationalism.

The Wonderful Adventures of Nils and the Swedish Educational System The Wonderful Adventures of Nils is, as the title indicates, a story about a boy named Nils and his adventures traveling through Sweden. Based on a tradition of the Bildungsroman, the reader is acquainted with a lazy, disobedient, and mischievous boy who was cruel to animals and neither wanted to attend school nor church. As a punishment for his wrong-­ doings, he is transformed into an elf that can talk to animals. On the back of his parents’ goose, he joins a group of wild geese in their travels across Sweden where he experiences changing landscapes, important historical sites, major cities, and vital industries. As he learns more about Sweden and about life in his travels with the geese, he is able not only to enjoy the amazing nature of Sweden, and the many achievements of the Swedish population, but also to develop into a kind and responsible youngster. As a result, he is freed from his spell and is returned to his parents as a normal-­ sized boy. In examining this book, the concept of national literacy highlights the entangled relationship between education and nationalism. Lagerlöf’s book on the boy-turned-elf was not only about the nation, but about the literacy of Swedish school children. At the turn of the century, primary school enrollment had already been expanding rather rapidly since the creation of a national primary school system via the School Act of 1842. As a consequence, almost all children attended school for a couple of years by 1900 (Westberg, 2019). Although this quantitative development was striking, policymakers met challenges when raising the quality of schooling. The primary school system was still very decentralized, and 2300 school districts bore the main responsibility for organizing and funding primary schools. In such a system, local conditions created stark regional variations in how education was implemented, and in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, there was a trend towards so-called half-time schooling. In such schools, children either attended every other day, or in

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shorter or longer periods, such as every other week or every other month. At the turn of the century, approximately half of all Swedish school children attended half-time schools (Westberg, 2021: 35–37). In this context, serious concern was voiced regarding the decentralized organization of the school system and the quality of the schooling that it provided. In the teacher journal Svensk Läraretidning, authors lamented that children only learned to read mechanically, without an understanding of the actual content, and that they only received very basic knowledge in religion, math, geography, and natural history (Westberg, 2021: 39). Attempts were also made to address this situation. At the central government level, a new national school standard was published in 1900 with the intention of improving the education provided at primary schools; in 1904, new regulations for state school inspectors were enacted; and in 1906, a new committee to investigate primary schools was established. In 1913, increased central government grants to local school districts were implemented, and a new national board of primary schooling (Folkskoleöverstyrelsen) was created (Westberg, 2022: 19). In order to improve the literacy of school children, attention was also turned towards the textbooks used at primary schools. In the Swedish primary school, the Reader for Primary School (Läsebok för Folkskolan) remained the main textbook in the early twentieth century. This reader was the result of curricular reform following the School Act of 1842, which acknowledged the need for a comprehensive textbook apart from the Bible and the catechism. In line with similar efforts elsewhere, including the Deutsches Lesebuch (1843) and the Norsk Læsebog for Folkeskolen og Folkehjemmet (1863), the Reader for Primary School (1868) was intended to serve a range of purposes. It was supposed to function as a textbook in school subjects such as history, geography, natural history, and religion with the purpose of training children’s reading ability and of providing a social, moral, religious, and national education. As a result, it included seven sections that covered content such as the history and geography of Sweden, moral stories, and the presentation of important inventions (Edgren, 2017). Although the Reader for Primary School was an instant success, providing both the textbook and the content that the expanding primary school system needed, it soon became an object of criticism. The textbook had been produced by high-ranking educationalists with little or no experience of teaching primary school children, and, consequently, the texts were often not particularly accessible for small children, and the frequent

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inclusion of poems did not speak to the textbook’s advantage. In addition, the Reader increased remarkably in length, from 564 pages in the first edition to an entire 1920 pages in the 10th edition (Berg & Larsson, 2023). Already in the 1880s, the educational reformer Anna Sandström described the reader as that which everyone knows of, that everyone speaks ill of, and that no one defends (Edgren, 2017: 118). Later, in 1898, the educationalist and feminist writer Ellen Key described the reader as a ‘national disaster’ (Landahl, 2016, p. 209). In the early twentieth century, the Swedish Association for Teachers, thus engaged with ambitious plans to provide the primary school with new textbooks, created a textbook series called The New Reader (Nya Läseboken). For the first reader in the new series, the plan was initially that the series’ editorial committee would write the book together. When the possibility to add the famous author Selma Lagerlöf to the project arose, a co-authored book project was first envisioned but later abandoned for the option of letting Lagerlöf write the entire book herself (Landahl, 2016: 210–15). Lagerlöf had initially been ambivalent towards the idea of writing a reader for the Swedish primary school. She did not appreciate the suggestion of writing a serious and truthful non-fiction textbook nor the initial plan that it would be co-authored by a committee (Olander, 1918: 23–24). For her, it was also evident that such a book would never be able to find the international readership that she was looking for. But on the other hand, she felt that success abroad would be difficult to achieve and that it might be more worthwhile to write a book that would be read extensively by a Swedish audience (Bondesson, 2011: 238–39). Certain insecurity was also felt by members of the editorial committee. Even when the book had already been delivered to the printers, one of the members  still believed that it might be difficult to persuade school boards to purchase an entirely fictional textbook. Instead of the existing title of The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, other more descriptive titles were therefore suggested, and Lagerlöf herself even considered the prosaic From Smygehuk to Kebnekaise that stressed the geographical distance that the book covered, ranging from the south to the north of Sweden. The need for a new reader was, however, apparent, and Lagerlöf’s book was an immediate success, with 100,000 copies sold in the first print alone (Landahl, 2016: 215). Apart from the appeal that Lagerlöf herself brought to the book project as a well-known author, this success may be understood on the basis of the dynamics of the decentralized organization of the Swedish educational

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system: Here, the central government enacted national educational reforms that local school districts could respond to in different ways. In this context, Lagerlöf’s book found support both on the central and local levels. The production of Lagerlöf’s book was the result of a top-down attempt to reform the content of primary school education, which was in line with the above-mentioned efforts to improve the quality of schooling after the turn of the century. The impressive sales were due to local-level demand of new and updated readers among teachers and school boards. Consequently, the success of The Wonderful Adventures of Nils was the result of the same dynamic of the decentralized school system of Sweden that may explain both its rapidly expanding enrollment levels and its stark regional variations (Westberg, 2022).

A Particular Kind of National Literacy Lagerlöf’s The Wonderful Adventures of Nils was in some ways modeled on its predecessor, the Reader for Primary School. The Wonderful Adventures of Nils had similar content. It was intended to provide the same content as the section on natural history and geography in the Reader, and from there onwards introduce history, culture, technical inventions, and so forth. In terms of content, there was thus clear continuity between the Reader and Lagerlöf’s new book. By allowing Nils to travel across Sweden on the back of a goose, the framework of the book was certainly that of a textbook on the human and physical geography of Sweden. In terms of topics covered, the aim of Lagerlöf’s book also remained similar to that of its predecessor. It was intended to provide a basis for education in history, geography, and natural history, thus enabling children to ‘learn to know and love the country that they live in’ (Olander, 1918: 24). By reading about the adventures of Nils, they would also be stimulated into wanting to become morally good individuals and useful citizens (Olander, 1918: 24–25). In that sense, The Wonderful Adventures of Nils shared the efforts evident in the Reader for Primary School in promoting a Swedish national identity (Edgren, 2017). How this was to be accomplished differed, however, from the Reader. In this, Lagerlöf followed broader trends in children’s literature and school readers. Readers were not solely intended to provide children with useful information but were also expected to provide pleasurable reading (Parlevliet & Amsing, 2021: 52). Although the framework of the book certainly was educational, closely linked to what you would expect from a

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textbook in geography with chapters dealing with different regions of Sweden, Lagerlöf’s aim was to tell stories and fairytales. In that respect, her collaborator Valborg Olander argued that she wanted to break down the wall of ‘outdated views’ on what a reader should be and what was necessary and useful for children to read. Instead of dry and unamusing essays, Lagerlöf intended to educate children via so-called real literature, a true work of art (Olander, 1918: 24, 31). In terms of language, this meant that she did not go as far as to opt for children’s everyday language, but rather for an educated yet vernacular tone that was intended to provide children with a baseline for a clear and simple Swedish language. In order to accomplish this, Lagerlöf made sure that she included features of oral language to avoid the stiffness of the written language. For example, she allowed herself to repeat conjunctions within the same sentence, as in sentences like ‘It was a joy and a cackle and a flapping and a shouting, which no one can describe’ (Olander, 1918: 36). To guarantee the quality of this relatively relaxed writing style, professor Adolf Noreen (Uppsala University) reviewed the language used, to make sure both grammar and the terminology chosen was suitable (Olander, 1918: 35–37). According to Olander, Lagerlöf nevertheless promoted a nationally uniform Swedish language. In her book, she avoided foreign words as far as possible, although the topics addressed at the time forced her to use foreign words such as ‘seminarium’, ‘modell’ and ‘kurs’. In order to give life to her stories, she allowed the characters to talk in different ways. King Oscar used rhetoric while farmers spoke in a simpler, down-to-earth fashion. This was also part of the aim to increase children’s vocabulary and to teach them about the rich possibilities of the Swedish language, which was also indicated by Lagerlöf’s efforts to use synonyms. The national perspective did, nevertheless, provide some restrictions. While the main character, Nils, was born and raised in the county of Skåne, where a distinct dialect is spoken, the book was however supposed to be read aloud in the Swedish standard language (Olander, 1918: 35–41). The fostering of nationally useful citizens was intended to be accomplished via the creation of a specific link between Lagerlöf’s book and the child-reader. In this respect, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the rise of new ways of approaching children. Acknowledging that children’s books were a viable educational tool, such books had previously focused either on showing children how to behave or on describing the horrible consequences of bad behavior. Instead of offering such

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pedagogical examples, in the nineteenth century, children’s books began to offer portrayals of more childlike children, with both their strengths and weaknesses. Instead of teaching children to discern right from wrong via good and bad examples of behavior, this new literature intended to foster morality by identification. Children were expected to learn to identify with the characters of the books, thereby learning about morality, vices, and virtues (Parlevliet, 2012: 550–51). According to Olander, Lagerlöf followed a similar indirect method that Olander described in terms of ‘bringing to life’, ‘exciting’, providing ‘impulses’, and ‘generating’ or ‘appealing’. Olander argued that Lagerlöf’s book did not contain moral stories that spoke to children’s mind and trained their ability to reflect. According to Olander, one could not promote love of the fatherland through ‘moralizing precepts and prohibition’ or ‘dry and tendentious lecturing’ (Olander, 1918: 25). Instead, Lagerlöf’s stories were intended to engage with children’s fantasy, imagination, and emotions. Olander argued that this was a wise choice and claimed that children’s will cannot be governed via their minds. Instead, this could only be accomplished via the heart of children and by communicating moral ideals via art and a literary aesthetic (Olander, 1918: 25). The national literacy pursued by Lagerlöf was thus not a set of skills that could simply be taught or instructed, but that had to be experienced via true literature. What was pursued was consequently a multifaceted skill, in the sense indicated by Tröhler’s usage of the concept of national literacy (Tröhler, 2020). The national literacy that Lagerlöf aimed for did not only consist of the ability to merely recognize national symbols and have a cognitive knowledge of the Swedish nation and of what good citizenship consists. Instead, it was intended to be more encompassing than that, including the imagination required to draw conclusions and the emotional ability to form a sense of attachment to the Swedish nation and a will to do good. As evident from above, this national literacy was certainly in part an emotional literacy that included an ability to experience and engage with a set of feelings for the Swedish nation. In the center of this was the feeling of love, which was described in Olander’s handbook using the nouns love (kärlek) and love of the fatherland (fosterlandskärlek) as well as the verb ‘to love’. This interest in the emotions of school children may in part be related to an increasingly emotional pedagogy in Swedish primary schools, where warm feelings for the school, the teacher, and the country were encouraged (Landahl, 2015). But it may also be related to a broader contemporary discussion on patriotism, where the feelings of love could be

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linked to those of pride and loyalty (Hoegaerts, 2020). In Olander’s handbook, the love for the Swedish nation was linked to knowledge, pride, and a will to work and protect: you learn and love, you love and protect, you love and feel pride, and you love and work for your compatriots (Olander, 1918: 10, 24, 25, 26). In this context, Lagerlöf’s primer would enable the love for the fatherland to ‘grow easier, happier and stronger’ among children (Olander, 1918: 28). As an example of Lagerlöf’s method, Olander discussed how Lagerlöf approached the issue of emigration. In Sweden, the large-scale emigration of Swedish citizens to North America was a big political issue at the turn of the century, described as a threat to the Swedish nation (Kälvemark, 1976). Instead of merely providing an account of the detrimental effects of emigration or an explicit moral lesson on the duty that we all have to our fatherland, Lagerlöf told a story about how Nils met an old woman who had to suffer in great poverty after her children left her and the country to stay in North America. Instead of allowing Nils to comment on the behavior of her children, Lagerlöf merely let Nils himself react to this situation by just noting that his mother was still alive. By doing so, he reflected on the fact that he himself had momentarily left his parents, thus encouraging the reader to reflect on their own relationship with their parents and what it would mean if they also left them. According to Olander, it was this method of identification that made Lagerlöf’s book so impactful. Instead of merely teaching children about civic duties and the detrimental effects of emigration, she encouraged them to think and draw this conclusion on their own. According to Olander, the impact of this story becomes so strong ‘just because of all that is not said but which the reader himself has to think’ (Olander, 1918: 26).

Nation, Regions, and Imagination While The Wonderful Adventures of Nils does provide knowledge of the different parts of Sweden, as did its predecessor the Reader for Primary School, its purpose was slightly different. Olander argued that the main aim of Lagerlöf’s book was not the dry knowledge in itself, but the feelings of love, pride, and belonging that Nils’ adventures across Sweden promoted. When Nils flew over Uppsala, with the ancient Uppsala University at its center, the reader was intended to get not just an insight into the importance of the learned professions but also the joys of higher studies and comradeship. When Nils traveled across the county of Östergötland, the

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depiction of this region was intended to evoke reverence for hard farm work. The stories involving blacksmiths in the region of Bergslagen and the timbermen in northern Sweden were supposed to raise similar feelings: not by telling the children about their social, economic, or national importance, but by narrating how skillful blacksmiths ‘dealt with the fire, as if it were completely harmless’ and how ‘rafters play with the water, as if they were masters of it’ (Olander, 1918: 26–27). When creating this relationship between child and nation, the basis for The Wonderful Adventures of Nils were the Swedish regions. On the back of his goose, Nils traveled across all of the regions, with the conspicuous exception of Halland, which was described as unremarkable, from the south to the uttermost north. In this regard, Lagerlöf aligned herself to the notion that the soul of the nation was not its center, but its many regions: it is by learning about localities and their traditions and symbols that you learn about the nation (Hobsbawm, 1992). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, local and regional landscapes, buildings, and traditions were transformed into national phenomena in various ways. A classic example is the open-air museum Skansen, which was created in 1891 to showcase buildings and local cultures from various regions in Sweden in order to celebrate the Swedish nation (Fransson, 2010: 13–14). In line with such a national discourse, the Swedish nation that Lagerlöf presented was a nation of regions. It was a nation that featured the beautiful nature of Västerbotten and Lappland, where the plains of Närke were described as a dance floor. It was also a nation of mountains, lakes, and bogs, including those of Blekinge. It is furthermore a nation that featured a range of animals, various kinds of folk costumes, and building traditions. Among these traditions, the small cottages of Småland, the farms of Skåne, the castles of Sörmland, and the huts of the Saami people were each highlighted by Lagerlöf. Apart from presentations of big national personalities, like those of Saint Bridget of Sweden or Charles XI, Lagerlöf’s story about the adventures of Nils also included a range of local tales and legends (Olander, 1918: 29–31). Again, it is however noticeable that these accounts were not intended merely to teach children facts about the Swedish nation. According to Olander, the methods employed were instead those of the saga and the fairy tale. In this respect, Olander acknowledges the limitations that follow from Lagerlöf’s choice of format. Since the book is a saga about a boy shrunken by an elf sitting on the back of a goose, some stories are difficult

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to tell. It is, for example, difficult for Nils to visit cities, industrial plants, and churches, which is a reason why certain phenomena are not covered extensively by the book. But the limitations in terms of content, Olander argued, allow for potential in terms of children’s engagement with the book. In progressive education, children’s imagination was perceived as key to the learning process, and fictional stories were to have both a moral and an educational value (Parlevliet & Amsing, 2021: 67). Olander argued that fictional narrative served two functions in Lagerlöf’s hands. First, it enabled Lagerlöf to provide children with unique insights into the main features of Sweden. Olander supported this interpretation by quoting a review by the author and literary historian Fredrik Böök, who claimed that it was fiction that provided Lagerlöf with the tools to make the story of Nils Holgersson’s many adventures into one single depiction of the essence of Swedish nature and Swedish life. According to Böök, it was fiction that enabled Lagerlöf to portray this unity of Sweden in a way that true descriptions of reality could not have done (Olander, 1918: 34). Secondly, the saga format enabled Lagerlöf to promote the imagination of children. The role of imagination in education was not undisputed. The progressive educationalist Jan Ligthart (1859–1916) made a distinction between imagination that would enable children to engage with the truth, and fantasies which he described as charming lies (Parlevliet & Amsing, 2021: 67–68). Olander did not see the value of such distinctions, merely noting that the format of fairy tales had always been used as an ‘educational tool’ and that children can easily separate fact from fiction (Olander, 1918: 33). Instead, she highlighted the educational potential of imagination (fantasi). Aided by imagination, Lagerlöf was, according to Olander, able to ‘probe the emotional life of children’ and to provoke positive feelings for humans, animals, and the nature of the fatherland (Olander, 1918: 25, 28). Using this imagination, Olander argued that Lagerlöf’s book appealed to ‘national instincts’ and several virtues. By letting the reader know both good and bad humans and animals, Lagerlöf’s story showed the value of consideration, courage, and perseverance. Olander also noted how difficult it was to combat egoism among children but that Lagerlöf succeeded by telling stories about friendships: stories that promoted the values of obligations, mutual help, empathy, and friendship (Olander, 1918: 27–28). By building on imagination instead of facts, The Wonderful Adventures of Nils is thus not merely a reader that teaches children to learn

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and love their country. Instead, it is a reader that promotes a broader national literacy, intended to enable children to actively shape their relationship with the Swedish nation and their fellow citizens.

In Conclusion As mentioned in the introduction, Daniel Tröhler has used the concept of national literacy to highlight how modern schools are vital in educating national citizens who are able to identify and understand national symbols (Tröhler, 2020: 12–13). Lagerlöf’s incredibly successful reader, The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, is an apt illustration of the potential of this concept and how it may be used in history of education. First, the concept of national literacy highlights the importance of examining the role of modern school systems. In this chapter, I have indicated how Lagerlöf’s book was the result of both short and long-term efforts to reform the organization and the curriculum of the decentralized Swedish primary school. In this context, Lagerlöf’s bestseller was both a tool promoted by national actors to improve the quality of schooling and a primer that filled a gap for local school districts. In that respect, The Wonderful Adventures of Nils represents both a continuation and a shift in relation to the Reader for Primary School (first published in 1868) that it replaced. Secondly, this chapter highlights the many dimensions of a national literacy. The purpose of The Wonderful Adventures of Nils was not only that school children were supposed to learn more about Sweden and be able to understand how various features of nature and society could be appreciated and interpreted as Swedish. In this context, the intended national literacy was not first and foremost a skill that could be taught or prescribed: Lagerlöf did not want to teach children how to love their fatherland and become good national citizens. Instead, she wanted to engage with their imagination and emotions via the genre of a fairy tale and via the quality of true art. Although Lagerlöf’s aim to create national citizens was shared with that of the previous reader, she consequently intended to reinvent, or reimagine, the link between education and the nation. Instead of facts, she wanted to use the imagination and aesthetics of fairy tales to foster a new generation of school children. And instead of lecturing children, she wanted children to identify and engage with the main characters of the book: Instead of telling children that emigration was bad, she wanted

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children to experience this themselves through the stories she told. In the same way, she did not intend to teach children to love their country, but instead intended to excite or evoke such feelings. In that sense, the national literacy that she intended to create was also an emotional literacy. The Wonderful Adventures of Nils not only helped children to understand and interpret national symbols, but also to experience and feel them. For further research into such efforts, ‘national literacy’ is certainly a useful concept.

References Axell, C., & Hallström, J. (2015). Technology and the shaping of a Swedish national identity in the educational work of Selma Lagerlöf, 1900–1907. History of Education and Children’s Literature, 10, 299–316. Berg, A., & Larsson, E. (2023). Diligent and docile workers: Descriptions of the working poor and the social order in the Läsebok för folkskolan, 1868–1920s. Paedagogica Historica, 59, 19–35. Bergenmar, J. (2018). The North seen from the South in the Spanish reception of Selma Lagerlöf. European Journal of Scandinavian Studies, 48, 170–188. Bergenmar, J., & Karlsson, M. (2022). Lagerlöfs läsare: Allmänhetens brev till Selma Lagerlöf. Makadam förlag. Bondesson, A.  S. (2011). Italy seen from Sweden and Sweden seen from Italy: Selma Lagerlöf’s Sicilian novel and Italian translations. Scandinavian Studies, 83, 233–246. Cabanel, P. (2007). Le Tour de la Nation par des Enfants. Roman Scolaires et Espaces Nationaux (XIXe–XXe Siècles). Belin. Dahn, N., & Boser, L. (2015). Learning to see the nation-state: History, geography and public schooling in late 19th-century Switzerland. Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 5(1), 41–56. Desmidt, I. (2003). Jetzt bist du in Deutschland, Däumling. Nils Holgersson on foreign soil: subject to new norms: traduction pour les enfants. Meta (Montréal), 48, 165–181. Edgren, H. (2017). Kungsådran av den lilla läroanstaltens bildning: 1870-talets pedagogiska förväntningar på Läsebok för folkskolan. In J.  Westberg, E. Larsson, A. Berg, & M. Michaëlsson (Eds.), Utbildningens Revolutioner: Till Studiet av Utbildningshistorisk Förändring (pp. 95–118). Uppsala Universitet. Elenius, L. (2002). Selma Lagerlöf och Norrland: nationella idealbilder i Nils Holgerssons underbara resa. Sekelskiftets Utmaningar, 15–41. Erlandson-Hammargren, E. (2006). Från alpromantik till hembygdsromantik: Natursynen i Sverige från 1885 till 1915, speglad i Svenska Turistföreningens årsskrifter och Nils Holgerssons Underbara resa genom Sverige. Gidlund.

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Félix, I. (2020). School journeys: Ideas and practices of new education in Portugal (1890–1960). Doctoral dissertation. Umeå University. Fransson, P. (2010). Landskapet som lärobok Regionalitet och medborgarfostran i Jämtland kring sekelskiftet 1900. Doctoral dissertation. Sekel förlag. Hobsbawm, E. (1992). Nations and nationalism since 1780: Programme, myth, reality. Cambridge University Press. Hoegaerts, J. (2020). Learning to love: Embodied practices of patriotism in the Belgian nineteenth-century classroom (and beyond). In A.  Stynen, M.  Van Ginderachter, & X. M. N. Núñez Seixas (Eds.), Emotions and everyday nationalism in modern European history (pp. 66–83). Routledge. Kälvemark, A.-S. (1976). Swedish emigration policy in an international perspective, 1840–1925. In H.  Runblom & H.  Norman (Eds.), From Sweden to America: A history of the migration (pp. 94–113). University of Minnesota Press. Landahl, J. (2015). Emotions, power and the advent of mass schooling. Paedagogica Historica, 51, 104–116. Landahl, J. (2016). Politik & pedagogik: En biografi över Fridtjuv Berg. Lärarstiftelsen. Nordlund, A. (2005). Selma Lagerlöfs underbara resa genom den svenska litteraturhistorien 1891–1996. Symposion. Olander, V. (1918). Handbok till Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige. Bonnier. Parlevliet, S. (2012). Foxing the child: The cultural transmission of pedagogical norms and values in Dutch rewritings of literary classics for children 1850–1950. Paedagogica Historica, 48, 549–570. Parlevliet, S., & Amsing, H. T. A. (2021). Freedom behind a fence: outer place and inner space in Dutch classic primers (1902–1913). Paedagogica Historica, 57, 50–71. Stynen, A., Van Ginderachter, M., & Núñez Seixas, X. M. N. (2020). Emotions and everyday nationalism in modern European history. Routledge. Sundmark, B. (2008). Lagerlöf’s legacy: A hundred years of writing the nation. Bookbird, 46, 14–21. Söderlund, P. (2007). Review: en riktig författarhustru. Samlaren: Tidskrift för Svensk Litteraturvetenskaplig Forskning, 128, 399–401. Thomsen, B.  T. (2004). Lagerlöfs relative landskaber. Om konstruktionenaf et nationalt territorium i Nils Holgersson. Edda, 91, 118–133. Tröhler, D. (2020). National literacies, or modern education and the art of fabricating national minds. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 52(5), 620–635. Westberg, J. (2019). Basic schools in each and every parish: The School Act of 1842 and the rise of mass schooling in Sweden. In J. Westberg, L. Boser, & I. Brühwiler (Eds.), School acts and the rise of mass schooling: Education policy in the long nineteenth century (pp. 195–222). Palgrave Macmillan.

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CHAPTER 9

Kapara on You: National Literacy in Israel Between Judgment Day and Everyday Judgment Marva Shalev Marom

Introduction: Kapara on You! My next-door neighbor at Stanford was a fellow-Israeli named Boaz. ‘Kapara on you!’, we would greet each other amicably in the hallways of our graduate-student dorm. But when other neighbors—students from across the world—asked me what kapara meant, I was not sure what to say. From one vantagepoint, kapara is ubiquitous—the third most common moniker in Hebrew, which Israelis use widely with family, friends, colleagues, and even complete strangers (Rosental, 2022). Since the Israeli winner of Eurovision 2018 thanked the cheering crowd by saying, ‘Europe, kapara on you!’, the term turned into an internationally celebrated symbol of Israeli culture and was printed on t-shirts, pillows, and cups. But from another perspective, kapara is not about friendly hellos and emotional thank yous: it is a biblical term related to Yom Kippur

M. Shalev Marom (*) Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Fox, L. Boser (eds.), National Literacies in Education, Historical Studies in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41762-7_9

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(Repentance Day) that literally means atonement and practically refers to sacrifice. On Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Judgment, God is believed to calculate the deeds and misdeeds of each person and decide by nighttime whether to ‘inscribe their names in the Book of Life’ or to doom them. In reverence of Yom Kippur, Jews refrain from food, drink, showers, intercourse, exercise, electricity, and transportation, and some also try and change the verdict: the ritual sacrifice of tarnegol kaparot (the Atonement Chicken). Since late antiquity and to this day, this kapara unfolds as follows: a person brings a chicken to the rabbi, who ritually ‘pours’ the person’s sins into it. The rabbi then holds the chicken by the neck, spins it three times over the person’s head and says on the person’s behalf: ‘this is my exchange, this is my substitute, this is my atonement; this chicken will die, and I will live long’. After the final spin, the chicken’s head detaches from the body, which is traditionally taken to slaughter and given to tzkada (charity), while the person joins the community in prayer, fast, and repentance (Reed, 2014). Watching my discombobulated neighbors struggling to reconcile the casual and the ritual meanings of kapara, I too became aware of the dissonance, indeed the dissociation between them. It would appear every time I unthinkingly greet Boaz with ‘kapara on you!’, I assure my compatriot that I would die for him: not like lovers do or even like soldiers in battle, but rather, I seemingly offer to be brutally dismembered for his mortal sins. I obviously don’t really see myself as going headless for Boaz, but rather, only sweetening a hallway chat by offering a familiar reminder of home away from home. One might say I am ‘literate’ as an Israeli: able to discern hellos from sacrifices even when they go by the same word. But in Israel today, kapara is both a hugely popular slang term and a legally performed sacrifice regulated by the Chief Rabbinate, the key religious authority of Israel. Naming the dissonance between the two meanings obscures what I and millions of other Israelis might actually be ‘literate’ in when we employ this term. As kapara grows in popularity among Israelis across ethnic and religious spectrums, the answer to one question in particular becomes ever more pressing: what is so Israeli about this seemingly absurd match of martyrdom and routine, Judgment Day and everyday judgment? Is the mismatch in fact a perfect tango in the Israeli national mind? In this paper, I explore the notion of kapara within the greater ‘grammar’ of Israeli national literacy, as a vibrant intersection of Jewish national identity, religious practice, state law, and street culture. While kapara

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rituals are legally performed by the Chief Rabbinate of Israel and even taught in the dati (religious) and haredi (ultra-religious) tracks of Israel’s public school system, kapara’s colloquial meaning has received very little research attention and is not even recognized by the National Academy of Hebrew. Yet understanding kapara as both a state-authorized Jewish ritual and as ‘airborne’ street-language reveals that beneath the seeming dissonance resonates a perfect harmony. In a single word, themes of atonement, repentance, and sacrifice travel from sanctity to profanity, from myth to reality, and from religious to national literacies. Unraveling the vast range of kapara offers a telling perspective into Israeli national thought: namely, how the conflation between ancient Jewish roots and contemporary nation-state practices naturalizes an even greater confusion between life-­and-­death matters and day-to-day habits reproduced across political, religious, and popular spheres. I begin by introducing Tröhler’s conceptualization of national literacy and its relationship to public schooling and nation-state building, with an emphasis on the nuanced interplay between institutionally generated and ‘airborne’ manifestations. Addressing the understudied interface of nationalism and education, as well as the tendency to overlook the distinction between ‘nation’ and ‘state’, Tröhler’s conceptualization of national literacy sheds light on schools as state-authorized makeries of nationally oriented citizens. This keen perspective does tremendous service to the study of Israel as a Jewish nation-state, by exposing a fateful, tucked away arena, where the national mind learns to ‘read’ and decode national symbols in ways that reassure collective identity. I proceed to explore kapara as a major reproduction site of Israeli national literacy, a ‘key word’ that reflects the complex tapestry of Jewish peoplehood, religiosity, nationalism, and statecraft in Israel (Kartiel, 1999). Building on two nationally defining events that shape Israeli society to this day—the establishment of semi-independent Jewish-religious public schools in 1953 and the 1973 Yom Kippur War—I show how kapara is nationally constructed within the ‘semantic field’ of liturgy and war, schooling and counterculture, that together form the DNA sequence of Israeliness. I conclude with what kapara as a case study adds to our unfolding understanding of national literacy, highlighting the fact that this unique consensus was created beyond school borders. I then make a case for including informal education within the ‘makery’ of national literacy alongside formal education frameworks and its research in higher education. Methodologically, I build on Kartiel’s sociolinguistic approach to integrating artifacts of popular

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culture, state-documents, and Jewish law excerpts in an auto-ethnographic approach to ‘reconstruct one’s own national path dependencies’ from one’s everyday life (Tröhler, 2020b: 14).

Imagined, Institutionalized, and Airborne: National Literacy in Israel ‘Sometimes single words can work like a magic stick’ (Tröhler, 2020b: 11). With these words, Tröhler offers one explanation of the process by which words as symbols come to be seen as real. ‘Nation’ is such a word: a larger-than-life idea enforced through everyday casualties and celebrated in a ‘daily plebiscite’ (Renan, 1992: 27). The nation becomes omnipresent through daily reenactment: Billig’s groundbreaking conceptualization of ‘banal’ nationalism (1995) drew attention to how coins, stamps, web addresses, and figures of speech are all subliminal yet prevalent expressions of the ‘nation’ that make it indistinguishable from reality. This daily reproduction relies on institutions, immigration departments, tax offices, and public schools just as it relies on how ‘ordinary people talk’—drawing on national frameworks without taking notice of the ‘flag’ their words raise (Skey & Antonsich, 2017; Billig, 1995). These various invocations embedded in everything from bureaucracies to street language cultivate the national citizen: an identity framework whose skills, tendencies, and perspectives are useful for the state, and whose willingness to sacrifice lives for the ‘nation’ gives this idea a marvelous and disastrous potency (Tröhler, 2020b). The concept of ‘national literacy’ unravels how this ‘magic’ works: the ability of citizens of a nation to generate and to decode national symbols reproduces the nation as a collective identity. Public schools are a major site where national literacy is acquired, not merely in terms of the dominant understanding of literacy as defined as predictable capita (OECD, 2003), but in terms of the dominant cultural thesis of a single country (Collins, 1995). Tröhler observes that and how various curricula cultivate this fundamental skill and enable the nationally-wired mind to locate itself, whether home or away, among strangers or brethren. And yet schools do not function alone in the fabrication of national minds: this process is radicalized by war and conflict that fuel the national sentiment, just as it is ‘cleverly concealed’ in hallway conversations, language innovations, and fashionable trends (Rosa & Flores, 2021; Tröhler, 2020b: 22).

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If national literacy is the common root of institutionally perpetuated and seemingly ‘airborne’ representations of the nation, then ‘key words’ can be understood as miniature imprints of national literacy (Kartiel, 1999). Such words are windows into the ‘taken for granted’—casual rhetoric that actively constitutes social reality and enacts and negotiates values, patterns, and norms. ‘Key words’ bring out national identity not as a fixed essence but as a dynamic process where boundaries and values are negotiated, where language changes social practice, and vice versa (Rosa & Flores, 2021).

From Counterculture to Collective Experience: The National Construction of Kapara Saying kapara is not only popular in Israel, but uniquely pervasive across different ‘kinds’ of Israeli Jews, crossing the ‘ethnic divide’ and the spectrum of religious observance: Mizrahi (of North African descent) and Ashkenazi (of European descent) both use it, as do hiloni (secular), dati (religious), and haredi (ultra-religious) Jews. Though Jews form almost 80% of Israeli society, they are an overwhelmingly divided majority. Not only do different ‘kinds’ of Jews look different, think different, and lead different lifestyles, but they have drastically different civil experiences: they attend different school systems, have different civil rights and duties, pay different taxes, and live in different cities and neighborhoods. These experiences likely lead to perceiving kapara differently: datis and haredis may sanctify kapara rituals while hilonis might see them as abusive and ‘primitive’; Mizrahis may hear their grandmother’s loving voice in kapara while Ashkenazis might hear their grandfather’s bitter complaints that Israel is becoming ‘religious’. In the following, I unravel how kapara is nationally constructed by ‘reading’ it into two nationally defining events—the establishment of semi-independent religious-public schools in 1953 and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. I argue that the key to its popularity lies in Israeli national literacy—the ongoing conflation of religion, nationalism, and statecraft in Israel, and that (paradoxically) the fact that kapara is not taught at schools allowed the term to function as a unifying concept across bitter social divisions.

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Religious-Public Schools, ‘Mizrahi’, and the Emergence of Kapara Civil differences among different kinds of Israeli Jews are rooted in the ideological and pedagogical foundations of the Jewish State. Israel’s turbulent founding in 1948 was the result of Zionist lobbying, which started in the late eighteenth century when many nationalist movements blossomed across Europe. Zionists perceived the ‘nation-state’ as an invincible constellation of national unity and political security, offering the only solution to Jews’ enduring hardships as a dispersed and persecuted minority. To fit this model, Zionists redefined Jews as a ‘nation’ rather than a religious community: united not by a common faith but by a shared national essence, culture, body, and relationship to the land. But while Israel was founded as the national home of the Jewish people (Rubinstein, 1998), history would reveal that the Jewish people had cultures, bodies, and relationships to the land more diverse than the Zionist imagination. Soon after Israel’s founding, Arab countries across the world withdrew their citizenship from Jews. Over a million members of the great Sephardi Jewish diaspora effectively became refugees and fled North Africa and the Middle East to arrive in Israel throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Unexpectedly, members of the founding generation—predominantly Ashkenazi Jews of European descent—were called to share their home with ‘other’ Jews, whose bodies, traditions, and cultures did not align with the Zionist perception of a European nation. The leaders of the nascent state turned to public education to address these differences and forge a collective identity. From the outset, the mission of public education as ‘the greatest tool for the construction of the people’ was to bridge over these gaps and enculturate future citizens according to the desired cultural model (Marom, 2005). And yet, the ‘people’ were skeptical about this tool: the Chief Rabbinate of Israel demanded autonomy over religious education, and many immigrants who sought to fulfill their Jewish dreams of return were unwilling to change to fit the Zionist model of Jewish cultural citizenship. As a result, to please the four dominant sectors of Israeli society, the Law of Public Education (1953) divided Israel’s centralized public education system into four

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semi-­independent branches: hiloni (secular), dati (Jewish religious), haredi (ultra-religious), and Arab.1 The newcomers soon became Israel’s ‘others’: although they were entitled to make aliyah as Jews and receive automatic citizenship and other privileges, the ‘social benefits’ they were offered—the housing, education, and jobs made available to them—channeled Sephardi Jews into a different pathway altogether. With the establishment of Israel’s public school system in 1953, Sephardi immigrants were channeled into dati schools and boarding schools, where their ‘old traditions’ would be replaced by religious reeducation and their national identity shaped according to the Zionist ideal. To this day, students of North African descent form 90% of dati students. Sephardi Jews’ shared cultures and traditions, alongside their group experience of systemic discrimination in Israel, birthed a new Israeli identity: Mizrahi (Eastern). It was out of this culture that the street meaning of kapara took root. Not allowed to follow their tradition in the dati but instead encouraged to acquire the desired national model through religious reeducation, Mizrahi instead invoked kapara outside of ritual contexts—alongside other traditional Jewish symbols like Hamsah artifacts and Star of David necklaces—as a form of resisting the power dynamic that reduced them to second-class citizens in Israel. Traditionally, in Sephardi communities, a mother, for instance, could tell her son she would be a kapara on him—in other words, she would give up her life for him to live (Rosental, 2022). But in Israel, this expression of devotion took on a new meaning, as parents who made Aliyah ended up sacrificing their traditions, possessions, and dignity which were their lot in the diaspora to become ‘Israeli’, to be reconstructed as Jews and as citizens (Shenhav, 2006). Kapara came to symbolize Mizrahi experience for the general Israeli public through the first Mizrahi-authored novel that entered the mainstream in 1983, Eli Amir’s Tarnegol Kaparot (Atonement Chicken). This groundbreaking novel was the first to expose the destruction Mizrahi Jews experienced as a result of their immigration to Israel and also the first to use 1  Israel’s public education system is divided largely into four groups. The major division separates the Mamlachti (general) state-run public education system attended by the majority of students and the dati (Jewish Orthodox) public education system that emphasizes Jewish studies, tradition, and observance. The majority of dati schools are called mekif (public schools with general admission), while a small private branch (ulpana/yeshiva tichonit) caters to selected Ashkenazi populations and holds a selective admission process. However, both haredi (ultra-orthodox) Jews as well as Israeli Arabs who do not identify with the Zionist enterprise attend semi-independent yeshivas or sectorial schools in accordance with their religious and national worldviews (Hakohen, 1994).

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kapara as neither the religious ritual nor a metaphor of unconditional love, but in terms of the sacrifices his family and community made to become Israeli national citizens. It is no coincidence that this ‘key word’ flourished informally on the streets as a symbol of Mizrahi counterculture and resistance to the power structure of Ashkenazi dominance. With the decades, Mizrahi gained a demographic and political footing in Israel, and symbols of Mizrahi traditions—music, food, artifacts, and figures of speech such as kapara—turned from a ‘flag’ of national resistance to a competitive alternative to the Zionist ‘national’ model of who and what is Israeli. The Aftermath of the Yom Kippur War and the Spread of Kapara The failure of the public schooling project to forge a collective identity has had long-term ramifications within Israel, seen in the radically different lives hiloni, dati, and haredi Jews lead. What began as a fourfold sectorial public school system has become parallel civil trajectories once school is over. In the case of Jews, haredis are exempt from army service, are paid by the state to study the Torah at a yeshiva, and often live in poverty in closed communities. Datis adopted the name ‘national-religious’ (dati leumi) to link their Jewish practice and national ideology; contribute to the army, economy, and culture; and sometimes take the law into their own hands and create illegal Jewish settlements in Palestinian territories. And hilonis are the direct heirs of the Zionist project, having inherited control over Israel’s major political and cultural institutions as well as the burdens of leading the army and paying taxes for haredis to study the Torah, and as a result, they are becoming increasingly disengaged, disidentified with Israel, and critical of its domestic and international politics. Yet despite the striking differences, all three of these groups use kapara. Indeed, once a ‘key word’ penetrates the public discourse, it travels freely in the semantic field, and the more prevalent it becomes, the more it accumulates meanings and functions that correspond with other parts of the nation (Kartiel, 1999). Boaz and I are a case in point: we are among the many privileged Ashkenazi Israelis who wholeheartedly appropriated kapara, having never seen an atonement chicken nor heard this expression in our families. We both attended semi-private hiloni (general) schools whose student body was predominantly Ashkenazi, and until we started our army duty—the key collective experience in Israel—we did not have many Mizrahi friends. What then could have separated kapara from the warm nest of its traditional Mizrahi usage among close family members to fly across the ethnic divide and the religious spectrum to offer a rare common ground in a sea of difference among Israeli Jews?

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I contend that kapara relates to the conflation of Jewish religion, nationality, and statehood in Israel through the collective experience and aftermath of the traumatic Yom Kippur War (1973). As a holiday, Yom Kippur might offer the widest social consensus in Israel to this day, as everything everywhere shuts down: roads are empty, and businesses, restaurants, and shopping centers are closed for two days. Tellingly, this unique holiday isn’t grounded in state law but is a national consensus: some Israelis ritually repent in synagogues, others ride their bikes across the motorless country, and even Palestinian-Israelis and other non-Jews often refrain from driving and working. Peaceful as this holiday may sound, Israel paid a heavy price for celebrating Yom Kippur in 1973, when it was caught unprepared for one of its bloodiest battles. Major invasions from neighboring states caught the Israeli army unprepared, both psychologically—its triumphant victory of the Six Day War in 1967 had generated an aura of invincibility—and practically—soldiers who went on Yom Kippur vacation were urgently called back to duty but had no transportation, phones, or even radio available. Israel’s lethargic regrouping cost thousands of lives: many soldiers were still in their teens fulfilling their obligatory service. Israel ultimately won the Yom Kippur War, but in its aftermath, the religious themes of Yom Kippur (echoed in the lives lost to protect the land of the forefathers) brought the language of sacrifice—religious, national, and political—into the frontline of the public discourse. Was Israel sacrificing its future to protect the territories of its mythical past? Was the security of citizens second to having political control over the entire ancient land of Israel? Should Israel sacrifice territory to ‘inscribe’ the next generations ‘in the book of life’ and enable peaceful conduct with its neighbors? These questions created tremendous social and ideological ruptures that shape Israeli society to this day. In the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, the ground for kapara to enter the general lexicon was created: Israel’s turbulent political reality was reframed in terms of religious atonement and sacrifice. While the deaths of soldiers and civilians was old news for the young state, which lost one fifth of its population in the War of Independence (1948) and continues to accumulate losses in over a hundred years of conflict, the Yom Kippur War linked this political reality with religious ideals of martyrdom and fighting God’s war to fulfill messianic aspirations. Israeli ownership over territories which were beyond the internationally agreed borders of the state created a split between ‘old’ and ‘new’ Zionists: while the founding generation

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framed Palestine as a nationally-appealing political asset which should be negotiated for political interest, the generation born into war, also known as ‘the children of winter 1973’ (Shapira, 2004) saw their own Israeli lives as a divine calling to protect Israeli ownership over biblical Israelite territory. The split between secular and religious Zionism soon penetrated the curriculum, especially in Bible class, which is mandatory across branches: hiloni schools taught biblical criticism to disrupt the association between the ancient Land of Judea and contemporary Israel, while dati schools taught the Bible as a religiously as well as nationally abiding narrative, focusing on the relationship between ancient and contemporary Israel, faith, and civil contribution. Haredi schools rejected the discussion by devoting their entire curriculum to the Talmud and received fire for not partaking in the national mission (Shapira, 2004). While the war polarized Israeli society gradually between a religious right and a secular left, the idea of sacrifice as both a religious and civic practice became a national reality.

Conclusion: Kapara as Israeli National Literacy When I finally graduated from Stanford, I received a gift from Boaz: a glass mug with the word kapara printed vertically in Roman letters with traditional Hebrew pronunciation mixed in. I stared at the amalgam of cultural symbols displayed on the transparent background—from the appeal to Western ‘worldliness’ to the echoes of Biblical Hebrew—and found the unmistakable imprint of Israeli national literacy. I noticed the sense of double meaning, both modern and ancient, mythical, and mundane, which leaves one puzzled about what is actually being said and whether millennia-old traditions or modern statecraft and nation-building practices lurk behind every flashy trend in passing. This very puzzlement is the blueprint of Israeli public discourse, what Ernest Renan would call the ‘daily plebiscite’ that reconstitutes the idea of the nation as an everyday reality. When Israelis say kapara, they naturalize the conflation between Jewish religion, nationality, and statehood so that clarity—even if achieved—becomes ultimately irrelevant. In this paper, I explored the widespread usage of kapara in light of two foundational Israeli state practices: sectorial religious public schooling (1953) and the general Yom Kippur War (1973). I showed how kapara was first nationally constructed as a symbol of Mizrahi group identity in revolt against the Zionist Ashkenazi establishment. I delineated the major

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role of religious reeducation in dati public schools in their systemic marginalization. While semi-segregated schooling was made to deconstruct their traditions to make them into cultural citizens of Israel, it also paved the way for Mizrahi group identity to form as a counterculture, at least, if not also as a powerful alternative to the established national model. While Mizrahi Jews used kapara to reclaim their traditional values and voice the sacrifice their community made to become Israeli, in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, as national, religious, and political sacrifices interfused in the public discourse, Israelis across the spectrum adopted the term that gradually turned into an internationally recognized symbol of Israeli culture. If kapara is so charged religiously, nationally, and politically, what makes it thrive as if airborne on the streets? In other words, what are Israelis ‘literate’ in? How does kapara ‘read’ within the grammar of the Israeli national mind? Kapara encapsulates the intricate ‘how’ of the Jewish nation-state: the dense interweaving of religion, nationalism, and statehood in Israel, where Judgment Day intersects with everyday judgment, is the battlefield within the classroom. The semantic field of kapara captures Israeli thought-style: Jewish tradition, peoplehood, and contemporary nation-state practices clash; white-noise and divine echoes resonate side by side; and no clear cuts form between the mundane and the mythical, nor between religious reeducation and national identity formation. While the threefold enactment of Jewishness in Israel created distinct civil trajectories for Jews of different origin and religious conduct, Israelis share the conflict across the divide. Through kapara, the sacrifices they all made in war and at school, the traditions, family members, and future horizons they lost to be part of the nation, fuel the desire for future change that sacrifice is founded upon. For the National Academy of Hebrew, kapara is still not even a word. But the undercurrents of the national mind, which harbor the nation’s future therein, might not even be seeking permission as they are changing direction right under its nose. Taking a careful look at the literacies ‘taught’ beyond school curricula, this study stresses the importance of including informal and un-institutionalized learning environments for understanding the making of national minds. If nations are indeed ‘langues that need paroles’ (Tröhler, 2020a: 632), discourses to be performed and embodied, then the concept of national literacy distills the very voice being reproduced across societal divisions and learning environments. Learning to ‘hear’ this voice within the Israeli case study—identify the workings of national literacy throughout the dense and intense interweaving of nation

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and state, religion, and education—is key to groundbreaking insight for scholars of education, religion, and nationalism invested in this context. For this I can only say: Daniel, Kapara on you!

References Billig, M. (1995). Banal nationalism. SAGE. Collins, J. (1995). Literacy and literacies. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24(1), 75–93. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an.24.100195.000451 Hakohen, D. (1994). Olim Be-Seara: The great Aliyah and its absorption in Israel, 1948–1953. Yad Ben Zvi. Kartiel, T. (1999). Keywords: Patterns of culture and communication in Israel. University of Haifa Press & Zmora-Bitan. Marom, D. (2005). Constitution, marriage and education: Interrelations between religion and state in the thought of Ben Zion Dinur. In A.  Ravtizki (Ed.), Religion and state in twentieth-century Jewish thought (pp.  295–357). The Israel Democracy Institute. OECD/UNESCO Institute for Statistics. (2003). Literacy skills for the world of tomorrow: Further results from PISA 2000. PISA, OECD Publishing. https:// doi.org/10.1787/9789264102873-­en Reed, A.  Y. (2014). From sacrifice to the slaughterhouse: Ancient and modern approaches to meat, animals, and civilization. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 26(2), 111–158. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43907142 Renan, E. (1992). What is a nation? Text of a conference delivered at the Sorbonne on March 11th, 1882. In Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? (E.  Rundell, Trans.). Presses-Pocket. Rosa, J., & Flores, N. (2021). Decolonization, language, and race in applied linguistics and social justice. Applied Linguistics, 42(6), 1162–1167. Rosental, R. (2022). My journeys in Hebrew. Keter Publishing (Hebrew). Rubinstein, E. (1998). The declaration of Independence as a basic document of the State of Israel. Israel Studies, 3(1), 195–210. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/30246801 Shapira, A. (2004). The Bible and Israeli identity. AJS Review, 28(1), 11–41. Shenhav, Y. (2006). The Arab Jews: A postcolonial reading of nationalism, ethnicity and religion. Stanford University Press. Skey, M., & Antonsich, M. (2017). Everyday nationhood: Theorizing culture, identity and belonging after banal nationalism. Palgrave Macmillan. Tröhler, D. (2020a). National literacies, or modern education and the art of fabricating national minds. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 52(5), 620–635. https:// doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2020.1786727 Tröhler, D. (2020b). Nation-state, education and the fabrication of nationally-­ minded citizens. Croatian Journal of Education, 22(Sp.Ed.2), 11–27.

PART IV

The Nation in School and Curriculum

CHAPTER 10

Curriculum, National Identity, and National Literacy Berit Karseth

Curriculum concerns schooling and education, and captures regulations, intentions, and practices. It is a contested word that reflects historical, cultural, and epistemological characteristics, as well as institutional and political conditions. Its scope comprises substantive aspects, such as educational purposes, content, and learning expectations, and it includes processes of decision making on different levels and by different actors. It is materialized in regulations, guidelines, user guides, and frameworks defining selections, time allocation, and assessment procedures. It also carries power relations between teachers and students and between teachers and the institution, in addition to its relationship to public constituencies. Curriculum represents the memory of society and, at the same time, aspirations for the future. According to Daniel Tröhler, curriculum is designed for developing nationally minded individuals or ‘fabricating the loyal minds of the future citizens’ (Tröhler, 2020b: 627). Finally, it must be interpreted within a particular context and encompasses both text and

B. Karseth (*) University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Fox, L. Boser (eds.), National Literacies in Education, Historical Studies in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41762-7_10

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process. Thus, the enactment of a formal national curriculum is dependent upon local practices in schools (Sivesind & Karseth, 2019). This chapter elaborates on how curriculum may represent aspects of national identity and what Daniel Tröhler calls ‘national literacy’ (2020b). While Tröhler expands his concept within a long historical timeline, I read Norwegian curriculum texts and educational policy through the conceptual lens offered by Tröhler’s national literacies. The main aim of this chapter is to demonstrate how national identity and national literacy acquire different meanings in different curricula. Consequently, formal curriculum texts and policy texts make up the empirical point of departure. I hope this chapter contributes to further contemporary analysis of curriculum work as well as the work of the curriculum, with regard to defining who we are and who we should become. In the first part of the chapter, I discuss the nexus between global educational reform agendas and national decision-making processes on educational changes. I argue that despite global trends and movements, curriculum making in countries like Norway follows a state-based tradition where certain political institutions and arrangements are the main players. I then present a section on curriculum and national identity, with attention to the concept of national literacy. Thereafter, I move on to the Norwegian case. Before closing the chapter, I discuss significant shifts in the Norwegian curriculum with reference to its individual and future orientation, as well as its new digital format, and ask what consequences this may have for how a country like Norway defines a literate citizen.

National Curriculum Making in an Era of Globalization European countries such as Germany, France, and the Scandinavian countries have a tradition of state-based curriculum making (Westbury et al., 2016). However, curriculum making does not take place in a vacuum. Certainly, the development of globalization, interconnectedness, and increased competitiveness across states motivates governments to borrow ideas internationally. Pressures and expectations for educational change have emerged from intergovernmental organizations, such as the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and official curricula are becoming more uniform around the world, especially at the elementary level (Anderson-Levitt, 2008).

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The OECD has played an important role in mobilizing a shift from a content-oriented curriculum model towards a future-focused competency orientation that applauds the learner as a self-reflexive agent who needs to develop a range of transferable skills and competencies described through certain learning outcomes. This change implies that learning sciences have emerged as dominant sources of authority, rather than sociology and ways of handling societal issues. The concept of competence is driven by arguments related to both the knowledge economy and the individual’s learning needs and interests, which makes it appear to be a trans-discursive term with a consensus-creating function. Williamson (2013) noted that ‘the competencies framework switches together an entrepreneurial vocabulary of initiative, risk, teamwork, brainpower, and so forth with a civic discourse of community values, empowerment, and cultural diversity’ (26). Another point of departure that underlines the emergence of a global curriculum script is the world culture theorists who argue that ideologies and ideas, rather than material causes, inspire international collaboration between states, organizations, and individuals. A cultural notion of modern and global competition among states is what motivates governments to borrow ideas internationally. According to Meyer (2007), curriculum reform worldwide follows general ideas on how education should prepare individuals and the nation-state to become part of working life in a world society. Although curriculum researchers identify significant variations in the implementation and management of reforms, these reforms are not being legitimated by references to national structures (Meyer, 2007: 265). Hence, Meyer questions the role of states in creating global heterogeneity through national reform. However, researchers criticize the arguments of convergence and note that although similar education reforms are spreading globally, they are translated, recontextualized, and modified in national and local contexts. Nation-states understand and handle global reform manuscripts on curriculum policy differently and adjust their policies to meet global requests and demands (Sivesind et  al., 2016; Karseth & Sivesind, 2010; Steiner-­ Khamsi, 2009). Several core concepts used in European policy texts are being reconceptualized in the national arena and given a different meaning when recontextualized (Maroy & Pons, 2019). William Reid (2000) questioned the idea that curricula are directly comparable across nations, and concluded that there are fundamental differences in practice and terminology. Curricula are, according to Reid, cultural artifacts in the same way that national songs and stories are

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cultural artifacts. Despite increased global networking and the intensifying numbers of international comparative studies in the 20 years since Reid’s contribution, Tröhler (2020b) argued that globalization has still not produced a homogeneous world culture and that long-standing traditions still affect educational arrangements, planning, and reasoning. He claims that researchers have overlooked how ‘the (idea of) nation creates realities that foster a kind of identity of people’ (Tröhler, 2020a: 13). From a historical point of view, Tröhler argued, school subjects served as national identification despite sharing some common features. Schools did not teach geography, but national geography, not history, but national history, not writing, but national writing. Hence, schooling was about national literacies that ‘promised meaningful life in the particular national context’ (ibid.: 21). In a recent article, Sautereau and Faas (2022) explored how national identity is reflected in history, geography, and civic education curricula in today’s France and Ireland. They concluded that French curricula privilege national topics, whereas Irish curricula veer between national, European, and international matters. In Ireland, it is essential to develop not just national pride but also global skills and citizenship. The French case underscores a nationalist approach in which respect for French values is important. According to Saterau and Faas’ conceptualization, the French curricula represent a duty-oriented approach compared to a more inclusive approach in Ireland. This is an interesting analysis that shows how different historical legacies have shaped current curricula and ideas of identity. Kopińska (2022) analyzed the alteration of the Polish core curricula in a context of political change by focusing on how the political agenda of strengthening the national identity translates into changes in the core curricula. Through a detailed discursive analysis of the old and new curricula, Kopińska showed a significant discursive strengthening of the national identity on the one hand and allocation of mitigation/exclusion strategies concerning issues of social equality and diversity on the other. The author concludes that the endemic nationalism present in the core curricula has become more exclusive. This confirms Tröhler’s critical point that we are faced with a world of nationalism that cannot be ignored by the rhetoric of globalization. The two examples above are relevant to understanding how curricula have helped generate these national sentiments in their future citizens. I

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will outline some aspects of the curriculum and national identity and introduce the term national literacy before discussing the Norwegian case.

Curriculum, Identity, and National Literacy William Reid (2000) stated that curriculum is essentially public and institutional in character, and its arrangements of content are inevitably linked with the themes of national identity and national aspiration. Hence, he concluded that curriculum theory must be seen and understood as operating within specific and multifarious national contexts. Furthermore, he maintains that curriculum theory ‘could and should be seen as also operating at a meta-level, where it is concerned with very broad cultural questions of how the organization of learning is related to the structure of societies and to cultural evolution’ (Reid, 2000: 122). Like Reid, Tröhler’s analyses are mainly based on historical studies, and to capture national aspirations and collective identity, he introduces the concept of ‘national literacy’, which aims to develop ‘nationally minded citizens who are able to ‘read’ the constant national symbols, and understand and interpret them as an assurance of their collective identity’ (Tröhler, 2020b: 631). Tröhler explains the term further in the following way: ‘National literacy’, therefore, absolutely means to focus on the particular ‘cultural context of a single country’ that can also be labeled as the ‘nation’, understanding ‘nation’ as a dominant cultural thesis (or discourse) about who ‘we’ are and who others are not. (ibid.: 633, note 8)

The term captures the importance of the production and reproduction of national sentiments in schools through curriculum, learning materials, and classroom activities, as well as the ongoing public discourse on who we are. Inspired by this concept, I will look into Norwegian curricula. I will start with the 1997 curriculum, which places national literacy within a common frame of reference. Thereafter, I will look at the curricula of 2006 and 2020 and provide some examples of what I find to be significant changes. I will draw on research that I have been involved in over the last few decades.

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The Curriculum of 1997: Common Frame of Reference The 1997 curriculum for primary and lower secondary education (L97) is an interesting example. For the first time in Norwegian history, a core curriculum of principles and aims was developed that, in addition to primary and lower secondary education, also included upper secondary education and adult education. The Ministry argued that the introduction of large-­ scale reforms simultaneously in primary, secondary, and higher education made it ‘natural and fitting to provide a common formulation of the Common Core of the curriculum, with a view to emphasizing how the stages of education are linked together, including adult education’ (The Ministry of Education, Research, and Church Affairs, 1999: Foreword). The decision to create a core common curriculum from primary education to adult education was, and still is, a unique construction in the Nordic context. The curriculum text of L97 was produced as a hardback book with pictures. Pictures from well-known painters (Munch, Matisse, and Leonardo da Vinci, to mention a few) were used to visualize ‘who we are and who we want to be’. It also illustrated Western civilization as the cradle for the emergence of the Norwegian national state. The core curriculum was based on the underlying assumption that personal identity develops through a common base of knowledge, culture, and values. In the document, cultural heritage is considered an important source in two respects. Individuals develop their personal identity by becoming familiar with inherited forms of conduct, norms of behavior, and modes of expression to be cultivated. Therefore, the curriculum should develop the learner’s familiarity with national and local traditions. One argument is that the bonds between generations are closer when they share experiences, insights, stories, songs, and legends. In addition, if society is going to remain democratic, the curriculum must play a leading role in passing on the common cultural heritage. However, the main arguments for the centralization of content adhere to a more subtle line of thought: in an increasingly specialized society, common frames of reference must be the property of all to avoid differences in competency that lead to social inequality (Karseth & Sivesind, 2010). The core curriculum was translated into Chinese, English, French, German and Russian. Not only were foreigners invited to read the overall vision of education, but the text was also distributed globally to symbolize

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national policy and goals. The curriculum sought to realize ideas of the 1990s policy in Norway, marketing Norway in the global society, yet the development of the curriculum was also motivated by creating a global cultural heterogeneity through national language and reform (Karseth & Sivesind, 2010). One school subject to highlight in the discussion on ‘who we are or are not’ is the handling of religious instruction and moral education. In the Norwegian case, religious instruction has been part of the school curriculum since its beginning. The country has experienced debates and battles about questions in relation to the Church, the content, and its syllabus, as well as the amount of time allocated to the subject. While the curriculum of 1987 offered the possibility to choose an alternative school subject titled ‘General religious and moral education’, the curriculum reform of 1997 abolished that possibility. The subject curriculum states that ‘young people who are ignorant of the Christian faith and tradition are deprived of an important basis for understanding norms, values, language, literature, and art’ (Ministry of Education, Research, and Church Affairs, 1999: 98). Furthermore, it is stated that the subject has various functions, namely, to transmit a tradition, maintain a sense of identity, and build bridges that give insight and promote dialogue. Taken together, national literacy in L97 is based on the idea that there is a common core of knowledge that not only enables Norway’s citizens to read, write, and think critically, but also works as a cultural compass for becoming a national citizen. Pictures and visualizations underscore the sentiments of the text that situate Norway in a national and international context. Compared to its predecessor, the core curriculum attached to L97 positions the student in a knowledge framework rather than in a social context (Hörmann & Karseth, 2023).

The Curriculum of 2006 and 2020: The Meaning of National Literacy Within a Competency-Based Framework The curriculum reform prepared at the beginning of this millennium represented a shift towards competencies and basic skills. The text genre of 2006 was different from the 1997 curriculum. Instead of being distributed as a complete book, the curriculum was published as accessible PDF files for the individual school subject on the web page of the Directorate

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of Education and Training. Although the school subject still made up the structure of the curriculum, the expected learning outcomes described through competence aims gave direction. This represented a new curriculum discourse that emphasized the individual learner and hence the need to develop subject curricula that express clear learning targets concerning which type of competence pupils should be able to acquire. Together with colleagues, I have described the 2006 reform elsewhere as a fundamental reform that replaced earlier reforms of primary and lower secondary curricula, as well as upper secondary education (Baek et  al., 2018). The 2006 curriculum (LK06) represented a shift from input-­ oriented policy instruments towards output-oriented tools, such as measurable objectives, standardized tests, and data-based planning (Møller & Skedsmo, 2013). Furthermore, the reform propelled increased decentralization and local autonomy alongside increased accountability. The two White Papers behind LK06 also pioneered a new discourse on holding key actors, such as local authorities, school principals, and teachers, more accountable for the performance of schools. To do so, the Ministry of Education and Research introduced a national quality assessment system alongside the curriculum reform (Møller & Skedsmo, 2013), and national testing was implemented in 2004. Although the Ministry concluded that the reform had been an overall success, some shortcomings became a cause for public concern (Steiner-­ Kamsi et  al., 2020). The first shortcoming was the need to change the core curriculum, as it was not changed with the 2006 reform. In addition to curriculum overload and the need to give priority to content and knowledge as guides for formulating the competence description, another issue concerned relevance and how the curriculum addressed societal challenges, such as climate change and diversity. These challenges constituted important premises for renewing and strengthening the value aspect of the curriculum—a call for value promotion. The White Paper behind the curriculum renewal issued this call, as did the report by the parliamentary standing committee on education and research, which handed over its recommendations to Parliament, arguing that: The committee believes that one of the school’s tasks is to manage a national cultural heritage that all children and young people should share in. It is about building and further developing a common cultural identity, while at the same time showing openness and tolerance towards different cultural and religious groups and individuals. (Stortinget, 2016a, translated by the author)

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Based on the proposal from the committee, Parliament made the following decision: The Storting [Parliament] asks the government in connection with the work to renew the general part of the curriculum and the renewal of subjects to ensure a value promotion in the school by better incorporating the common values of the objectives clause in all subjects and at all levels in the school. (Stortinget, 2016b, translated by the author)

The common values described in the objectives clause are ‘respect for human dignity and nature, intellectual freedom, charity, forgiveness, equality, and solidarity; significantly, these values also appear in different religions and beliefs and are rooted in human rights’ (Ministry of Education and Research, 2017). When looking into the policy process, there is concern about the purposes of schooling. The debate and conclusions drawn by Parliament reflect societal concerns that schools need to play an active role in securing the values of society. The new core curriculum states that pupils should learn about the values and traditions that contribute to uniting people in our country. Furthermore, it maintains that Christian and humanist heritage and traditions are an important part of Norway’s collective cultural heritage and have played a vital role in the development of our democracy. It also states that the Sami cultural heritage is part of Norway’s cultural heritage. The importance of a common frame of reference for individuals’ sense of belonging in society is emphasized. The argument is that this will help to create solidarity and connect each individual’s identity to the greater community and to a historical context. A good society, according to the core curriculum, is founded on the ideals of inclusiveness and diversity (Ministry of Education and Research, 2017). However, analyzing the process towards a final curriculum reveals that some important modifications occurred as several common values became less visible (Karseth et al., 2022). Most important is how the reformulation of the objectives clause’s common values in the overall section of the core curriculum was further modified by the value sections in the subject curricula. In these movements, some values—such as creative joy, engagement, and the urge to explore—emerged as particularly important, while other values became almost invisible. Solidarity, charity, forgiveness, and freedom of spirit—all values highlighted in the objectives clause—were

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not articulated in the values sections of the subject curricula examined (Karseth et  al., 2022). The question of values was primarily directed inward towards the school’s inner life and the student’s mastery. The elaborations and clarifications of the school’s value base in the core curriculum and the value sections of the subject curricula have led to values becoming more visible in the curriculum, but how they have been included reflects an orientation towards the individual learner. Furthermore, the local anchoring of teaching and learning has apparently been downgraded over time (Hörmann & Karseth, 2023). In the 1987 curriculum, the local context was quite visible. The student was regarded as a part of and as a future member of a (local) social community, and the school’s mandate was to provide conditions in which the student could grow into this community: ‘The life and work of the school must be such that all learn to respect each other and cooperate in spite of differences’ (Ministry of Education and Research, 1987: 19). The discourse emphasized social processes and how to shape a good environment. Moving into the twenty-first century, social learning has become associated with learning outcomes. This move was orchestrated by the OECD and implied a focus on measuring social and emotional skills (Restad & Mølstad, 2021). Restad and Mølstad analyzed how Norway negotiated tensions in the understanding and measurement of social and emotional skills in the new national curriculum and concluded that the Norwegian curriculum does not align with the international knowledge base that emphasizes a broad understanding of social and emotional skills and the measurement of such skills in schools. They argue that Norwegian policymakers have ‘drawn the red line to avoid the inclusion of social and emotional skills as part of the students’ subject competence and to avoid standardized assessment of such skills’ (Restad & Mølstad, 2021: 446). Hence, they maintain that the Norwegian case presents a strong case for rejecting measurability. Conversely, we might argue that a competency-based curriculum approach makes it difficult to include a curriculum language in the overall educational aims and social conditions and activities. The curriculum discourse of social learning focuses on whether it should be possible to measure competence rather than emphasizing social learning as the development of the school as a democratic community. Hence, the primacy of learning outcomes has an impact on the semantics of the subject curricula.

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From a National-Minded Citizen to a Future-­Oriented Lifelong Learner? When entering the twenty-first century, Norway, as described above, joined many other Western countries in changing its curriculum policy from a content-driven to a competency-oriented approach, where learning sciences, in alliance with economic arguments, legitimate changes in how a national curriculum is designed. The question to ask is whether these changes also alter the role of the curriculum in shaping national identity or defining national literacy. In the Future of Education and Skills 2030: OECD Learning Compass 2030 project, the OECD takes a new step in governing education globally and calls for a redesigning of curricula to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. While the focus of the former project, Definition and Selection of Competencies (DeSeCo; OECD, 2005), was on the formulation of competencies, the new project also addresses how to design and implement a future-oriented curriculum. One of the reports produced from the recent project is Embedding Values and Attitudes in Curriculum: Shaping a Better Future (OECD, 2021). While the OECD argues that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to embedding values in curricula, the whole project aims to contribute taxonomies that can be used to measure social and emotional competencies. The learning outcomes of individual learners are at the core. The national context is made into a non-existent context, and redesigning implies an individualized and personalized curriculum in which societal issues and values, such as solidarity, human dignity, and diversity, are ‘non-issues’. Rather than linking learner identity to disciplinary knowledge, the curriculum of the future links identity formation to a lifelong project that the individual works continually to achieve. According to Williamson (2013), the minds and mentalities of young people are subject to an emerging style of thought that seeks to shape them as certain types of people, and the starting point is ‘that society asks for employable people, and not so much people that comply with social norms’ (120). Others, like Simons and Masschelein (2021), point to some fundamental shifts: a shift from an educational institution to a learning environment, from disciplining to monitoring, and from normalization to personalization. However, as Williamson underscores, the extent to which things might happen as they have been imagined and planned for is an empirical

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question. As described in the beginning of this chapter, research shows that school subjects are still at the core of curriculum architecture and may play a significant role in developing national literacy (Sautereau & Faas, 2022). The school subject underpins the basic intentions of schooling. As in the previous curricula, the school subjects are presented separately in the curriculum, and a fixed number of teaching hours are distributed per subject. Hence, as Goodson (1989) stated more than three decades ago, the school subject is the: only tangible aspect of a pattering of resources, finances and examinations and associated material and career interests … In short, the written curriculum provides us with a testimony, a documentary source, a changing map of the terrain: it is also one of the best official guide books to the institutionalized structure of schooling. (Goodson, 1989: 134)

Following Tröhler’s argument about school subjects serving as national identifications, I argue that this main structure has not changed throughout the period. While competence and measurable objectives are central, the substance of the curriculum is anchored in different school subjects. However, the regulation of what to teach and offer in schools is less prescribed in the twenty-first-century curriculum than in earlier versions. L97 divides the school subject ‘Social Studies’ into history, geography, and social sciences, and the curriculum describes what pupils should have the opportunity to learn for different grades. For instance, the curriculum for history in grade 8 states that pupils should have the opportunity to learn about how Norway obtained its constitution in 1814, the Norwegian parliamentary system, the emergence of the labor movement, and the women’s rights movement. Furthermore, in grade 8 social sciences, pupils should have the opportunity to become acquainted with the organization of municipalities and county municipalities. In geography, the curriculum states that pupils should gain an overview of the main geographical features of their area and of the country as a whole. Compared with the 1997 curriculum, the new curriculum (LK20) does not describe the content in the same way, and the distinction between history, geography and social sciences is not present as an organizing principle, as in L97. Furthermore, the core category of the curriculum is the competence aims, formulated as what pupils are expected to be able to do. For instance, the curriculum states that after year 10, pupils should be able to ‘reflect on how people have fought and continue to fight for change in society while also having

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been and still being influenced by geographic conditions and historical contexts’ (Ministry of Education and Research, 2019). As a governing category, the competence aims are open and generic regarding content selection. Instead of regulating the content, competence aims to regulate how to work by describing methods, skills, and strategies. However, the LK20 curriculum does refer to one event. In the curricula of Social Studies, we find the following sentence: ‘Learning about the terrorist attack in Norway on 22nd July 2011 shall be a part of this instruction’. The decision to include this sentence was debated in the media, with some arguing that naming a particular event is not in line with the profile of the curriculum (Drabløs & Eriksen, 2018). The analysis above points to some shifts or modifications in the formal curriculum through the latest reforms. Attention towards students’ achievement and expected outcomes as a part of schooling is not new; however, statistical, and digital technologies are continuously developed to improve learning and to optimize the education sector for the benefit of the national economy. The concern is more about equity than equality, where learning is primarily regarded as an individual process for which each student is held accountable. Nevertheless, we can recognize old patterns and ideas in the recent curriculum. Hilt et  al. (2019) described a coexistence of social democratic progressivism and neo-liberal market economy (394), with the competence trend as an expression of neo-liberal thinking promoting an understanding of the ideal student that was easy to adapt to the earlier ideal of the independent child, as promoted by social democratic progressivism. Taken together, the official Norwegian curriculum (LK20) represents a cultural artifact in which competence aims linked to the different school subjects make up the overall structure. Compared to the curriculum in the 1990s, there are very few symbols, historical events, and detailed content descriptions in the curriculum. This may indicate that what it means to be nationally literate has changed, and that the discourse about who we are seems less evident. However, the lack of a clear national narrative does not necessarily mean that the curriculum plays a minor role in defining national aspirations. The core curriculum, as its predecessors, reflects a national identity based on inclusiveness, democratic values, and consensus, and hence carries important aspects of legitimation of a common school in Norway. Educating national-minded citizens is an important task of the curriculum; however, what it means to be a national-minded citizen is changing.

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Changing Curriculum Format: From Book to Digital Platform The national curriculum in Norway is a legally binding text, and the Directorate of Education and Training has developed additional supporting materials. When analyzing the materials, a question to ask is to what extent the Directorate for Education and Training, through these resources, emerges as an authoritative interpreter of issues that traditionally reside with the profession. Given that guides, tools for planning, and curriculum texts all inhabit the same online platform, what constitutes legal documents and what is open to professional judgement may appear ambiguous. Hence, the user friendliness of supporting resources may play an important role in defining what to include or not to include in the local work of the curriculum (Karseth et al., 2022). The official curriculum is an instrument for governing schools by distributing power within the education system with the intention of controlling schools (Lundgren, 1977). However, research repeatedly highlights that curriculum enactment in educational practice may not necessarily comply with the formal curriculum. Nevertheless, the formal curriculum generates knowledge about the public discourse on education and dominant assumptions and preferences for crafting the formal curriculum (Goodson, 1995). Likewise, as shown above, research on school subjects is important for curriculum policy research, as it moves the focus towards the manifestations of expectations formulated in the curriculum. The effect of a new digital curriculum platform, as well as other digital resources offered by the Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training, is uncertain. However, the digital resources put forth distinct explanations of what central concepts in LK20 mean, and the digital resources are not neutral but produce individuals, issues, concerns, and activities. Hence, we may question whether the LK20 reform represents a final discontinuation of the licensing model in which the national curriculum regulates what content to teach (Sundby & Karseth, 2021; Hopmann, 1991). The digital curriculum platform does not offer local schools guidance for selecting content. However, through the competence aims, it offers appropriate methods, strategies, and skills. Through its ‘formula’, the platform evolves as a strong provider of ‘correct’ ideas, positioning practitioners in schools as executors of these ideas rather than providing them with room for discretion based on professional knowledge. While

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the core curriculum and the subject curricula represent rather open texts embedded in the values defined in the Educational Act, the digital platform offers a curriculum in which certain relationships between the components of the curriculum are made possible. The ‘work’ of the curriculum platform may appear rather instrumental and hence places the values and social norms in the background.

Conclusion This chapter began by addressing how national curriculum-making processes are surrounded by global reform initiatives and, at the same time, embedded in national and local contexts. The analysis of Norwegian curriculum documents shows significant changes in the period from the 1990s to the 2020s. The format has changed from a hardcover book with many illustrations to an interactive curriculum situated on a digital platform. Furthermore, the content of the curriculum has changed from emphasizing common frames of reference, such as common contexts, certain historical events, and cultural idioms, to emphasizing rather open learning outcomes using certain verbs (e.g., explore, reflect, talk about). These changes raise several lingering questions. Does the formal curriculum work as a signpost for analyzing what it means to be nationally literate in a nation state? And is it possible to capture important changes? To answer these questions, we need to study in more depth the teaching and learning materials offered and used in schools, as the enactment of a formal national curriculum depends on these local practices. Educational institutions are concerned with problems that are practical and not easily fixed (Sivesind, 2008: 466). Teachers will face tensions between different purposes and values and need to balance different considerations of what education and schooling is about. This requires room for deliberation. There are many sides to everything. I’ve looked at life from both sides now From up and down and still somehow It’s life’s illusions I recall I really don’t know life at all. (Joni Mitchell, 1967)

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References Anderson-Levitt, K. M. (2008). Globalization and curriculum. In F. M. Connelly, M.  F. He, & J.  A. Phillion (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of curriculum and instruction (pp. 349–368). Sage. Baek, C., Hörmann, B., Karseth, B., Pizmony-Levy, O., Sivesind, K., & Steiner-­ Khamsi, G. (2018). Policy learning in Norwegian school reform: A social network analysis of the 2020 incremental reform. Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy, 4(1), 24–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/2002031 7.2017.1412747 Drabløs, Ø. T., & Eriksen, D. (2018, October 15). Nå kommer læreplanene som tar 22. juli inn i skolen:—umulig å lære bort uten hatet som lå bak. NRK Kultur og Underholdning. https://www.nrk.no/kultur/na-­kommer-­laereplanene-­ som-­tar-­22.-­juli-­inn-­i-­skolen-­1.14247877 Goodson, I. (1989). Curriculum reform and curriculum theory: A case of historical amnesia. Cambridge Journal of Education, 19(2), 131–141. https://doi. org/10.1080/0305764890190203 Goodson, I. (1995). The making of curriculum: Collected essays (2nd ed.). Falmer Press. Hilt, L. T., Riese, H., & Søreide, G.  E. (2019). Narrow identity resources for future students: the 21st century skills movement encounters the Norwegian education policy context. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 51(3), 384–402. Hopmann, S. (1991). Current structures of curriculum making in the Federal Republic of Germany and their impact on content. In B.  B. Gundem, B. U. Engelsen, & B. Karseth (Eds.), Curriculum work and curriculum content: Theory and practice: Contemporary and historical perspectives (pp. 158–180). Department of Education, University of Oslo. Hörmann, B., & Karseth, B. (2023). From active members of the school community to active knowledge acquirers: The rhetoric on students in Norwegian curricula across time. In D. Tröhler, B. Hörmann, S. Tveit, & I. Bostad (Eds.), The Nordic education model in context: Historical developments and current renegotiations (pp. 273–290). Routledge. Karseth, B., & Sivesind, K. (2010). Conceptualising curriculum knowledge within and beyond the national context. European Journal of Education, 45(1), 103–120. Karseth, B., Kvamme, O. E., & Ottesen, E. (2022). Fra Politiske Intensjoner til Nytt Læreplanverk: Prosesser, rammer og Sammenhenger [From political intentions to new curriculum] (EVA2020 rapport 4). The Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Oslo. Kopińska, V. (2022). Towards an exclusive community? Political shift and changes to the school core curricula in Poland: A discourse analysis. Journal of

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Curriculum Studies, 54(4), 520–535. https://doi.org/10.1080/0022027 2.2021.1995051 Lundgren, U. P. (1977). Model Analysis of Pedagogical Processes. CWK Gleerup. Maroy, C., & Pons, X. (2019). Theoretical framework. In C. Maroy & E. Pons (Eds.), Accountability policies in education: A comparative and multilevel analysis in France and Quebec (pp. 53–94). Springer. Meyer, J. W. (2007). World models, national curricula, and the centrality of the individual. In A. Benavot & C. Braslavsky (Eds.), School knowledge in comparative and historical perspectives. Changing curricula in primary and secondary education (pp. 259–271). Springer. Mitchell, J. (1967). Both Sides Now.  https://genius.com/Joni-mitchell-bothsides-now-lyrics Ministry of Education and Research. (1987). Curriculum guidelines for compulsory education in Norway: M87. Aschehoug. Ministry of Education and Research. (2017, April 8). Core curriculum—Values and principles for primary and secondary education. Ministry of Education Research. https://www.regjeringen.no/en/dokumenter/verdier-­o g-­p rinsipper-­f or-­ grunnopplaringen%2D%2D-­overordnet-­del-­av-­lareplanverket/id2570003/ Ministry of Education and Research. (2019). Subject curricula for primary and secondary education. Directorate of Education and Training. https://www. udir.no/laring-­og-­trivsel/lareplanverket/ Ministry of Education, Research and Church Affairs. (1999). The curriculum for the 10-year compulsory School in Norway. Ministry of Education, Research and Church Affairs. Møller, J., & Skedsmo, G. (2013). Modernising education: New public management reform in the Norwegian education system. Journal of Educational Administration and History, 45(4), 336–353. OECD. (2005, May 27). The definition and selection of key competencies. Executive Summary. DeSeCo-project. https://www.oecd.org/pisa/definition-­selection-­ key-­competencies-­summary.pdf OECD. (2021). Embedding values and attitudes in curriculum: Shaping a better future. OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/aee2adcd-­en Reid, W. (2000). Curriculum as an expression of national identity. Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, 15(2), 113–122. Restad, F., & Mølstad, C.  E. (2021). Social and emotional skills in curriculum reform: A red line for measurability? Journal of Curriculum Studies, 53(4), 435–448. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2020.1716391 Sautereau, A., & Faas, D. (2022). Comparing national identity discourses in history, geography and civic education curricula: The case of France and Ireland. European Educational Research Journal. https://doi. org/10.1177/14749041221086378

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Simons, M., & Masshelein, J. (2021). Looking after school: A critical analysis of personalisation in education. Education, Culture and Society Publishers. Sivesind, K. (2008). Reformulating reform: Curriculum history revisited. Doctoral dissertation. University of Oslo. Sivesind, K., & Karseth, B. (2019). An officially endorsed national curriculum: Institutional boundaries and ideational concerns. Curriculum Perspectives, 39(2), 193–197. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41297-­019-­00074-­4 Sivesind, K., Afsar, A., & Bachmann, K. E. (2016). Transnational policy transfer over three curriculum reforms in Finland: The constructions of conditional and purposive programs (1994–2016). European Educational Research Journal, 15(3), 345–365. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474904116648175 Steiner-Khamsi, G. (2009). Knowledge-based regulation and the politics of international comparison. Nordisk Pedagogik, 29, 61–71. Steiner-Khamsi, G., Karseth, B., & Baek, C. (2020). From science to politics: Commissioned reports and their political translation into white papers. Journal of Education Policy, 35(1), 119–144. Stortinget. (2016a, October 5). Innstilling til Stortinget fra Kirke, Utdannings- og Forskningskomiteen om Fag—Fordypning—Forståelse. En Fornyelse av Kunnskapsløftet. Church, Education and Research Committee. Innst. 19S (2016–2017). https://www.stortinget.no/no/Saker-­og-­publikasjoner/ Publikasjoner/Innstillinger/Stortinget/2016-­2 017/inns-­2 01617-­0 1 9s/?all=true Stortinget. (2016b, October 11). Behandling av Innstilling fra Kirke-, Utdanningsog Forskningskomiteen om Fag—Fordypning—Forståelse. En Fornyelse av Kunnskapsløftet. Church, Education and Research Committee. (Innst. 19 S (2016–2017), jf. Meld. St. 28 (2015–2016). Sak nr 3, 11.10.2016. https:// www.stortinget.no/no/Saker-­og-­publikasjoner/Saker/Sak/?p=65336 Sundby, A. H., & Karseth, B. (2021). ‘The knowledge question’ in Norwegian curriculum. The Curriculum Journal, 33(3), 427–442. Tröhler, D. (2020a). Nation-state, education and the fabrication of national-­ minded citizens (Introduction). Croatian Journal of Education, 22(Sp. Ed.2), 11–27. Tröhler, D. (2020b). National literacies, or modern education and the art of fabricating national minds. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 52(5), 620–635. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2020.1786727 Westbury, I., Aspfors, J., Fries, A.-V., Hansén, S.-E., Ohlhaver, F., Rosenmund, M., & Sivesind, K. (2016). Organizing curriculum change: An introduction. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 48(6), 729–743. https://doi.org/10.108 0/00220272.2016.1186736 Williamson, B. (2013). The future of the curriculum: School knowledge in the digital age. The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9457.001.0001

CHAPTER 11

‘National Literacy’ in an Imperial Setting: The Strange Case of Istanbul’s Robert College Kevser Muratović

Introduction Writing in such volumes always bears a temptation. The author can be easily deceived into choosing a certain concept in order to ‘apply’ it to the sources. This, however, bears the risk of telling a quite foreseeable, one might even say boring, story: namely, quod erat demonstrandum. On the other hand, the author could also take inspiration from a lifework full of curious investigations, fresh approaches, and innovative questions. By doing this, there is a good chance of developing new knowledge or at least of adding new aspects to things already known. Taking this latter idea as a starting point, my story begins with a curiosity about Daniel Tröhler’s research on education, Protestantism, and nationalism in regard to my own field of research: the Ottoman Empire.

K. Muratović (*) University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Fox, L. Boser (eds.), National Literacies in Education, Historical Studies in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41762-7_11

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My curiosity led me to Istanbul’s Robert College (RC)—the first American higher education institution that was founded outside the USA in 1863 in the Ottoman Empire. Today it is one of the most famous universities in Turkey—concurrently one of the best 500 universities in the world. Known as Boğaziçi University since 1971, many members of the Turkish political, business, and cultural elite have graduated from this institution. These graduates include at least three former Prime Ministers (Tansuçiller, Ecevit, and Davutoğlu), the chairman of the biggest Turkish conglomerate (Rahmi Koç), and the famous writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Orhan Pamuk (CNNTürk, 2018). I asked myself whether the history of Robert College’s seemingly smooth transformation into a Turkish university can tell us something about Daniel Tröhler’s concept of ‘national literacy’ (2020a). Tröhler’s framework captures the interconnectedness of education and nationalism by ascribing the task of constructing ‘particular sensitivities to symbols and practices constituting nationality and foreignness’ to modern schooling systems (Tröhler, 2018: 186; translation KM). Thereby, modern schooling contributes to teaching pupils how to be future citizens who are ‘able to “read” the constant national symbols and understand and interpret them as an assurance of their collective identity’ (Tröhler, 2020a, b: 13). Was Robert College such a school contributing to the social construction of the ideology of nationalism? And if so, how did this play out in a culturally heterogenous imperial context? And finally, what can this specific historical context tell us about the concept of national literacy, its agents, and its educational and political enactment? To historicize Robert College’s entanglement with the ideology of nationalism, the chapter investigates, first, the organization behind the College, namely, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) and its agenda. Then, I will locate the founding of Robert College within the Ottoman educational landscape and how it displayed an enactment site for the Protestant-secular nexus. This will allow me to show the fascinating overlap between religion and nationalism in the Ottoman era. Before the conclusion, Robert College’s metamorphosis from a foreign university into a Turkish national university is identified.

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The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Mission Robert College (RC) was the first American higher education institution to be established outside the USA. Its establishment in 1863 is linked with the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions (ABCFM) which was founded in Boston in 1810. The founding members of the ABCFM had all graduated from schools built during the Second Great Awakening (1795–1835),1 and they had all been raised in Congregational, Presbyterian, or Reformed milieus. In order to understand RC’s role in the Ottoman Empire, one must understand the vision, mission, and mindset of the men behind this organization. The ABCFM had the declared aim to spread ‘evangelical Protestant values, an inquisitive educational system, and American culture from food habits to family relations, and more important, the representation of an evangelical Protestant Christianity’ (Bahar, 2019: 18). From the very beginning, the ABCFM emphasized the role of educational institutions within its missionary work, coupling universal Protestant values with an American—hence decidedly national— lifestyle (see Reeves-Ellington, 2013). The Christian spirit to serve among the heathens in order to save their souls was equated with the patriotic spirit to defend the fatherland (Cleaveland, 1863), combining religious and national duty in an inseparable amalgam. This amalgam consisted of the idea that missionaries were not just missionaries but also American citizens, thus furnishing them with the right to be protected by the American nation-state as a powerful advocate for their mission (Annual Report of the ABCFM, 1864; Dwight, 1850; Hamlin, 1896)—something that should prove very useful in the erection of Robert College, too. The Americanness of their mission was also accompanied by a fierce progressivism. Thereby, political, intellectual, economic, and social progress was

1  During the Second Great Awakening from 1795 to 1835, many Protestant churches in the USA experienced a great increase in membership. Some of the main themes of this Protestant movement were soul-winning as the primary function of ministry and several moral and philanthropic reforms, including temperance and the emancipation of women. Therefore, during the second wave of evangelical revivalism, many colleges and seminaries as well as mission societies across the country were established (Britannica, 2019).

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located within the American and British nations2 and bound to the missionary work: If we look on it in its political circumstances, where do we behold the ascendancy of strength, greatness, and empire, but in those nations which are the seats of our missionary associations, and the sources of the piety, liberality, and the self-sacrificing zeal by which the work is carried on? If we contemplate it, in regard of the trade, the arts, the intellect, the literature, the enterprise, the wealth, the happiness of the people; still the advantages, in a pre-eminent degree, are with those portions of it, which, in more senses than one, may be termed the missionary countries of the globe. (Skinner, 1843: 22–23)

This statement is part of Reverend Skinner’s sermon before the ABCFM which shows certain profound intermingling in the thinking of the ABCFM agents: the economic, political, and military success of certain nation-states was linked to the missionary work. This work itself was described as the pedigree for religiopolitical activism. Hence, the nation-­ state was coupled with a specific moral (Protestant), political (constitutionalism), and even economic order as well as a certain kind of lifestyle. Thus, the nationally framed Protestant mission claimed a universal applicability of this threefold order: the ‘human race [has to be recovered] from the curse of evil, and united … through Christ to the society of the holy and the blessed’ (ibid.: 48). This order and lifestyle were the gatekeepers for civilizational progress, whereas the path towards a civilized nation went through education able to bring forth ‘newly created people’ (ibid.: 41). Within such a worldview, the subjugation of ‘enfeebled, decrepit, inaggressive, decaying, ready and almost willing to perish’ (ibid.: 23) people from other religions was a logical necessity. Against this backdrop, the national-minded evaluation of Ottoman reality at the hands of ABCFM missionaries seemed to be reasonable. The ethnoreligious groups within the Ottoman Empire were interpreted as 2  Mentioning the American and British nations together was very much bound to the idea that both were born out of Christendom whereby ‘the American nation … was her latest born, strongest child’ (Skinner, 1873: 7). This religious proximity was enacted directly in the Ottoman Empire since American missionaries organized their activities under the aegis of the British embassy until 1830 when the Ottoman State officially recognized the United States by a diplomatic treaty. Nevertheless, even afterward, American missionaries regularly contacted British officials in the OE for support (cf. Makdisi, 2008, Sharkey, 2008, ReevesEllington, 2013).

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nations rendering, for example, Armenians a nation with Christianity as their national religion (Dwight, 1850). Along with this interpretation, the Ottoman Empire, almost exclusively referred to as the ‘Turkish Empire’, was perceived as the oppressor of those ‘nationalities’ (Strong, 1910: 225) which were in need of the missionaries as pacifying intermediaries obviously able to harmonize the different nationalities and religious affiliations. One of these missionaries was Cyrus Hamlin, the man who was to found Robert College.

Foundation of Robert College: Generating a Protestant-Secular Nexus Of course, the founding of Robert College in Constantinople in 1863 did not happen in a historical vacuum. Within the long nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire, just like other multi-ethnic empires, witnessed not only frustrating defeats on the military battlefield but also the emergence of ideological and political struggles. Education was one of the battlegrounds where those fights were fought. Its potential to gain power over people and their minds turned education and schooling into a contested area between the Ottoman state; the great powers of that time, Britain and France; ailing Empires like the Austro-Hungarian and the Russian Empires, and colonial newcomers like Italy and Germany (see Evered, 2012; Fortna, 2002; Somel, 2001). Missionary schools offered a welcome opportunity for other (nation-)states to interfere in Ottoman decision making and politics since fellow citizens and co-religionists had to be ‘protected’ (Evered, 2012; Fortna, 2002;  Hamlin, 1896; Somel, 2001). Robert College was one such missionary school. Robert College’s founder, Cyrus Hamlin, an American missionary of Huguenot descent (Hamlin, 1878), was sent to the Ottoman Empire by the ABCFM in 1831, where he opened and led the Bebek Seminary in Istanbul for 20  years. The idea of opening a college in Constantinople, though, came from the brothers Dwight (Coşğun-Kandal, 2017)—both sons of another ABCFM missionary, Harrison Otis Dwight, who was sent to the Ottoman Empire to proselytize amongst the Armenians. In proposing to found a college, his sons James H. and William B. Dwight obviously heeded their father’s statement that ‘[e]ducation and the press have been two powerful auxiliaries to the living preacher’ (Dwight, 1850: 261). They contacted the American businessman and philanthropist Christopher

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Rheinlander Robert—also of Huguenot descent (Washburn, 1909), who was impressed by Hamlin’s missionary work in Istanbul, which included a flour mill, a bakery, a laundry, stove, and shoe mold workshop (Coşğun-­ Kandal, 2017). Robert agreed to found the college under the leadership of Hamlin. It was not difficult for Hamlin to fulfill Robert’s wish to build the college as formally independent from the ABCFM (Gates, 1940), as he himself was convinced of the importance of missionary work beyond the preaching of the Gospel. This did not at all mean cutting off ties from the ABCFM, as the personal backgrounds of teachers and school directors prove (Gates, 1940; Hamlin, 1893; Washburn, 1909). Furthermore, the ABCFM’s president as well as some of its other members composed RC’s board of trustees located in the USA. However, the formal independence widened the possibilities and scope of a mission that ‘saw what a Christian college might accomplish in the elevation of the people’ (Washburn, 1909: 2). Hence, RC was put on a legal footing as a fully fledged American state college, laying the foundation for its wondrous transformation from a Protestant missionary school into a secular Turkish university. By layering educational missionary activities with American educational institutions (Strong, 1910) a Protestant-secular nexus was generated. The nexus was also embodied in the person of C.R. Robert: While he was treasurer of the American Home Missionary Society (Washburn, 1909) and a benefactor to religious-educational institutions in the USA, his support for RC was designated as ‘secular’ (Bowman, 1995). Within the construction of this Protestant-secular nexus, RC’s language policy played a crucial role. Whereby educational activities were mostly conducted in English, the college also offered education in the vernacular languages of the student body, which meant Bulgarian, Armenian, Greek, and later also Ottoman Turkish. Some researchers regarded this as a testimony of RC’s advanced, tolerant, and diverse educational approach (Potukoğlu & Büyüktolu, 2020; Sabev, 2014; Freely, 2009). In fact, it was a missionary conviction that the knowledge of the vernacular was essential for the spread of the Gospel. For Protestant missionaries in the Ottoman Empire accommodating millions of Christians, it was paramount to provide the Bible in a language they could understand (Strong, 1910). However, the English language assumed a special role as a developing foil for these Eastern languages. English was not just a communication tool: it was regarded as a medium for American and English influence in order to create a ‘universal empire’ of Christianity (Skinner, 1843: 26) and the best way to expand Protestant, American, and English

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ideas (Washburn, 1909). Especially by steadily revising Bible translations into the local languages, these languages could be transformed and take on new meanings until they were finally ‘capable to express all the truths of our salvation’ (Hamlin, 1893: 211). By making English the main language of instruction for RC, Hamlin sought to ‘unite all languages in the English language’ (ibid.: 423). Accordingly, the English language apparently constituted a universalized benchmark and a linguistic grinding stone for the different languages at the college. The following section discusses the question whether this benchmark was a national one or not.

Robert College: The Provider of a Universal National Literacy? On the cover page of George Washburn’s autobiography, Fifty Years in Constantinople (1910), right beneath his own name is a remarkable addition, namely ‘Commander of the Princely Order of St. Alexander (Bulgaria), Grand Officer of the National Order of Civil Merit (Bulgaria)’. This praise of RC’s second director is by far not the only occasion where Bulgarian nationalism was related to Robert College and by that also to American Protestant missionaries. The British diplomat and author of ‘Observation on Bulgarian Affairs’ (1880), Marquis of Bath, wrote that ‘there is hardly a town in Bulgaria where persons are not to be found who owe them [the missionaries] the advantages of a superior education. The result of their teaching had permeated all Bulgarian society, and is not the least important that have rendered the people capable of wisely using the freedom so suddenly conferred upon them’ (Bath, 1880: 12). Bath refers here to the Treaty of Berlin after the Ottoman-Russian war between 1877 and 1878, where Bulgaria became an independent principality reaching full independence in 1908. The British politician and deeply evangelical Earl of Shaftesbury had suggested Bulgaria to Hamlin as a fruitful field for missionary work (Hamlin, 1893), whereby he also assured British support. But it was the American missionary Albert Long who directed Bulgarian students for their ‘enlightenment’—which obviously meant to throw off the Turkish yoke and gain national independence—towards RC, where he would later not only become a teacher but also the vice-director (Washburn, 1909). Long resorted to the personal and technological network of American missionaries in the Ottoman Empire for his Bible translation into the Bulgarian language (Strong, 1910). Together with

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missionary Elias Riggs, who was in charge of the missionary press (Doğan, 2010), he worked out a Bulgarian Bible translation known as the Constantinople translation of 1871. Tellingly, this translation project was made in collaboration with the Bulgarian Petko Slaveykov, a celebrated national figure in Bulgarian literature and culture (Britannica, 2022). The basis for this nationalized culture was a comprehensive Bulgarian language, which was enabled by the Constantinople translation in the first place (Schaller, 2018). Hence, ‘the brawls between various dialects of Bulgarian subsided, and the Eastern Bulgarian dialect finally became the common language of all brainworkers and of the nation’, as Petko Slaveykov’s son, Pencho, was cited by the Bulgarian National Radio (28 November, 2013). But the connection between RC and the founding of Bulgaria was even more interlaced, as Washburn (1909) recalled in his memoirs: The political event of the year which most interested us at Robert College was the national convention which met at Tirnova in April, 1879, to adopt a constitution and choose a prince of Bulgaria, … The assembly itself was unique, made up largely of peasants, many of them in their sheepskin clothes, and I think that there was no one in the assembly who knew anything about parliamentary law except the old students of Robert College, who were in force. There was not a member who had personal experience in Civil government. One of the acts of the assembly was to pass a resolution of gratitude to Dr. Long and myself for what we had done for the elevation and independence of Bulgaria. (147)

Indeed, Orlin Sabev’s (2014) source-rich analysis of Robert College corroborated Washburn’s memories. He has comprehensively shown that many Bulgarian students of RC were later involved in Bulgarian independence as parliamentarians, authors, journalists, military officers, and so on. The American curriculum of the college, the schoolbooks in use as well as the personal relationship with ‘patriotic’ teachers seemed to be pivotal for RC students to gain national awareness. School subjects such as geography, history, parliamentarian law, political economy, Anglo-Saxon commercial law, mental philosophy, history of philosophy, ethics, and pedagogy along with topics like physiology and hygiene, civil Engineering, Paley’s evidences, Bible classes, and Shakespearean literature (Acun, 2015; Sabev, 2014), conducted mostly in the English language with American

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textbooks, succored a new kind of person able and willing to see their world through a nationalist lens (Gates, 1940).

Continuity and Metamorphosis of Robert College This new kind of person was situated within a ‘melting-pot of the nations’ (Gates, 1940: 184), displaying an international community—a term that popped up just in Caleb Gates’ time when he was the third missionary director of the college from 1903 to 1932. The educational enactment of an international community mirrored a global-national nexus: while keeping up national distinctions by providing courses in vernacular, Robert college has been nevertheless remarkably successful in amalgamating students from different nationalities into one harmonious group. The members of the faculty were inspired by the purpose of training men who should serve their peoples. The spirit pervaded the classroom and united all branches of instruction in one common aim. The pursuit of knowledge went hand in hand with the building of character and of good citizenship. (ibid.: 180)

RC’s student body in the Ottoman era mainly consisted of three Christian minority groups in the empire, namely Bulgarians, Armenians, and Greeks. This was bound to early Protestant missionary experiences which had shown that converting Jews and Muslims was almost impossible. Therefore, the three abovementioned ethnoreligious groups were turned into the main target group. The low rate of Turkish students at RC during the Ottoman period until 1923 was partly due to this missionary reorientation. However, Ottoman restraint towards RC was certainly also bound to the boom of Ottoman state-led educational institutions during the 33-year reign of Abdülhamid II (1876–1909). During this time, the sultan and his bureaucrats recognized how valuable and important state-­ controlled schools were for establishing cohesion in Ottoman society (Evered, 2012; Fortna, 2002; Deringil, 1998). Abdülhamid’s policy also involved the control of so-called foreign schools, especially to hinder the entrance of Muslim students into missionary schools to avert moral damage. Therefore, only 56 Muslim students graduated from RC in the Ottoman era—a number that would change drastically after the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923 (Acun, 2015; Sabev, 2014). Nevertheless, Turkish enrolment rates, which were interestingly almost

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the same as the Bulgarian ones throughout this period, more than doubled after 1908. This was the year when the Young Turk movement deposed Sultan Abdülhamid II and reintroduced the Ottoman constitution. Sabev’s collected tables show that most of the enrolled Turkish students came from households that were either directly or indirectly attached to the Ottoman state (Sabev, 2014). This raises the question of why the Ottoman state had tried to ward off the influence of foreign schools even though, at the same time, Ottoman officials were enrolling their children in RC.  By the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, the Ottoman state had already gone through a deeply rooted reorganization process. For officials and bureaucrats to gain foot and prominence in this new system, they had to have knowledge of European languages as well as European ways of acting, dressing, speaking, and behaving. According to the conviction of leading officials and bureaucrats, this knowledge could be best acquired in modern educational institutions. It is, therefore, not surprising that Muslim parents brought their children to RC in order to ‘make men’ (Gates, 1940: 183) out of them; Gates made clear that the college’s proclaimed aim was indeed to educate ‘men of thought and action, such as were needed in the Near East’ (ibid.: 165) and which he obviously saw embedded into a nationally organized world of the twentieth century. The college was founded by American philanthropists to fit the Youth of the Near East physically, mentally, and spiritually for the service of their own people with no discrimination of race and creed. Each country must build their own national structure. The foreigner can only help to prepare the sons of the nation to do its work. This aim Robert College sought to follow as far as conditions would permit. (Gates, 1940: 206)

Gates’ shared vision and mission of Robert College was obviously to prepare ‘sons of the nation’ able to perceive, read, and understand an international world on a nationalized basis. In this sense, the first Muslim graduate from RC, Hüseyin Hulusi, is a prime example. He accompanied the Turkish delegation to the Lausanne Conference in 1923 as a translator (Potukoğlu & Büyüktolu, 2020). This conference, led and attended by men who had been brought up in modern educational institutions, was the birthplace of the Turkish Republic. Furthermore, the first private

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secretaries of the new President Kemal Atatürk and Prime Minister Ismet Inönü were also RC graduates (Gürtunca, 2018). The stress on internationality under Gates’ directorate encompassed a crucial feature for metamorphosis in continuity. His and his predecessors’ vital interest and role in Ottoman and Turkish politics displayed the intermingling of an educationalized Protestant moral order with a nationalized political order. Gates, who was the director of RC during the political transformation from empire to republic, even joined the Lausanne Conference as the unofficial advisor of Admiral Bristol. There, he championed the ‘Turks [who] were now ready to sit down to the conference table not as the pleading representative of the Sick Man of Europe but as the proud emissaries of a young and independent Republic’ (Gates, 1940: 287). It was the conviction of a Protestant moral order performing best within a national structure that enabled an international approach according to which students at Robert College as well as other American educational institutions in the Middle East ‘were being trained for citizenship and for constructive service to their peoples’ (Gates, 1940: 237). In fact, RC graduates ever since have occupied high positions in Bulgarian and Turkish society, be it as state officials, educationists, or merchants. Based on Robert College alumni records, Acun (2015) has shown that RC graduates were heavily involved in state-led industrialization enterprises in the Turkish Republic. They also excelled in the private sector as shown by the case of the biggest pharmaceutical company in Turkey, ‘Eczacıbaşı’, which was founded by RC graduate Nejat Eczacıbaşı. He was also one of the men to establish the Turkish Education Association. Accordingly, RC under Gates also aligned well with the 1932 change in curriculum. This change included that history, geography, and civics should be taught by Turks, in Turkish, and with Turkish textbooks (ibid.: 302). When the Turkish government released a new law in 1971 stipulating that other states were no longer allowed to run institutions of higher education in Turkey, the board of RC acted accordingly to the abovementioned conviction and handed RC over to the Turkish Republic. Ever since, it has been known as Boğaziçi University with its self-declared mission to produce ‘universal thought’ by educating ‘individuals […] who are rooted in the local and open to the global, and who can, with their self-­ confidence and scholarly, social and cultural foundations, successfully take on leadership positions anywhere in the world’ (Boğaziçi University, n.d.).

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Conclusion This story found its beginning in my curiosity of whether, and if so how, the case of Robert College could fit into the triangle of education, nationalism, and Protestantism. My analysis has shown three interconnected aspects to quench this curiosity: First, the case of RC is certainly a prime example of the Protestant path dependency of modern education as it relates the educationalization of the world to the shift of missionaries from evangelizers to educators (Reeves-Ellington, 2013; Makdisi, 2008; Sharkey, 2008), carrying not only the Gospel but also modern education to various regions to be proselytized. Additionally, my case has uncovered that the educationalization of the Protestant moral order was the key feature for the emergence of a Protestant-secular nexus. Second, this educationalized Protestant-secular nexus overlapped with a global-national nexus as the missionary backpack also contained the ideology of nationalism—not only as ‘an unintended consequence’ (Okkenhaug, 2015: 597) of missionary education but rather as a constituent element of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century American Protestant salvation narrative. RC addressed and educated its students as future citizens of nation-states to come. However, while it was actively involved in the founding of the Bulgarian and Turkish nation-states, such an involvement was not the case for the Armenian nation-state. This stresses the utter urgency of differentiation also mentioned by Cowen in this volume (Chap. 4). While nation-­ state building, national literacy, and the ideology of nationalism are certainly interconnected, they must be addressed and researched in analytical awareness of their differences. In this regard, the case of RC has stressed that national literacy is apparently a precondition for the founding of a nation-state but certainly not a guarantor. While education at the college enabled the students to make sense of themselves and their worlds in a national(ized) way, the actual founding of a nation-state was bound to geopolitical rationales far beyond the college’s sphere of influence. Last but not least, my case unraveled two characterizing aspects of ‘national literacy’: First, national literacy was transmitted through an entangled grid of traveling ideas, persons, buildings, objects, textbooks, and curricula. Secondly, the case of RC has disclosed that national literacy also contains international literacy. Nations only make sense within a universally accepted international community. The transmission of national literacy within the heterogenous Ottoman context enabled the students to not only develop national awareness for themselves but also to see an

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international reality in which one’s own nation plays a part. As Tröhler has already shown in his latest research, international is rather a euphemism to ‘obscure the imperial impulses of globally dominant nation-states’ (Tröhler, 2023). The case of RC, therefore, adds to the concept of ‘imperial nationalism’ (Tröhler et al., 2021) by pointing at the interconnectedness of a nationalized Protestant mission, the universalization of the ideology of nationalism, and the educationalization of the world—or in other words, the overlapping of an educationalized Protestant-secular nexus with a global-national nexus.

References Acun, F. (2015). Robert kolej Mezunları ve Meşhurları [Robert College alumni and celebrities]. Türk Tarih Eğitimi Dergisi, 4(2), 136–164. American Board of Commissioners for the Foreign Mission. (1864). Fifty-fourth annual report of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Press of T.R.  Marvin & Son. https://archive.org/details/annualreportofam00amer_27/page/n3/mode/2up. Accessed 5 July 2022. Bahar, H. (2019). From empire to republic. The role of American missionaries in US-Ottoman Empire relations and their educational legacy. Peter Lang. Bath, J. A. T., 4th Marquis of (1880). Observation on Bulgarian affairs. Macmillan. https://archive.org/details/obser vationsonbu00bathuoft/page/n5/ mode/2up. Accessed 22 Sept 2023. Boğaziçi University. (n.d.). Vision and mission. https://www.boun.edu.tr/en-­ US/Content/About_BU/Vision_Mission. Accessed 6 Dec 2022. Bowman, J.  S. (1995). The Cambridge dictionary of American biography. Cambridge University Press. Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. (2019, May 8). Second great awakening. In Encyclopedia britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Second-­ Great-­Awakening. Accessed 15 Sept 2022. Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. (2022, August 14). Petko Rachev Slaveykov. In Encyclopedia britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Petko-­Rachev-­Slaveykov. Accessed 14 Aug 2022. Bulgarian National Radio. (2013, November 28). Intense Literature 4: Petko and Pencho Slaveykov—like father, like son. https://bnr.bg/en/post/100223296/ intense-­literature-­petko-­pencho-­slaveykov-­like-­father-­like-­son. Accessed 5 Aug 2022. Cleaveland, E.  L. (1863). Motives to the missionary work. A sermon, before the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, at their meeting in Rochester, N.Y., October 6. Press of T.R. Marvin & Son. https://archive.org/ details/motivestomission00clea. Accessed 7 July 2022.

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CnnTurk. (2018, January 8). Boğaziçi Üniversitesi’nden Mezun Olan Ünlüler [The celebrity alumnis of Boğaziçi University]. https://www.cnnturk.com/ yasam/bogazici-­universitesinden-­mezun-­olan-­unluler. Accessed 24 July 2021. Coşğun-Kandal, S. (2017). Kuruluşu, Öğrencileri, Etkisi: Amerikalı Seyyah Diplomat ve Misyonerlerin Anılarıyla Robert Kolej [Establishment, students, impact: Robert College in the memoirs of American traveling diplomats and missionaries]. Uluslararası Sosyal Bilgilerde Yeni Yaklaşımlar Dergisi [International Journal of New Approaches in Social Sciences], 1, 91–105. Deringil, S. (1998). The well-protected domains: Ideology and the legitimation of power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909. IB Tauris. Doğan, M.  A. (2010). The missionary activities of Elias Riggs in Izmir. International Journal of Turcologia, 5(10), 23–43. Dwight, H. G. O. (1850). Christianity revived in the East; or, a narrative of the work of God among the Armenians of Turkey. Baker and Scribner. https:// archive.org/details/christianityrev00dwiggoog/page/n9/mode/2up. Accessed 6 July 2022. Evered, E. (2012). Empire and education under the Ottomans: Politics, reform, and resistance from the Tanzimat to the young Turks. I.B. Tauris. Fortna, B. C. (2002). Imperial classroom: Islam, the state, and education in the late Ottoman Empire. Oxford University Press. Freely, J. (2009). A bridge of culture: Robert College—Boğaziçi University. How an American college in Istanbul became a Turkish University. Boğaziçi University. Gates, C. F. (1940). Not to me only. Princeton University Press. Hamlin, C. (1878). Among the Turks. R. Carter & Brothers. https://archive.org/ details/bub_gb_ujUpAAAAYAAJ/page/n3/mode/2up. Accessed 15 July 2022. Hamlin, C. (1893). My life and times. Congregational Sunday-School and Publishing Society. https://archive.org/details/mylifetimes00haml/ page/470/mode/2up. Accessed 15 July 2022. Hamlin, C. (1896). America’s duty to Americans in Turkey. An open letter to the Hon. John Sherman, United States Senator from Ohio. The North American Review, 163(478), 276–281. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25118703 Makdisi, U. (2008). Artillery of heaven: American missionaries and the failed conversion of the Middle East. Cornell University Press. Okkenhaug, I. M. (2015). Christian missions in the Middle East and the Ottoman Balkans: Education, reform, and failed conversions, 1819–1967. International Journal of Middle East Studies, 47, 593–604. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S002074381500063X

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Potukoğlu, S., & Büyüktolu, R. (2020). Osmanlı’da Yabancı Dil Öğretimi ve Robert Koleji Örneği [Foreign language teaching in the Ottoman Empire and the case of Robert College]. Belgi Dergisi, 2(19), 2004–2029. Reeves-Ellington, B. (2013). Domestic frontiers: Gender, reform, and American interventions in the Ottoman Balkans and the Near East. University of Massachusetts Press. Sabev, O. (2014). Spiritus Roberti: Shaping new minds and Robert College in late Ottoman Society 1863–1923. Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Yayınevi. Schaller, H. (2018). Elias Riggs (1810–1901). Notes on the grammar of Bulgarian language. In S.  Comati, R.  Krauß, & H.  Schaller (Eds.), Bulgarica 1 (pp. 35–82). AVMedition. Şencan Gürtunca, E. (2018). Türkiye Cumhuriyeti’nin Kuruluş ve Gelişim Sürecinde Robert Kolej Mezunlarının Yeri [The place of Robert College graduates in the establishment and development of the Republic of Turkey]. In B. Yüksek, Y. Avcı, & S. Küçük (Eds.), International language, education and teaching symposium IV. Valahia University Press. Sharkey, H. J. (2008). American evangelicals in Egypt: Missionary encounters in an age of empire. Princeton University Press. Skinner, T. H. (1843). Progress, the law of the missionary work. A sermon preached in Rochester, N.Y., Sept., 1843, Before the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, at their thirty-fourth annual meeting. Press of Crocker and Brewster. Skinner, T. H. (1873). Christianity and the State: A sermon preached in the ‘college hall’. Elm Street Printing Press. Somel, A. (2001). The modernization of public education in the Ottoman Empire, 1839–1908: Islamization, autocracy and discipline. Brill. Strong, W. E. (1910). The story of the American Board; an account of the first hundred years of the American Board of Commissioners for foreign missions. The Pilgrim Press. https://archive.org/details/storyofamericanb1910stro/page/ n7/mode/2up. Accessed 5 July 2022. Tröhler, D. (2018). Internationale Provokationen an nationale Denkstile in der Erziehungswissenschaft: Perspektiven Allgemeiner Pädagogik (Antrittsvorlesung Universität Wien). International Journal of Higher Education, 8(2), 173–189. Tröhler, D. (2020a). National literacies, or modern education and the art of fabricating national minds. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 52(5), 620–635. Tröhler, D. (2020b). Nation-state, education and the fabrication of national-­ minded citizens (introduction). Croatian Journal of Education, 22(Sp. Ed.2), 11–27.

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Tröhler, D. (2023) Comparative education or epistemological power games of Western rivals for world domination. In International handbook of comparative education, in press. Tröhler, D., Piattoeva, N., & Pinar, W. F. (Eds.). (2021). World yearbook of education 2022: Education, schooling and the global universalization of nationalism. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003137801 Washburn, G. (1909). Fifty years in Constantinople and recollections of Robert College. Houghton Mifflin Company. https://archive.org/details/fiftyyearsincons028535mbp/page/n7/mode/2up. Accessed 11 July 2022.

CHAPTER 12

National Literacy and Institutional Models: The Case of Colegios Nacionales in Argentina Between the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Felicitas Acosta

Introduction Education is (still) nationally organized, and the school and its curricula aim at developing national literacies and national identities (Tröhler, 2020). What is of interest, then, is the examination of how these national systems adjust to international movements beyond or below politics, and here, case studies from smaller countries in particular are very revealing […]. (Tröhler, 2023: 7)

The concept of national literacy proposed by Daniel Tröhler sheds light on how schooling has enabled people to live a significant life within a certain national context by transferring specific skills and knowledge that he

F. Acosta (*) University of La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina University of General Sarmiento, Buenos Aires, Argentina © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Fox, L. Boser (eds.), National Literacies in Education, Historical Studies in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41762-7_12

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defines as ideologically nationalist. A sense of collective identity derives from this formation of nationally minded citizens through modern schooling. This chapter seeks to analyze this thesis based on the case of colegios nacionales (national schools) in Argentina. National schools were created in the second half of the nineteenth century and were meant to educate an elite that would lead the budding nation and run the state under the nation-state form. This twofold purpose of national schools leads to think about the formation of a collective identity linked both to the ideas of the nation and the nation-state. In this sense, I argue that the case of national schools could indicate a more situated notion of national literacy, one in tune with the different rhythms of articulation between schooling, nationalism, and the construction of nation-states across diverse territories. In this case, it is a territory that, unlike the path of European states, first had to achieve independence from Spain and then establish itself as a state in order to invent itself as a nation. In this context, the development of a national literacy required a combination of different elements, among which the development of a specific institutional model, such as that of the national school, played a central role. At the same time, I maintain that this institutional development accompanied the fluctuations of national literacy and constructed a particular identity: that of the educational subject of the national school. Drawing on Tröhler’s conceptualizations, the chapter explores the changes in the conception of national identity education and the construction of a national literacy in its interweaving with the institutional model of the national school. To do so, it presents two sections. The first takes up Tröhler’s valuable ideas for developing the argument and combines them with the notion of an institutional model to consider the case of national schools in Argentina by the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. The second part presents the creation of such schools amidst the formation of nation-states and the changes around the idea of nation through the analysis of primary sources—students’ biographies and official documents such as regulations and rectors’ reports. These types of sources offer a perspective from institutional actors in their interaction with official provisions to organize the educational offer. Although they do not account for the entirety of the institutional experience, they are useful for shedding light on the terms upon which the language surrounding national literacy was constructed in national schools (Tröhler, 2013).

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Finally, concluding remarks reflect on the transformations around building a national literacy. All in all, the chapter offers the possibility of presenting the notion of national literacy as a concept open to the meanings that processes of circulation, reception, and appropriation of educational ideas and practices acquire in various temporalities and spatialities (Nóvoa, 2017). In the words of comparatist Robert Cowen (2009), ‘as it moves, it morphs’.

The Relation Between Schooling and National Literacy: Some Thoughts on the Case of Colegios Nacionales The idea of nation has long been related to the practice of schooling. In effect, the association of this technology used to distribute knowledge with the production of a specific identity linked to nation building can be traced back to the second half of the eighteenth century if not earlier. In his work, Tröhler (2013, 2020a, b) himself points to the role played by Enlightenment philosophers such as Jean Jacques Rousseau in this sense. The notion of national literacy is among Tröhler’s multiple contributions to the study of the relation between nation and schooling. It is well established in his work that he identifies national literacy as a synthesis of the ideas of nation, State, and nation-state. He clearly and accurately defines nation as a cultural thesis about community and togetherness; and based on Renan (1882), he stresses not only the cultural nature of this form of identification—based on language, history, or tradition—but also its volition-related nature: the common will to live together in national unity (Renan, 1882, as cited in Tröhler, 2020a). As to the State, Tröhler presents it using a classical definition in terms of three pillars: a defined territory, an inhabiting people, and a political power to which he adds a national constitution and international recognition as parts of that entity. Here he situates schools in the role of State-run institutions responsible for creating future loyal citizens who will then become members of the State. According to this view, constitutions are also part of the embodiment of the State, given that laws regulating individual behavior—for instance, compulsory schooling—and the physical and symbolic institutions representing the State in daily life emanate from them. More than providing education per se, the State had to ensure the

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existence of that citizen, that is, a citizenry understood as autonomous and not subjugated. Schooling expansion throughout the nineteenth century, and even during the twentieth century, accounts for the expansion of this moral autonomy as new actors would gradually become part of the social and political contract  (Acosta, 2019). Such expansion was embodied by the school itself, that is, by literacy as a new form of moral regulation. What is interesting about Tröhler’s research is that it characterizes that literacy by using a form distinctive to nation-states, that is, national literacy: Schools did not teach geography, but national geography, not history, but national history, not writing, but national writing (Dahn and Boser, 2015). It was always about (national) kinds of people that had to be created, not with just any literacies, but with national literacies, which promised meaningful life in the particular national context. (Tröhler, 2020a: 21)

One of the analytical potentialities of the national literacy concept is its twofold nature: it offers a synthesis as well as openness; it allows capturing a moment as well as a kind of dynamics. On the one hand, it offers a synthesis because the elements underlying schooling, both in terms of its aims—an educated subject—and its content—a nation-State citizen, converge on national literacy. And on the other hand, it provides openness since it allows thinking about the development of schooling as it progresses in different times and spaces. Besides, the notion of national literacy enables the analysis of a specific moment, for instance, the content of citizen construction in relation to nation-state building during the second half of the nineteenth century in Argentina. At the same time, it opens up the possibility of exploring the different variations in the content in the same territory over time. This twofold nature of the concept allows to analyze the form it takes in a specific scenario and the institutional supports on which that form develops. The institutional support refers to the model of the national school: an institution created for education under the State government’s responsibility, inheriting humanistic institutional traditions, generating prestige, and identity associated with urban and cultured life, based on a curriculum with culturalist and generalist tendencies. This institutional model was established in parallel with the development of the nation-state and the discourses about the construction of national identity. It was a process of institutional construction whose productive effects are not only evidenced in the formation of a particular national identity but also in the

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construction of a specific educational subject: the national school educated subject. Building on Tröhler’s notion of national literacy, the following section discusses the joint construction of a certain identity, that of the ruling elite; a specific institutional form, that is, national schools in Argentina; and how the relation between nation and State developed from the second half of the nineteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth century. Special attention is paid to the shifts among those three objects throughout the abovementioned period to account for the analytical contribution of the national literacy concept.

Nation-State in Argentina and the Creation of Colegios Nacionales: Building National Literacy and the National School Educated Subject The aim of this section is to show how the ideas around national literacy changed as the consolidation of colegios nacionales and the development of the nation-state progressed. I propose thinking of the result as a national literacy ensemble that does not follow a pattern but instead deploys among continuities and changes according to different points of reference, which subsequently include the nation-state, its elite republican modernization, and the homeland. These points of reference make it possible to situate the relationship between schooling and the formation of national identity in a web of transnational circulation and to identify combinations between the terms that emerge in the experience of national schools linked to meaning constellations shaped by context and history (Schriewer, 2012). The Colegio Nacional and the Nation-State After the post-independence wars, former Spanish colonies underwent the process of nation-state organization. What distinguished the region was that, in most cases, the process of constructing the nation and imposing some conceptualization of it on the popular imaginary included ideas about the future of the nation under the form of republics guided by ideals of progress and justice (López-Alves, 2011; Sabato, 2009). A place of condensation of this future imaginary on the emerging nations was their constitutions. However, it was not so much about ensuring the mechanisms to warrant the effective realization of constitutional precepts, but

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rather to have a teleological instrument—a new political and social order for which men can be educated (Acosta, 2022). Constitutions appear as an expression of the process of the educationalization of social problems (Tröhler, 2019), but they also reflect a regional uniqueness: ‘[…] a continual return, despite all the obstacles, to the cause of making knowledge and culture more accessible’ (Miller, 2020: 6). As a result, from the first phase of the formation of the Spanish American nation-states, intellectual elites showed an interest in the extension of education, an interest that political elites would increasingly assume in the progressive construction of a State schooling apparatus. Notably, secondary education was subject to intervention by the new States even before primary education with the aim of instructing the elites. In Argentina, the creation of free compulsory elementary education was preceded by the development of secondary education in the figure of colegios nacionales. These were the institutions responsible for the formation of the ruling classes; they were university-oriented but also aimed at serving the emerging republic’s institutions. This process took place at a particular time when the country finally embarked on its consolidation as a nation-state.1 This concern for building the State went hand in hand with an interest in secondary education. A student at the preparatory school that was the forerunner of the first national school in the Argentine Republic accounts for it (circa 1853–1859): The purpose was not to form ideologues, but rather men of learning, command and government. In each of us it saw a prospective Pitt or Fox, and it considered us destined now to rule the Nation, to participate in its government. And as our regime was parliamentary and institutional, it wanted us to be in possession of the strategy necessary in the federal and democratic republics, to successfully steer the ship of the State […]. (Tobal, 1942: 12, 18)

1  Argentina was formed as a republic with a representative and federal system of government in 1853, when its constitution was passed. After independence, a series of domestic struggles ensued, including a significant conflict between projects that favored a federalist organization and those that supported a centralization of power in the province of Buenos Aires. As of 1861, all territories became part of the Argentine Republic under the political and economic leadership of Buenos Aires. Three successive constitutional presidents from 1862 to 1880 laid the basis for the political, economic, and social organization, though there was ongoing political instability and conflict between the provinces and the central government.

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It was necessary to educate men of command and government to steer the State. On the basis of this school, the first national school of the Argentine Republic was founded in 1863. The Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires (National School of Buenos Aires) was created by decree during Bartolomé Mitre’s presidency (1862–1868) in 1863. He defined it as a school of science education that would focus on the arts, humanities, moral sciences, physics, and mathematics. As of 1864, the national State created national schools in the capital city of each province whose programs of study and regulations were to follow the one of Buenos Aires. At these schools, selectivity and culturalist content strengthened the homogeneity both among students and schools in relation to the institutional model. Concerning the relation between the nation-state formation and national literacy building, two elements stand out in this first stage of institutional development. On the one hand, there was the need to extend the presence of this type of establishment in most of the territory—to ensure State infrastructure (Mann, 2006): In accordance with these considerations, the Executive Power has deemed it preferable that instead of concentrating its resources in the fostering of grand educational establishments in privileged locations, the convenience of reaching the vast numbers of pupils, and even justice, demanded distributing them, though smaller in scale, throughout the entire territory of the Republic. (Mitre & Costa, 1864: 64)

On the other hand, the focus was on creating a new kind of subject: a moral subject whose example would improve the government and the population. Mitre expressed this view in 1870  in a speech as a national senator. He opposed expanding scholarships to students to pursue higher education, to become doctors or lawyers, on the basis that there were already national schools in each province, and it was necessary to concentrate resources on primary instruction. With 3,000 young people possessing the knowledge that today is acquired in these establishments, a generation can be given a moral temper; the government improve and act more effectively on the mass of ignorance, educating it through propaganda and by example […] Now that Congress has voted for a college for each Province […] scholarships have no reason to exist. The abolition of the boarding school must closely follow this reform […]. (Mitre, 1870)

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Before constructing the nation, or simultaneously with its construction, it was necessary to build the State (Halperin Donghi, 1995). The Elites’ Republican Modernization The last part of the nineteenth century found the national schools in a double process of growth and experimentation. Indeed, this type of establishment increased in number, especially in Buenos Aires, the province with the largest population. The number of students also increased continuously, although enrollment would be more substantial during the twentieth century (Table 12.1). During this period, the change in programs of study was remarkable: 17 proposals between 1863 and 1917 (Dussel, 1997). These changes account for a gradual incorporation of national content, albeit one still in debate with the cultural-generalist model. An exclusive identification of the national language, without indigenous components, and a history of the homeland from the first year of school appeared to be the basis of the individual to be promoted by the end of the nineteenth century (Acosta, 2020). However, the rector of the Colegio Nacional de Corrientes, Santiago H. Fitz-Simon, also associated general culturalist education with the education of the democratic citizen: From the collective point of view, secondary teaching, above all in a democracy, must be organized so that this culture is given to the greatest possible number of citizens; the intellectual future of the Nation depends on this, and citizens, without exception, must encounter no more restraints, no more obstacles to their ever-growing culture, than the limits of their own abilities. (1891: 162)

Strictly speaking, Fitz-Simon’s concern refers to the period inaugurated in 1880, when the search for the democratic form was increasingly urgent Table 12.1  Number of students at national schools 1865–1925 (selected years) Year 1865 1870 1875 1880 1885 1890 1895 1900 1905 1910 1915 Stud 515

1920

1925

1192 1962 1533 2418 2895 3082 3231 4609 7003 11,132 18,281 22,263

Source: Original table based on Ministerio de Justicia e Instrucción Pública (1948). Estadística 1948 y Estadística retrospectiva

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in a republic sustained by the practice of fraud. Presumably, after achieving the goal of a school in each province of the nascent nation-state, it was necessary to ensure the literacy of this new subject in terms of republican and democratic virtues. The rector of the Colegio Nacional del Rosario expressed such a vision when referring to the lectures school rectors had to deliver to the students: […] a child who will become a citizen tomorrow and will be called on to participate in the public affairs of the community, and attend the debates and the sanctioning of laws promoting the grandeur of nations […] These lectures or conversations have always been on themes of the most nourishing teaching, and were aimed at instilling in the soul of the child the ideas of order, moderation, justice, obedience, and well-understood patriotism and humanity, putting at their service the contribution of History and its most critical events […]. (Gomez, 1882: 128–133)

Even ten years later, the terms of the debate—between training doctors or men for life in the republic—continued to appear among the rectors: What is best for the Nation’s development and prosperity? Is it about preparing the youth for liberal careers and doctorate degrees, or is it about forming men for the life in the Republic, with more knowledge than the acquired in school? Will the State incline to a more classic and literary education or to a modern, more scientific education? (de la Barra, 1894: 340; Rector of Colegio Nacional de Rosario)

After the consolidation of the nation-state, this second phase of the institutional development of national schools expressed a synthesis between classical and modern republican morality. In terms of Tröhler (2013), this was an integrity of character, participation in public affairs, and love for the homeland. The curricular discussion built on these elements while serving as the points of reference for a particular literacy: the national school’s literate subject. The Homeland, But Not Only The turn to the twentieth century marks a third shift in constructing the expected subject at national schools. By 1890, the Argentine territory covered 2.8 million square kilometers and the republic operated under a

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constitutional, federal, representative system, although elections only ceased to be fraudulent with the introduction of the secret ballot in 1916. The problem of order was undoubtedly related to the increasing complexity of a society in which urbanization, immigration, and labor organization were all growing rapidly (Terán, 2008). Over three million European immigrants arrived in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Thus, the task of promoting national identity for the creation of patriotic traditions and symbols began timidly from 1880 and grew more intense around the turn of the century to promote a cultural nationalism (Terán, 2008; Delaney, 2002). Several studies show the turn towards nationalism in Argentina, particularly within the education system, in the first part of the twentieth century. Therefore, it is interesting to analyze this turn concerning national schools—a less studied topic—and the new terms added to national literacy. These expressed governmental actions affecting schools as highlighted by the rectors. One of these was the prohibition of the teaching of some subjects by foreigners: The National Government understood this when it passed the very wise decree on 17 February 1899, establishing that one may not teach Argentine geography and history, the national language or civic education if one is not an Argentine citizen […] responsible for teaching these subjects that are the cornerstone of the education of the national soul […]. (Beltrán, 1900: 35; Rector of Colegio Nacional Oeste de la Capital)

At least two other measures accompanied this enthusiasm for teaching exercised by Argentines that permeated school activity and guided programs of study. One was the celebration of national holidays related to the Revolution and Independence. In these ideas, with no happy medium professed, has the action of the School taken place; an awakening of sentiment for the homeland has been sought and obtained, the full words and singing of the National Anthem have been taught, an anthem that many students confessed to never having heard! (Beltrán, 1900: 36)

These events replaced the content of the lectures that the rectors had to deliver for the students and oriented the lessons’ content.

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Since then, new vigor and character have been given to this teaching, with lectures given by the Rector, the Vice-rector and the teachers of the subject on the anniversaries of 25 May and 9 July [national independence dates], and compositions by the students and organizing evenings with the help of the Rector’s office and the teachers. The Rector’s office has also recommended that whenever it is a matter of men and great feats of ­ Argentine history, teachers should devote two or three classes to their study and explanation. (de Gainza, 1901: 71; Rector of Colegio Nacional Sud de la Capital)

On the other hand, programs of study showed an intensification of patriotic content, namely, in subjects such as history and civic education. The Rector wishes to highlight that ‘patriotic teachings have a preferential attention in this establishment, and in this sense, we can say for sure that, during the current school year, the Colegio Nacional del Uruguay has known how to fulfil with enthusiasm and superior vision the content of the civic and patriotic education curriculum submitted by the Executive Power […]’. (Tibiletti, 1920: 94; Rector of Colegio Nacional de Concepción del Uruguay)

It seems that some rectors enthusiastically incorporated national culturalism. The notion of Argentineness, re-signified at the time through intellectuals such as Ricardo Rojas  (1882–1957; Dussel, 2011), appeared among the terms of the discussion. In 1922, the rector of the Colegio Nacional de Corrientes proposed a new curriculum for national schools, including the section ‘Nationalism’. Nationalism […] Especially when teaching Argentine History and Civic Instruction, the pursued goal in all cases, by means of the compulsory education imposed in the official curricula, was to suggest ideas of Argentineness […] in the motives of justice, of sincere love for democracy, encouraged by the Founding Fathers of our homeland […] in the true concept of democracy, as our political organization’s ideal and program […] in the ideals of peace and human fraternity sealed with golden lettering on the huge gates of the Preamble of our National Constitution. (Ministerio de Justicia e Instrucción Pública, 1923: 249–250)

However, this section appeared surrounded by other words, such as State, republic, democracy, constitution, homeland, and virtues. This third shift indicates an accentuation of the idea of the homeland,

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formatted according to a constructed definition of Argentineness. But this accentuation is accompanied by those other layers upon which national identity—and, in relation to national schools, national literacy—was built. A journey that included the government of the nation-state initially, republican ideals in relation to democratic life at a second stage, and the symbiosis of nation/homeland at a third stage. The appropriation by the rectors of national schools of the aforementioned elements reflects the parallel process of constructing an institutional model and a subject that emerges from that model. The institutional model is defined by its functions, which give it meaning. In its connection with the nation-state and national literacy, these functions involve educating the administrators of the nation-state, the consolidators of the republic, and the Argentines whose values and virtues emanate from the constitution. The resulting subject is manifested in the intentions of the curricula and other institutional interventions, such as patriotic celebrations and the rectors’ lectures, with the aim of solidifying the knowledge of the language and national history.

Concluding Remarks Tröhler’s studies on nationalism and the construction of national literacy provide significant contributions to better understanding of the historical and transnational processes of schooling. In this chapter, I have sought to contribute to that understanding through the analysis of a case that is distant from the core configuration of nation-states and school systems. Indeed, as highlighted in the introduction, this is a case where State, nation, nation-state, and schooling combined in a different temporal logic. The synthetic and dynamic nature of the concept of national literacy enabled this possibility of exploration in other spaces and times. In the case of Argentina, and of Hispano-American Spanish-speaking countries in general, the assumption was the necessity of forming the State together with the nation and the crucial role of elite education and the expansion of schooling in this process. Along with that, I have aimed to introduce the institutional dimension as a central part of the interweaving: it was a dynamic of simultaneous formation in which the Argentine State created national schools to educate the ruling class, and these schools, in turn, shaped the State through the formation of specific educational subjects. This dynamic of interactive

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and reciprocal construction (Borschek, 2016) was supported by the progressive, though not sequential, development of a national literacy. The analysis has proposed an interplay of joint construction between social and symbolic systems, in which the meaning constellation of national identity is transformed into national literacy in its interconnection with school institutions and other institutions of the nation-state. The result of this combination constitutes a particular institutional model, crossed by dynamics, that is able to account for its changes and continuities over time. Indeed, the conception of the subject to be educated in the national schools changed as the nation-state consolidated and as nationalism emerged in its Argentine version. Tröhler’s notion of national literacy served to analyze the content of these changes: from an elite need to govern the state to the construction of a republican identity faithful to the homeland. But also, that notion helped to contour a new identity: that of the subject of the national school. The recollections from a notorious former student at the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires in the 1920s account for it: “[...] the school possessed its definite spirit, which without much work, was incorporated into us, instilling the healthy pride of being from the [National] school [...] In us, the phenomenon of the ‘Spirit of the School’ was intensely produced” (Escardó, 1963: 20). In short, as Popkewitz (2022) reminds, literacy is a fabrication about desired modes of reasoning, but an institutional infrastructure frames the contours of who is ‘literate’, especially when considering the case of institutions intended for those who were going to organize and administer the destiny of the nation through the State.

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[Languages of education: Protestant legacies, national identities, and global aspirations]. Octaedro. Tröhler, D. (2019). The dignity of the protestant souls: Protestant trajectories in the educationalization of the world. In R. Bruno-Jofré (Ed.), Educationalization and its complexities: Religion, politics, and technology (pp. 27–49). University of Toronto Press. Tröhler, D. (2020a). Nation-state, education and the fabrication of national-­ minded citizens (Introduction). Croatian Journal of Education, 22(Sp. Ed.2), 11–27. Tröhler, D. (2020b). National literacies, or modern education and the art of fabricating national minds. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 52(5), 620–635. Tröhler, D. (2023). Introduction: The Nordic education model: Trajectories, configurations, challenges. In D. Tröhler, B. Hörmann, S. Tveit, & I. Bostad (Eds.), The Nordic education model in context: Historical developments and current renegotiations (pp. 1–12). Routledge.

PART V

The Nation in a Globalized World

CHAPTER 13

Testing the Exception: The Curious Embrace of International Comparisons in American Education Discourse Ethan Hutt

American Superiority and Indifference It is only a slight exaggeration to say that Americans operate in two modes: superiority and indifference. The former attitude is familiar to most people as the stereotype that everything American is inherently superior to its counterpart elsewhere in the world. It’s a sentiment captured by the old joke about the mother who is watching a marching band and calls out approvingly to those around her, ‘Oh look! My son is the only one in step!’ It is not just that we march to the beat of our own drummer but that our way is clearly better. It’s this view that allows Americans to maintain a straight face as they call the championship of American baseball the World Series. Indeed, to be American is to be self-assuredly right and proud that we are the best in the world.

E. Hutt (*) University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Fox, L. Boser (eds.), National Literacies in Education, Historical Studies in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41762-7_13

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The counterpart to this feeling of superiority is a deep indifference to all things considered foreign or, at least, non-American. To extend the sports example, the counterpart to the American baseball championship being called the World Series is the general disinterest of American audiences—except in small, cosmopolitan pockets—to the largest sporting event in the world: the World Cup. Americans aren’t even interested in calling that sport by its otherwise universally used name—football. Having developed our own form of (American) football, Americans eschew worldly convention and insist on calling the sport ‘soccer’. They could go along with the rest of the world but––as the two sentiments come together in one response––why bother? These two attitudes—superiority and indifference––help explain not only Americans’ approach to sports fandom but also a great deal of the political discourse around our social institutions. There is almost nothing so dangerous in American political life as comparing an American institution unfavorably to its counterpart somewhere else in the world. When politicians refer to something as a ‘European’, ‘British’, or ‘Canadian’style system, for instance, it is definitely coded as a slur. Consider this line from the 2012 Republican Party political platform calling for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, which sought to overhaul the American health care system to guarantee all Americans access to health insurance. ‘[The Act] was about power, the expansion of government control over one sixth of our economy’, the platform explains, ‘and [it] resulted in an attack on our Constitution … It was the high-water mark of an outdated liberalism, the latest attempt to impose upon Americans a Euro-style bureaucracy to manage all aspects of their lives’ (Republican Party Platforms, 2012). As this formulation makes clear, ‘Euro-style’ is inherently un-­ American and almost necessarily ‘attacks’ the U.S. Constitution, and, in turn, the country’s foundational political and moral values. This kind of comparative rhetoric has been an important feature of American political discourse throughout the twentieth century.1 During the Cold War, especially, claims that policies were ‘totalitarian’, ‘fascist’, or ‘socialist’ were all clear indicators that the so-labeled policies—whether 1  This isn’t to suggest it wasn’t an important part of discourse prior to the twentieth century; of course, it was. Americans have been trying to figure out what was American or democratic or republican since the Revolution (in the context of schooling, see, for instance, Koganzon, 2012). But, for the sake of space, I constrain myself to twentieth-century examples here.

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health care, welfare, or economic—were incompatible with American life and institutions (e.g. Alpers, 2003; Ciepley, 2006). President Harry Truman’s mid-century attempt to create a national health insurance plan was branded as ‘socialized medicine’ by the American Medical Association— an argument that has been drawn on again and again by conservatives to stymie health care reform (e.g. Chapin, 2015; Starr, 2013). While many efforts to expand government assistance have been similarly critiqued as un-American, as many scholars have noted, there is one notable exception. Since the late nineteenth century, American efforts to extend social services and solve social problems have almost always been routed through that most American of social institutions: the public school. Whether it was addressing poverty; combating an array of public health issues (drug use, teen pregnancy, obesity, mental health); or curing the ills of racism, discrimination, and inequality, Americans have consistently turned to their schools to cure its social ills (e.g. Labaree, 2008; Steffes, 2012; Gordon, 2015). The argument goes that this approach helped resolve the tensions of democracy and capitalism while maintaining the American political preference for small government, individual responsibility, and fundamental optimism about improving the future. Whatever the particular reasons for this impulse, evidence of Americans’ insistence on educationalizing its social problems is compelling. But this tendency raises something of a paradox: the one institution Americans most reliably call upon to address its social problems—its schools—is also the one institution where Americans seem most willing to consider critiques rooted in international comparisons. Indeed, while American discourse about health care policy, for instance, consistently shrugs off statistics detailing unfavorable international comparisons on key health outcomes––including insurance costs, average life expectancy, infant mortality, and maternal mortality (Schneider et  al., 2021)—American discourse about education policy has consistently been galvanized by international comparisons showing American students falling behind their international peers. Not only that, but these unfavorable educational comparisons have served as the basis for reform proposals that would aspire to make American schools look more, not less, like their foreign counterparts. One need look no further than the array of books calling for the adoption of explicitly foreign models of schooling, whether it be the embrace of the ‘Finnish model’ or the wholesale adoption of Singapore Math. The paradoxical openness to international comparisons and reforms deepens when we consider that schools are the one place where Americans

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might reasonably claim that the unique organization and, perhaps, purpose of its schools make these international comparisons totally irrelevant. Unlike virtually every other national school system to which it is compared, the American school system is radically decentralized with no national ministry of education, no national standard of teacher training or certification, no standard curriculum or curricular standards, and no standard entrance requirements or examination for higher education. These historical developments have led scholars to characterize the American education system as a non-system and to question how it came to be considered a system at all (Hutt, 2016). These unique organizational features would only seem to amplify the more traditional argument for dismissing international comparisons of school systems: schools are fundamentally about creating national, in this case American, citizens. As Tröhler has astutely noted, the modern school ‘is the genuine state or public organization that develops … “national literacy,” the fundamental skill that permanently tells us whether we are at home or abroad or whether we are among our national peers or surrounded by foreigners’ (Tröhler, 2020: 632). In the American context, people have long argued that the form followed the function: the decentralized system and commitment to local control reflected an express commitment to democracy, pluralism, and liberty and against big government (e.g. Scribner, 2016). All the more reason to dismiss international comparisons, let alone reform suggestions, as inapt or inappropriate. So why is it that Americans seem especially prone to international comparisons and reform ideas for the one institution they might reasonably express indifference about given the dissimilar organizational structure or, alternatively, express self-confidence in given the inherently national aims of schooling? In this essay, I explore some partial explanations for this paradox and, in doing so, I draw on and extend Tröhler’s argument about the importance of attending to the role of schools in producing national literacies. My contention is that Tröhler’s argument is true not just of the messages delivered inside of schools but of the messages delivered about schools. In this case, given that the answer is not readily apparent suggests the extent to which the explanation to this paradox must be ‘taught’ to the American public, lest the contradiction become a source of unresolved tension. Specifically, when it comes to American schools, the American public receives important instruction about the purpose of schools through the complicated and often contradictory messages about how our schools compare (favorably or not) to those in the rest of the world.

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Three Possible Explanations: National Security, Preserve the Status Quo, and Social Expectations The first partial explanation for Americans’ willingness to take seriously international comparisons of schools but not of other social institutions is that Americans are repeatedly instructed that conversations about schools aren’t just about schools but are about something ‘bigger’ and more important: national defense. Though the production of good citizens has always been seen as an important part of preserving the country (as it has been everywhere), during the Cold War, Americans developed a much more explicit and direct argument linking American national security and the fate of its public schools. This link was quite explicit in the passage of the National Defense of Education Act (1958) following the Soviet launch of Sputnik. The act greatly expanded the federal role and interest in American schools and targeted a large, for the time, investment of federal resources in areas deemed critical to winning the Cold War: science, mathematics, foreign language instruction (Rudolph, 2002). This argument, that human capital was a vital resource for national defense, was not only taken up by Congress but also by prominent critics of American education, some of whom, like Vice Admiral Hyman Rickover, had ties to the American military. Rickover’s critiques are notable not only because they linked American school failures to America’s military preparedness (Rickover is considered the father of the American nuclear submarine program) but also because they were fundamentally rooted in international comparison. ‘The best of education now costs more money here and takes longer to obtain than in other democracies or in totalitarian U.S.S.R.’, Rickover wrote in 1959. ‘To dismiss our educational inferiority vis-a-vis the Russians by saying that our schools are concerned only with the happiness of the individual, whereas Russian schools are concerned only with producing useful Soviet citizens, is to dwell on irrelevancies’ (Rickover, 1959: 57).2 By the end of the Cold War, the messages linking education and national defense had been completely assimilated into the tropes of American educational reform. While the rhetorical bombast of A Nation at Risk (1983) 2  Rickover took the international comparison of school systems quite seriously, producing a whole volume on the comparisons between the school systems of America and Switzerland (another country that was perceived as decentralized, pluralistic, and democratic; Rickover, 1962).

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was, perhaps, novel, its message was completely familiar: low standards and educational quality were an existential threat to the country and should be understood in martial terms: ‘If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war’ (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983: 5). Three decades later, the trope was still available when the Council on Foreign Relations’ Independent Task Force on U.S. Education Reform—chaired by Former Chancellor of the New York City Schools Joel Klein and Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice—warned ‘the problems in America’s K–12 schools … constitute a very great national security threat facing this country’ (Council on Foreign Relations, 2012: 4). The credibility of these claims need not be evaluated to recognize the capacity of this kind of rhetoric to focus attention on the comparative aspects of educational systems and, crucially, to narrow the acceptable terms of discussion from a place of philosophical debate to utilitarian outcomes. After all, wars tend to be both zero-sum affairs and notoriously hostile to otherwise cherished American values like liberty and the right to speak freely in dissent (e.g. Dudziak, 2012). As Rickover put it, ‘the knowledge gap between Russian and American youngsters remains wider than we can safely tolerate … No amount of talk about the alleged advantages of “educating the whole child” can change the ominous significance of these figures’ (Rickover, 1959: 57). Indeed, some reformers seem to have recognized this and deployed this language cynically, as a convenient vehicle—a Trojan Horse, perhaps—to pursue their preferred reform agenda irrespective of its relationship to the alleged national security concerns. The Council on Foreign Relations Committee on Education Reform concluded that the solution for the ‘grave national security threat’ posed by American schools just happened to align with the conservative education reform preferences for higher standards, more charter schools, vouchers, and school choice. As one of the dissenting voices on the Task Force chided in his minority report, ‘there is a mismatch between the report’s alarmist tone and its core recommendations … if the current state of K–12 education [was] really a very grave threat to national security, the Task Force should emphatically support allocating greater resources to meet the challenge’ (Council on Foreign Relations, 2012: 65). But the report does no such thing, leaving ‘the unfortunate impression that the Task Force is trying to solve an alleged national security threat on the cheap’ (ibid). As the report makes clear, the key is not so much the

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credibility of the claim as its familiarity. The frame of national security opens up rhetorical space that might otherwise be off limits. The second possibility has less to do with the rhetorical frames of comparative education discourse and more to do with the form of education itself. Americans have often been especially attuned to the structure of government and, as David Labaree has argued, to educational formalism (Labaree, 2012). One way to reconcile the seeming openness to educational reform ideas from abroad is that they can be safely adopted and incorporated into the American educational system without altering the fundamental organization of schooling—a common preference in American educational reform (Tyack & Cuban, 1995). This explains, for instance, the consistent adamant refusal of Americans to consider anything approaching a national curriculum or national standards. Even recent efforts—that is, efforts after the already substantial increase in federal involvement following No Child Left Behind—like the independently developed and privately funded Common Core State Standards have been seen as a step too far in erasing the decentralized, state-based control of American schooling (Loveless, 2021). Even with talk of international reforms, whether it is setting higher standards; adopting a specific type of reading or math instruction; selecting higher quality teachers and providing them with more, higher quality training; or spending more hours in the classroom, none of them touch the organization of schooling (e.g. Sahlberg, 2011; Ripley, 2013). The result is that these reforms are fairly amenable to formalistic adoption. Americans have been responding to critiques, for instance, about Why Johnny Can’t Read (Flesch, 1955) by adopting newer, more rigorous standards for decades. But as we have long known but continue to re-­ learn, adopting new standards hardly effects classroom instruction. Likewise, state legislatures have made a show of alternatively raising and lowering teacher licensure requirements under the theory that they were qualifying too many low-quality teachers and, later, keeping too many otherwise qualified teachers out (e.g. Schneider, 2018). Most importantly, the suggestions from abroad always amount to quick fixes or easily absorbed additive measures that don’t require a fundamental rethinking of the structure of American schooling or of American society. Preserving relatively weak central control preserves the ability of wealthy communities to opt out of the latest reform and pursue their own path. It also preserves the long tradition of maintaining parental discretion (‘liberty’) over their children’s education either by opting out of particular

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topics (like evolution or sex education) or by exiting the system entirely and attending private school.3 These available forms of ‘exit’ ensure that education reform is about—if it is about anything at all––other people’s children. All of the proposed international reforms preserve this status quo. But more importantly, they maintain the fundamental inequalities and stratification that give rise to those views. This is the real value of these internationally inspired reforms: they suggest that nothing is fundamentally wrong with American society even if American schools could use a few tweaks. That is, it is much easier to concede that what America needs to fix its schools is not the more expansive Finnish welfare state or even its more egalitarian school funding or progressive tax structure but just its approach to teacher training! A third explanation requires we take the interest in international comparisons seriously not because they are entangled with national security or as a cynical ploy but on their own terms. Having placed the education system at the center of the American state and having made it central to society’s claims to fairness, equality, and upward mobility, Americans (and especially American politicians) are extremely sensitive to critiques that American schools might be lacking. More specifically, the risk that the central pillar holding up so much of American society and its values might be failing is cause for much greater alarm than the failure of other systems less central to the country’s core promises of citizenship. Americans might not expect to have access to good public transportation, health insurance, or employment protections, but they do expect their schools to reduce inequality and provide a pathway to social advancement and professional success. These expectations create pressure on those in government to be seen as actively monitoring and addressing the status of the education system. The irony, however, is that Americans expect policymakers to tend to educational problems while also insisting—for the reasons noted above—on minimizing their actual control over the system (Tröhler, 2010; Hutt, 2016). The upshot is a ritualistic attention to developing, tracking, and expressing concern over the various quantitative measures (usually test scores) that describe the status of the school system (e.g. Tröhler, 2015). 3  This seems to be a critical point of divergence with discussions on health care reform. The ‘European style’ bureaucracy is imagined to coincide with a restriction of individual choice and liberty as vividly captured by claims that the Affordable Care Act would lead to ‘death panels’, faceless bureaucrats deciding who gets treatment and who doesn’t.

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In yet another irony, having trained the public to view test scores as a legitimate, as opposed to totally dubious, measure of the school system quality, American school officials have found themselves hemmed in by the kinds of international comparative measures of school quality, like the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), that they might otherwise dismiss out of hand. This problem has only been amplified by the growing tendency, facilitated by organizations like the OECD and the associated Cold War logics equating national strength with economic growth, to view international test score measures in terms of economic strength. As with national defense discourse, Americans have increasingly learned that economic growth and prosperity might be a zero-sum game— a message underscored by decades of rhetoric about offshoring and free trade. That the development of these international school comparisons has coincided with these economic developments amplifies the worry that American schools might not be capable of providing the upward mobility or economic prosperity that is at the heart of the American Dream. This tangle of anxieties and aspirations has literally no analog elsewhere in American society.

Conclusion Though the average American might not be able to articulate these ideas with quite the specificity provided here, there should be little doubt about the broad message conveyed in education reform discussions that entertain international comparisons and foreign reform ideas. In both their framing and content, these messages underscore both the essential American commitment to education as the country’s bedrock institution as well as the fundamental ambivalence of Americans to making the kinds of social and political commitments necessary to substantially improve the system. This combination produces an interest sufficient to spur attention but not national introspection. Education is central to national defense and economic prosperity, yes. The education system has its failings, yes, but the basic organization—its decentralized control and space for local control and individual liberty if fundamentally sound. Therefore, the gaze abroad is in search of a quick fix—the educational equivalent of a miracle weight loss drug or a get rich quick scheme—but nothing so large as to shake the American belief that we are best. Americans learn early that, when you get offered those kinds of odds—well, now you have our attention.

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References Alpers, B. (2003). Dictators, democracy, and American public culture: Envisioning the totalitarian enemy, 1920–1950s. University of North Carolina Press. Chapin, C. F. (2015). Ensuring America’s health: The public creation of the corporate health care system. Cambridge University Press. Ciepley, D. (2006). Liberalism in the shadow of totalitarianism. Harvard University Press. Council on Foreign Relations. (2012). U.S. education reform and national security (Independent task force report no. 68). Council on Foreign Relations Press. https://www.cfr.org/report/us-­education-­reform-­and-­national-­security Dudziak, M.  L. (2012). War time: An idea, its history, its consequences. Oxford University Press. Flesch, R. (1955). Why Johnny can’t read: And what you can do about it. Harper & Row. Gordon, L. N. (2015). From power to prejudice: The rise of racial individualism in midcentury America. University of Chicago Press. Hutt, E. L. (2016). Surveying the nation: Longitudinal surveys and the construction of national solutions to educational inequity. Ethics and Education, 11(2), 240–258. Koganzon, R. (2012). Producing a reconciliation of disinterested commerce: The political rhetoric of education in the early republic. History of Education Quarterly, 52(3), 403–429. Labaree, D. F. (2008). The winning ways of a losing strategy: Educationalizing social problems in the United States. Educational Theory, 58(4), 447–460. Labaree, D. F. (2012). Someone has to fail: The zero-sum game of public schooling. Harvard University Press. Loveless, T. (2021). Between the state and the schoolhouse: Understanding the failure of common core. Harvard Education Press. National Commission on Excellence in Education. (1983). A nation at risk: The imperative for educational reform. Government Printing Office. Republican Party Platforms. (2012, August 27). We believe in America: 2012 Republican platform (The American Presidency Project). https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/302338 Rickover, H. G. (1959, November 28). The world of the uneducated. Saturday Evening Post, 232(22), 19, 54, 57, 59. Rickover, H.  G. (1962). Swiss schools and ours: Why theirs are better. Little Brown and Co. Ripley, A. (2013). The smartest kids in the world: And how they got that way. Simon and Schuster. Rudolph, J. (2002). Scientists in the classroom: The cold war reconstruction of American science education. Palgrave.

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Sahlberg, P. (2011). Finnish lessons: What can the world learn from educational change in Finland. Teachers College Press. Schneider, E., Shah, A., Doty, M.  M., Tikkanen, R., Fields, K., & Williams, R. D. (2021, August 4). Mirror, mirror 2021: Reflecting poorly. Health care in the U.S. compared to other high-income countries (The Commonwealth Fund report). https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-­ reports/2021/aug/mirror-­mirror-­2021-­reflecting-­poorly Schneider, J. (2018). Marching forward, marching in circles: A history of problems and dilemmas in teacher preparation. Journal of Teacher Education, 69(4), 330–340. Scribner, C. F. (2016). The fight for local control: Schools, suburbs, and American democracy. Cornell University Press. Starr, P. (2013). Remedy and reaction: The peculiar American struggle over health care reform. Yale University Press. Steffes, T. (2012). School, society, and state: A new education to govern modern America, 1890–1940. University of Chicago Press. Tröhler, D. (2010). Harmonizing the educational globe. World polity, cultural features, and the challenges to educational research. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 29(1), 5–17. Tröhler, D. (2015). The medicalization of current educational research and its effects on education policy and school reforms. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 36(5), 749–764. Trohler, D. (2020). National literacies, or modern education and the art of fabricating national minds. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 52(5), 620–635. Tyack, D. B., & Cuban, L. (1995). Tinkering toward Utopia: A century of public school reform. Harvard University Press.

CHAPTER 14

Spectacular Digitalization: Exploring the Role of Discourse and Education Technologies in (Re)producing the Imagined Community of the Nation Nelli Piattoeva

Introduction The ‘spell of globalization’ following the end of the Cold War gave rise to optimistic accounts proclaiming the end of the era of nationalism (Tröhler, 2022). It has resulted in sparse attention to the question of national reproduction in and by means of education (ibid., but see Tröhler et al., 2022; Millei, 2019). However, nationalism constitutes an underlying cognitive frame shaping how people see and structure their worlds (Özkirimli, 2005). It ‘leads people throughout the world to think and frame their aspirations in terms of the idea of nation and national identity’ (Calhoun, 1997: 6). As a political principle it also equates a state as a bounded territory with a nation as an imagined cultural community (Anderson, 2006;

N. Piattoeva (*) Tampere University, Tampere, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Fox, L. Boser (eds.), National Literacies in Education, Historical Studies in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41762-7_14

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Gellner, 1983). Nationalism is a contingent and vulnerable accomplishment dependent on continuous strategic and habitual reproduction across public and private domains (Kymlicka & Straehle, 1999). In other words, nation-states are products of ongoing nation-building policies and practices that diffuse and strengthen a sense of nationhood (ibid.). State funded and regulated education from early childhood to higher and adult education has played a major role in the daily preservation and reproduction of the bond between the people and the nation-state. Education inculcates traditions and norms from a young age, standardizes and elevates national languages and offers platforms that socialize future generations into ‘us’ and ‘them’. At the same time everyday practices can be valorized by teachers, parents or children themselves as forms of everyday nationalism that tacitly recreate the national community (Millei, 2019). Research on the digitalization of education has been proliferating, including critical perspectives that examine, for instance, how digitalization rebalances the power of commercial actors to their advantage (e.g., Williamson, 2021) or changes the purposes of education alongside teachers’ everyday work and expertise (Grant, 2022). Following these crucial observations, I have been puzzled by the fact that no research specifically examines the role of education in nation-building in the context of the ongoing digitalization of education—a process that many researchers justifiably acknowledge as a defining factor of contemporary education—at least in the affluent parts of the world. Indeed, education is no exception here and scholars of nationalism have made similar observations about the scarcity of research placing nationalism in a digital context (Mihelj & Jiménez-Martínez, 2021). Yet those who engage with the topic argue that national borders persist rather than being transcended on the World Wide Web. They are mirrored on the Internet in URL addresses, and the bordered ecologies linking national sites within a national territory (ibid.). The Internet and digital media technologies often accentuate rather than undermine national identities, efficiently reproducing affiliations across vast distances in both established nations and diasporic communities (Eriksen, 2007). Even the global platforms such as Netflix or Amazon have not given up on the imaginary of national audiences although they simultaneously seek to offer each client a personalized solution. The nation is reproduced in the form of standard language selection, and the curation of content assumed to be nationally relevant. Global search engines reproduce biases that

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stimulate nationally framed versions of the world (Mihelj & Jiménez-­ Martínez, 2021). In this chapter I develop some initial ideas on (the question of) how the historical role of educational institutions as conduits of national socialization is enacted through the digital policies and practices constituting contemporary education. I illustrate my propositions with examples from existing research and my ongoing study of Estonia as a self-proclaimed ‘digital nation’ based on the analyses of textual and visual sources such as media articles, policies and promotional materials. The radical digitalization of Estonian society and education offer an interesting case for the arguments developed in this chapter, but obviously also require some caution regarding their generalizability. I start by examining the onto-epistemological assumptions that might explain the sparse interest in the link between educational digitalization and nationalism. I then move to the role of commercial, non-state actors and the assumption of their disinterestedness in the prerogatives of nation-­ building. I explore how the commercial actors involved in the digitalization of education do indeed capitalize on and reiterate national narratives on the one hand and offer material means for (re)producing the nation on the other. I will then propose that there are three intertwined ways in which the digitalization of education reproduces nationhood. First, nationalism as a discourse means that it is a familiar and productive trope to capitalize on when promoting diverse interests, including commercial ones. Thus, akin to politicians bolstering up their legitimacy through nationalist discourses (they claim to represent and serve their nation best), commercial actors are no different and likewise use nationalism to foster legitimacy and claim relevance. Commercial actors reproduce the nation both habitually (because they are not outside of the nationalist syntax, see Calhoun, 2017) and strategically (because they know that it resonates with the publics) in branding and advertisement, for instance. Second, digitalization symbolizes progress, standing alongside other values and ideals, such as the human rights, individuality or diversity particularly central to modern Western democracies and capitalism. This means that promoting educational digitalization (of societies in general and of education in particular) is analogous to using education as a symbolic space (Kjørholt, 2007) that enables the nations in question to claim progress and development––both symbols of a thriving modern nation. Thirdly, as education systems remain national, that is, governed by national governments and

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following national curricula, the digitalization of education offers new tools to embed national literacies across subjects (Tröhler, 2020). In order to substantiate these claims, I must stress that digitalization and technologies more broadly must be seen as invariably political and power laden; they are both discursive and material. Discursively they reiterate certain past- and future-oriented sociotechnical imaginaries and claims (Rahm, 2021). Materially their characteristics have political ramifications through embedding the intentions and biases of those who design them, and more broadly align ‘[w]ith a certain kind of society and form of governance’ (ibid.: 9). Thus, digital technologies reiterate certain desires and discourses that can be attached to and empower some political prerogatives, and not others, while materially they are the physical means that enable some consequential actions, and not others.

Onto-Epistemological Assumptions Tröhler (2022) suggests that it is important first to understand the absence of a topic and deconstruct the possible onto-epistemological assumptions explaining the situation, that is, why researchers note some societal processes but remain oblivious to others. There are certainly multiple general and more contextual reasons for the failure to pay attention to the link between education and the digitalization of education vis-à-vis the historical nation-building mission of education. Here comes to mind the universal tendency to study digitalization with the focus on rupture and replacement (both of which should be treated as powerful discourses rather than as diagnoses and are notably promoted by the advocates of digitalization), thus neglecting a focus on continuities with the historical roles of education (e.g., in nation-building). States are perceived as increasingly differentiated, enveloped by pragmatic managerial and technocratic logics consisting of granularly specialized agencies, organizations, flexible rules and negotiations with an increasing number of actors promoting multiple rationales (see Le Galès, 2016). These developments leave an impression of a lack of or even the impossibility of adhering to an ideological prerogative of nation-building. At the same time the agents of digitalization perceive and promote it as a means of globalization understood particularly as a form of unprecedented connectivity that transcends physical and mental borders. Slater (2003) helpfully explains that this assumption is rooted in the intertwined notions of the disembeddedness and virtuality of the digital which, together with

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the distrust of nationalism, leave observers unprepared to note the relationship between the Internet and nation-building. In other scholarship, the digital and data technologies proliferating in education are interpreted as decontextualizing and disintegrating individuals under pretexts of personalization and individualization––rather than actively constructing collectives such as shared nationhood (e.g., Selwyn et al., 2021). Recent critical studies do focus on the role of digital technologies in reproducing deep-seated societal inequities such as racism, ableism or sexism (see, e.g., Benjamin, 2019; Noble, 2018), thus also effectively challenging the assumptions of technological neutrality or individualism, but they do not directly extend to the question of how these reproductions of difference also perform sameness and notably nationhood.

Non-state Actors in Nation-Building On the one hand, political elites and state actors develop and popularize the idea of the nation and the national community through the multiple arenas and tools at their disposal, including education. On the other hand, nation-building is also a prerogative of non-state actors such as the people, civil society and companies who may support or subvert official and elite efforts (Isaacs & Polese, 2015). The role of non-state actors in the process of nation-building has been paramount, yet it is less frequently an explicit focus of studies on nationalism, which tend to center on either state policy and cultural elites or the vernacular discursive and material practices of citizens. One case where we see the role of corporate actors as paramount is in the production of large infrastructures connecting different parts of the territory of the state (see also Piattoeva & Vasileva, 2022). State and corporate forces have historically participated in establishing the symbolic and material parameters of the nation-state: far from dichotomous, they have thus been mutually constitutive in the articulation of national consciousness (Aronczyk, 2017a). Joint state and corporate efforts have been and remain crucial for moving from nation as ‘imagined’ (Anderson, 2006) to nation as ‘fabricated’ (Barney, 2017): ‘produced materially by means of infrastructures onto which an imaginary nation was subsequently (and repeatedly) projected’ (ibid.: 79): Materially, space-binding infrastructure [such as the national railways, telephone lines or highways, NP] spans far-flung territories and creates a common economic and political space supportive of commercial exchange and

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capital accumulation. Discursively, infrastructure provides a medium for a rhetoric of national purpose and identification that summons collective investment in large-scale technological projects presented as coinciding with the nation’s interests. This is the recipe for technological nationalism in Canada: the nation needs infrastructure to bind it physically, and massive infrastructure projects that serve the interests of capital need the imperative of national purpose in order to be considered legitimate. (Ibid)

Advances in digital technologies expand the range of actors and tools contributing to nation-building (ibid.; Szulc, 2017). This development potentially diversifies the national narratives in circulation, including more recent notions of the nation as a community of consumers participating in a platform economy. Even though these processes of diversification and commodification may multiply the national narrative (the nation’s parole in Tröhler’s [2009] terms) and even engender conflicting narratives, they do not necessarily contest the ideological langue (ibid.) of national reproduction, that is, the fundamental yet taken-for-granted mechanisms or in effect obligatory aspects expressing a nation as a ‘real entity’ and authorizing a community to call itself a nation. In other words, they may not speak in unison of what, where or when a nation is, but they will not contest that it exists and exhibits a set of fixed qualities in the first place.

Spectacular (Digital) Infrastructures ‘Education Estonia’ is an initiative for international education cooperation by the Government of Estonia that capitalizes on Estonia’s recent high rankings in the PISA study and promotes the overall digitalization of society and education as both manifestations of Estonia’s unique progress and a means to achieve it. A promotional video of the initiative starts with a statement: ‘There are countries that take education seriously and then there are countries with a blackboard centred on their flag’ (Education Estonia, 2020). In the very first footage, we are shown an image of the Estonian flag with a black stripe in the middle. The narrator claims that it displays nothing less than the blackboard, which is the most traditional as well as the most cross-cultural symbol of school. The video continues by describing Estonia––a humble country of ‘only’ 1.3 million people––as the epitome of an unparalleled digital educational revolution that is changing the entire world ‘piece by piece’ after first having changed its own society for the better. Estonia is described as the

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home of EdTech forerunners, and viewers are presented with a graphic of ‘innovative’ digital educational solutions from digital report cards to data management systems that intertwine symbiotically and together relocate Estonian education in the digital cloud. Alongside the narrative of digital innovativeness, Estonia and Estonians are described as exhibiting a generation-long appreciation for learning and curiosity. Estonia as the ultimate ‘education nation’ successfully weaves together a historically shared confidence in lifelong learning that has since become a ‘lifestyle’ with the readiness and even courage to introduce necessary and perhaps even risky reforms. Through these narratives and the accompanying images of Estonia’s ‘singing revolution’ and choral traditions alongside robots and leisurely computer users, the discourses of continuity and change are masterfully intertwined to create an image of a distinctive and thriving now-digital nation. Estonia’s digitalization of education is a project that brings together state, academic and commercial actors (see OECD, 2020). The initiative described above shows how the contribution of commercial actors (in collaboration with the public authorities) entails both building the digital (educational) infrastructure of the nation through concrete digital solutions and legitimizing these efforts through national rhetoric. Estonia has rebranded itself into e-Estonia––a digital nation and a ‘virtual state’ with technologically superior infrastructure and education achievements (Krivý, 2021; Tammpuu & Masso, 2018). The Education Estonia initiative and the material described here are undoubtedly attempts at ‘nation branding’. Some scholars would view them as intended to create a commercially attractive image of a nation for marketing and investment purposes and therefore distinct from ‘real’ efforts at internal nation-building, thus contrasting commodity building with community building (Tammpuu & Masso, 2018; Bolin & Ståhlberg, 2010). Even if the video is aimed at international audiences with a pragmatic rather than an ideological orientation, it is important to ask why the producers of the video deemed nationalist rhetoric fruitful for their purposes of entering a global market and enhancing the sales of digital products. For one, it manifests the global nature of nationalism, that is, the supra-national langue (of nationalism) finding receptive audiences outside the borders of any one nation. Second, the video carries a strong promise of being and becoming the distinct, flourishing nation that Estonia has already become, and that others could likewise be if only they follow Estonia’s path. In this sense nation(hood) is curiously a replicable outcome. Other nations’ nationhood is not

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necessarily a product of internal ‘national’ forces and actors but may equally rely on and benefit from the assistance of external actors and emulate their example. Tammpuu and Masso (2018) as well as Polese et al. (2020) suggest that nation-branding connects to nation-building (un)intentionally because ‘our’ identity is entangled with how ‘others’ see ‘us’. Thus, the message targeting the outside audience that projects a particular identity and image of the nation may eventually boomerang, although it is important to examine further to what extent this message supports or contradicts internally circulating narratives. While the question of the presence of the narratives in the promotional video in the Estonian public space demands empirical scrutiny, Budnitsky (2020) has recently described how the image of a pioneering digital nation welcomes both tourists and residents arriving at Tallin airport, thus striving to impress both groups. Contrary to narratives that perceive the Internet as borderless, placeless and apolitical, ‘the technical infrastructures and institutions of the so-­ called global Internet belie its fundamentally national orientations’ (Aronczyk & Budnitsky, 2017; DeNardis, 2014, cited in Aronczyk, 2017b: 245). Narratives of progress, inevitability or amelioration often associated with the related processes of digitalization and globalization are in fact a form of banal nationalism. They allow national motivations ‘to descend beneath the surface of our consciousness … to appear no longer to exist despite evidence to the contrary’ (Aronczyk, 2017b: 245). The banal nationalism of the rhetoric of education digitalization becomes evident, for instance, in its framing as crucial for national competitiveness and the development of quality national education (Saari & Säntti, 2018). This rhetoric particularly reiterates a national syntax––the langue––based on an imagery of states as composed of unified collectives of people with shared ‘interest and destiny in the form of national competitiveness in a global theatre’ (Lauder et al., 2012, cited in Säntti et al., 2021: 862), deploying ‘rhetoric that exploits national characteristics, stories and beliefs’ (Säntti et al., 2021: 862). The national collective is both a resource deployed by actors and a banally reinforced imaginary of its existence. As in the video examined, the narrator invokes the ‘we’ of Estonian people when referencing the success of Estonia’s societal reforms that ‘we’ had the courage to introduce or when the whole country is said to be proud of its PISA success. Here education is not a didactic source of nation-building, that is, it is not about school subjects or textbook content channeling nationalist narratives. Rather, education is a symbolic arena

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onto which the nation and its fundamental elements are projected and where technological advances in the sphere of education become a symbol of ‘real’ nationhood. Finally, I also want to connect this video to the literature on technological infrastructures that we tend to think of in terms of dullness and invisibility as Star (1999) has described. However, to understand this case, it might be helpful to think of the video as projecting an infrastructure that is supposed to be anything but invisible––inspiring admiration and awe. With Brian Larkin (2013) we might think of it as spectacular, that is, as producing a symbolic meaning and also operating on the level of aesthetics, connoting progressiveness. Larkin writes that many infrastructural projects are copies, funded and constructed so that cities or nations can take part in a contemporaneous modernity by replicating infrastructural projects from elsewhere to participate in a common visual and conceptual paradigm of what it means to be modern. To be a modern and a real nation in the world today is to be a digital nation, as the promotional video seeks to convey. It is thus no surprise that the then Estonian President, Lennart Meri, soon after the opening of the first public access Internet point in 1997, curiously at the National Library in Tallinn wrote: On the Internet, every Estonian’s thoughts and words will matter exactly as much as their worth—they will matter equally with the thoughts and words of Americans, Russians, Germans, and Japanese ... So be quick to step onto this bridge that has united continents as neighbors and that will take us all, especially the young, right into the next century. Those who walk faster will reach the next century sooner. (cited in Farivar, 2011: 123)

Digital Technologies Manufacturing National Literacies Documenting the recent history of Estonia’s digitalization and construction of an information society, Aro Velmet (2020) describes the Tiger’s Leap project initiated by the president quoted above as reflecting the success of the then booming high-tech Asian Tigers. The project came to manifest Estonia’s crucial steps towards society-wide digitalization and belongs to the celebrated narrative of Estonia’s miraculous rise from the ashes of the post-Soviet collapse to become a digital prodigy. While the initiators of the program imagined teachers and communities would bid for STEM related projects to be funded through the initiative, many actors

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were extremely concerned about the survival of the national culture. They thus proposed projects that protected linguistic culture, prevented the takeover of education by English as the language of tuition and multiplied the number of web sites in Estonian (ibid.: 176). The Tiger’s Leap funded the development of computer terminology in Estonian, digitizing Estonian dictionaries and thesauruses, including the first Estonian dictionary of slang, a history of Estonian literature and digital surveys of Estonian biodiversity and geography (ibid.). The initiatives spanning the writing of educational software in Estonian to developing folklore databases and online editions of the Estonian national epic ‘Kalevipoeg’ made digital technology serve the consolidation of national culture. This albeit cursory example shows how, first, initiatives bringing together public and private actors like the Tiger’s Leap foundation promoted digital initiatives that served nationalist agendas. Moreover, technologies added to the didactic tools promoting the national language or teaching about the national symbols such as the nation’s myths. In this manner technologies can be made to inculcate various agendas. Thus, imagining that they solely or primarily help to transcend borders or communicate in the global lingua franca is gravely erroneous. Perhaps someone will take these observations as unworthy of mention––they may seem too obvious and uninteresting to deserve a place in this chapter. However, discussing them here is important; it is their obviousness that deserves our attention, the fact that we are more likely to note how technologies actually or potentially transform our nationally framed worlds but ignore how they enable these worlds to endure.

Conclusion: The Future Nation This chapter proposed a perception of the relationship between digitalization and nation-building as a mutually reinforcing one. I started from the claim of the ongoing nature of nationalism, that is, the nation as evolving and continuing rather than as fixed, relying on and being affected by both the deliberate and unintentional actions of various actors and their collectives. Overall, the metaphor of nationalism as ‘grounded’ introduced by Malešević (2019) demonstrates that the success of nationalism is not in its recognizable presence, but in its obscurity. The more successful it is, the more grounded––or underground––it becomes. I propose that one of the pressing questions to address is how the infrastructures, practices, discourses and ontologies of the new digitalized education technologies

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contribute to grounding nationalism in and through education. Because digitalization tends to be associated with transcending borders and a cosmopolitan outlook, it is easily excluded from the discussions on how it enables the national world to endure. Zooming onto the realm of education and its rapid digitalization in Estonia, I have made several observations and propositions that will undoubtedly require further empirical and theoretical elaboration, potentially opening up exciting avenues for future scholarly work. Overall, understanding the mutually reinforcing relationship between nationalism, education and digitalization means studying the spectacular politics of nation branding through impressive digital infrastructures, the national vitality they project and the operations of specific software and their purposes, which I discussed here only cursorily. Nationalism does not operate only as a state-led, top–down phenomenon. It is also a practice of many actors, including commercial ones, who align and identify with the nation and nationalist projects in multiple ways. This means that we should pay increasing attention to the non-state players and the corporate sector, whom we may not associate with nationalism at all. Moreover, as Tröhler (2022) has written, ‘global performances are reinterpreted nationally and ... are (ab)used in order to strengthen national political agendas’ (13). Indeed, allegiance to a delineated set of global (read, Western and Eurocentric) values and ideals may be exactly what it takes in the contemporary Western world to claim and be viewed by others as a fully-fledged nation. Ironically, nationalism is not only about appealing to and claiming nationally unique traditions, language or history. In the first place, traditions, languages, or histories are essential elements akin to Tröhler’s (2009) constituents of the langue (of nationalism), which I would propose to see as a supra-national discursive catalogue. My proposition is that digitalization has become akin to such fundamental elements (at least in the affluent Western world)––a script, ideal or ambition undergirded by the promise of progress and futurity that modern nations desire to be associated with. To be more provocative, digitalization is the yardstick of a nation’s distinctiveness and (future) vitality, even superiority. Both aspects are important: distinctiveness on the one hand and vitality on the other. In this respect, I argued that education is a symbolic space (see Kjørholt, 2007) where digitalization as a measure of a mature, ‘real’ and vital nation is performed both discursively and materially. The digitalization of education is largely an anticipatory, future-­oriented project––it makes claims about the future needs (regarding the

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knowledge, competences, or worldviews of the next generation of citizens, see Rahm, 2021) that demand and legitimize certain actions (extensive digitalization of education) today. In so doing they qualify actors to claim progressiveness, attunedness to the changing world and thus vitality. Hence, studying nationalism in education and its digitalization specifically, we are increasingly dealing not with how the nation came into existence in the past and through past and present policies and practices. The scholars of nationalism are invited to take exciting steps into studying nationalism as a future-oriented endeavor.

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CHAPTER 15

What’s So New About ‘New’ Nationalism in Higher Education? Hans Schildermans

The University Between the Nation and the Globe In the decades following World War II, the European continent has been characterized by increasing international collaboration and exchange. Within higher education, these tendencies culminated around the turn of the century in the current European Higher Education Area (EHEA) and the European Research Area (ERA), created by the Bologna Process and the Lisbon Strategy respectively. These transnational policy initiatives aimed to turn Europe into a competitive knowledge economy on par with the rapidly growing economies of countries such as China and India (Kushnir, 2016; Lawn & Grek, 2012). This tendency towards internationalization and globalization now seems to have come to an end. In recent years, governments have started to react to the perceived externalities of the unified European higher education space and the idea of global higher education more generally by charting a more protectionist course that

H. Schildermans (*) University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Fox, L. Boser (eds.), National Literacies in Education, Historical Studies in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41762-7_15

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tries to close off national higher education institutions (Brøgger, 2021; Van der Wende, 2021). More extreme repercussions of the return of nationalism in higher education include the silencing, firing, or even jailing of academics and the banning or defunding of university departments that contest the conservative status quo (Douglass, 2021a). Educational research has been slow to seriously investigate and analyze these new forms of nationalism. Due to the language of globalism that has been so prevalent in recent decades, ‘the nation(-state) had been removed from the research agenda, and where nationalism was addressed at all, it was treated as a moral problem that had to be countered with morals and human rights’ (Tröhler, 2022: 9). Taking the globe as both unit of analysis and point of orientation—what Marginson (2022: 11) has called ‘methodological globalism’—is problematic because it starts from the assumption of a zero-sum relation between the global and the national. This means that it is presupposed that the more globalism there is, the less nationalism prevails. However, both the global and the national coexist, and globalization did not occur at the expense of national interests and agendas. In reality, it indeed seems to be the other way around: the more globalism, the more nationalism. Problematizing the universalistic pretense of the ‘global university’ discourse, Nelson and Wei (2012: 259) remark that there are ‘many different ways of being or becoming global’. In other words, there are as many ‘global universities’ as there are nation-­ states that aim to promote their global university. In addition, methodological globalism is heavily loaded with particular norms, values, and expectations. The normative character of globalism, however, is not unequivocal but strongly divided into two opposite stances. Whereas some celebrate global convergence towards cosmopolitanism and a genuine world polity as a cure for the ills of nationalism, conservatism, and particularism, others are concerned about Americanization, neo-imperialism, and the subsumption of local cultural differences. Irrespective of their conflicting viewpoints, ‘[b]oth groups proved completely wrong about the decline of the nation-state. Each was half right about the simultaneous and contrary tendencies to homogeneity and difference’ (Marginson, 2022: 11). In light of the misunderstandings produced by an all too globalist perspective, this chapter raises the question of how we can understand the revival of nationalism in higher education today. Is it a return of the nation after years of Europeanization and globalization that sought to overcome the calamities of nationalism marking the twentieth century? Did the nation never really go away, and was it

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perhaps persistently present despite being disregarded by educational research ‘under the spell of globalization’ (Tröhler, 2022: 7; see Jusdanis, 2019)? Are we maybe witnessing a return of the nation under a new guise, with a new vocabulary and rhetoric, a new way of speaking and making its claims? This would mean that this revival might also signify the articulation of a new ‘national literacy’, a new way of experiencing what it means to be a nationally minded citizen and to feel attached to the national community (Tröhler, 2020: 620). Answering these questions requires having a closer look at how the relation between the university and the nation has been configured historically. This makes it possible to assess the novelty of so-called new nationalist or ‘neo-nationalist’ (Gingrich, 2006: 195) claims on higher education observed today and to see if it really gave rise to a new national literacy. The central intuition of this chapter is that the historical contract between the university and the nation as it has come into being at the beginning of the nineteenth century, that was confirmed and consolidated during the subsequent decades and that was strengthened during the Cold War (see Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004: 65: ‘the military-industrial-academic complex’), seems to have been broken due to the anti-intellectualist attitudes of new nationalist movements.

The University and the Nation in Historical Perspective Universities are often thought of as cosmopolitan, universalist or, indeed, global centers of higher learning. This idea is partly true when considering the first decades after the inception of the university in medieval Europe. Students who wandered across Western Europe, Latin as the lingua franca of scholarly exchange, and a strategically opportune relative independence from both secular and religious powers marked the heydays of the early universitas studii (De Ridder-Symoens, 1992). At the dawn of the Reformation, however, Catholics and Protestants were quick to mobilize the university to forge and bear their ideological arms in the religious wars. Universities generally thrived in this timeframe but, due to the excessive emphasis on questions of philosophical and theological nature, they became rather rigid and unworldly institutions. The early modern universities lagged behind on the advances that were made during the Scientific Revolution, and at the end of the eighteenth century, most European

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universities ‘were moribund, with idle professors feebly teaching a medieval curriculum without much relevance to modern life, and despised by the intellectuals of the Enlightenment’ (Perkin, 2007: 174; see Douglass, 2021b). The turn of the nineteenth century marked a tipping point in the history of the university. This time period not only saw the reinvention of the university after a decade-long process of decline, but it also witnessed the rise of nationalism as a political ideology about the formation of nation-­ states, namely as political-administrative entities that include people from the same nation. In an early reflection on the rise of nationalism, Ernest Renan remarked that a nation is not founded upon a shared language, race, or religion, nor is the nation being held together by shared interests or geographical location. He emphasized that a nation is not a static entity, but rather that it is a dynamic and collective identity that has to be convoked via stories and performed in rituals. Renan defined the nation as a ‘large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future’ (Renan, 1882/1990: 19; see Özkirimli, 2010). University reform at the beginning of the nineteenth century was heavily invested in the construction of the nation-states via, for instance, the construction of national canons in arts and literature and scientific research promoting national technological development. Two short exemplary case studies illustrate this point. The involvement of the university in a process of nation-building is probably most clear in the case of Germany. After its humiliating defeat during the Napoleonic Wars, the confederation of states was in need of a substitute for the University of Halle which was under French occupation. In 1809, Wilhelm von Humboldt, acting in his capacity as section head for culture and public education, ordained the foundation of a new university in the city of Berlin. The principles of this new institution were built on the ideas of German philosophers and theologians such as Fichte, Schleiermacher, and Schelling. Although in reality the newly established university was perhaps not as radical or avant-garde as proclaimed in the rather hagiographical accounts of these events (see Ash, 1999: Mythos Humboldt), the discursive machinations that produced a new idea of the university still provide insight into the way the connection between the university and the nation-state was being articulated at that time. It stands out that Humboldt’s aim was to construct a German university that was decisively different from the French institutions of higher education.

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In the wake of the French Revolution, universities in France were abolished together with the other institutions pertaining to the Ancien Régime. The old-fashioned universities were replaced by a state-led centralized network of schools specializing in a particular branch of science and technology (e.g., École Polytechnique, École des Mines; see Rüegg, 2004). The German idea of higher education, on the other hand, did not do away with the university and its claim to universal learning, but sought to embody it based on the principle of the unity of Wissenschaft (as a general philosophical-scientific study) and Bildung (as the cultivation of national character). The German university was conceived to give rise to a national culture and to make its students take part in it. ‘[T]he revelation of the idea of culture and the development of the individual are one […] and the place [where] they unite is the University’ (Readings, 1997: 65). This means that the university was not only the incubator of what had to become a particular German culture or maybe even thought-style (see Tröhler, 2018), but also that it performed the function of making the educated citizenry devoted to this newly founded German tradition and value-framework. In other words, the university gave ‘the people an idea of the nation-state to live up to and the nation-state a people capable of living up to that idea’ (Readings, 1997: 65). It would be, however, too easy to assume that the German university is merely a servant to the state by executing its nation-building agenda. Rüegg (2004) remarks that one of the characteristics of the German university—also as a way of distancing itself from the rivaling centralized French higher education system at that time—was the importance it accorded to freedom from direct state intervention. The competence of the state when it comes to matters of the universities was ‘to protect their freedom and to appoint professors’ (Rüegg, 2004: 5). The university advanced the German nation by creating an educated citizenry that could work in the professions required for the functioning of the state (namely by taking care of the legal, bodily, and spiritual integrity of the state and its citizens through the three ‘higher’ faculties of Law, Medicine, and Theology respectively). In addition, the disciplines of history, geography, and anthropology developed cultural heritage for the emerging nation by creating and disseminating narratives about the German nation-state, including its place in the world and in history. State and university form a loose connection within the body politic of the German nation with the state as a functionalist and executive organ and the university as the intellectual embodiment of national culture. ‘The state protects the action of

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the University; the University safeguards the thought of the state. And each strives to realize the idea of national culture’ (Readings, 1997: 69; see also Tenorth, 2018: 147). A second and slightly different case of the involvement of the university in nation-building is that of the land-grant colleges in the United States. These colleges came into being in the second half of the nineteenth century. Because of their embeddedness in the local communities of the Midwest—as opposed to the more elitist liberal arts colleges on the East Coast—these universities ‘were commonly referred to as “democracy’s colleges”’ (Nash, 2019: 437). The land-grant colleges are the outcome of a policy by the federal government to sell land in the new territories of the expanding nation and to use the revenues for establishing higher education institutions. Justin Morrill, the architect of the Land Grant Act that was signed into law by President Lincoln in 1862, envisaged a new kind of higher education, namely one that would be ‘accessible to all, but especially to the sons of toil’ (Morrill, as cited in Geiger & Sorber, 2013: x). The land-grant colleges had to provide instruction in practical subject matters, while teaching the basics of the liberal arts ‘to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes on the several pursuits and professions in life’ (Act of July 2, 1862, as cited in Geiger, 2015: 281). A last objective of these colleges was the economic development of the states through research in agriculture, engineering, military science, and mining. The land-grant colleges, ‘[t]his uniquely American invention’ (Labaree, 2017: 38), hence contributed in four distinct ways to the construction of the American nation-state. First, students could attend a university close to their homes in a subject that was deemed relevant and offered prospects of a stable job in the growing American economy. It was a way of ‘using education as a means to catapult the nation into global prominence as an industrial leader’ (Nash, 2019: 439). Second, the research conducted at the land-grant colleges and their affiliated agricultural experiment stations offered immediate scientific support to the state’s farmers. Solving mechanical problems and optimizing machines in turn was beneficial to the industrialists and their enterprises (Geiger, 2015). Third, the land-­ grant colleges performed a civilizing mission in that the students who attended these colleges and had to take the supplementary liberal arts courses grew up to become members of the rural upper class who could represent the American national consciousness in the local community (Labaree, 2017). Fourth, with the agricultural cultivation of land and scientific contributions to the development of the railroad network, the

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land-grant colleges played a crucial role in the westward expansion of the American nation to the detriment of the lives and livelihoods of Native American people (Stein, 2020). In sum, the land-grant colleges contributed to nation-building in a variety of ways. ‘Students trained in these colleges and universities helped build infrastructure, launch large-scale bureaucracies, and support the growth of the nation-state’ (Nash, 2019: 446). Both the Humboldtian research university and the land-grant colleges are clear cases of how institutions of higher education were mobilized to promote the advancement of the nation-state. The kind of nationalism present in both cases, however, seems to be of a different nature. The two reform movements indeed attempted to achieve rather different aims. The nationalism displayed in the German case addresses the university in its capacity to create a cultural elite that could not only perform a variety of professional functions essential to the operations of the modern German state, but that could also embody and emanate the values of an emerging German national ‘Culture’. This kind of elitist nationalism diverges from the nationalism exemplified by the U.S. land-grant movement. Although there are of course elements present for creating local, rural elites, the movement was not initially motivated by the desire to create a national culture, but rather by a zest for economic and industrial advancement under the sign of ‘Progress’ (see Tröhler, 2017). The nationalist reflex focused more strongly on the working class and sought to civilize rural populations, all while supporting the westward expansion and modernization of the nation-state via innovations in agriculture, the railroad network, and industrial enterprises. Two cases obviously cannot provide a systematic or encompassing overview of the historical relation between the university and the nation. Nevertheless, they give some indication of the ways in which universities became instrumental in nation-building projects of different kinds. Both kinds of nationalism—the elitist nationalism of the Humboldtian university (Culture) and the civic nationalism underlying the land-grant movement (Progress)—seem to be predicated on a strong connection between the nation and the state. This means that what is good for the nation is deemed good for the state and vice versa or that a particular politicization of the nation to strengthen the state transpired. In both cases, the university played a mediating role between the nation and the state, which granted the university its central position in the functioning of modern social life.

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The University and the Threat of New Nationalism This holy alliance between the nation and the state now seems to have been broken, with universities falling victim to the heated struggle between the two parties. Neo-nationalist movements and discourses have undone the bond between the nation ‘as a cultural thesis of commonality, collective being and belonging’ and the state ‘as an organizing principle of power distribution’ (Tröhler, 2022: 11). Neo-nationalist politicians and activists claim that the state no longer reflects the values and identities of the nation and that hence the contemporary nationstates ‘with the state profiting from loyal citizens and the nation from state institutions that perpetuate the idea of the nation’ (ibid.) are morally bankrupt. Neo-­nationalists denounce what they perceive as the state becoming a servant of a global political-economic elite, on the one hand, and the humanitarian role of the state in providing care for the globally dispossessed (e.g., people ousted by war or climate change), on the other (Gingrich, 2006). New nationalism is ‘the nationalism that emerged in the mid-2010s in Europe’s political landscape and relates to anti-immigration and anti-­ globalization right-wing populism, protectionism, and euro-skepticism’ (Van der Wende, 2021: 118). Although this definition focuses on Europe, similarities with the nationalist course charted by politicians such as Trump, Bolsonaro, or Putin are hard to overlook. Important to emphasize, however, is that new nationalism is not confined to presidential offices, but that it covers a spectrum ranging from nascent populist movements, populist political parties, nationalist-leaning governments, illiberal democracies, and authoritarian regimes (Douglass, 2021a). What characterizes current forms of new nationalism is not so much the politicization of some national identity—this is indeed a tale as old as the nation-state itself. Rather, its novelty lies in the fact that the politicization of the nation no longer happens in support of the state, but that instead the nation is now  turned against the state. In new nationalist discourses, the state is being staged as a representative of a global elite and supported by the ‘propaganda’ of the mass media. Therefore, new nationalism claims to be more bottom up and embedded within grassroots movements. Once it becomes dominant, following an election victory for instance, it turns authoritarian and hostile vis-à-vis the institutions representing the ‘traditional nationalism’ that identifies itself with the state (e.g., Trump

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communicating via Twitter instead of the official channels; discrediting judges or the entire justice system as ideologically biased). What does this mean now for the university? Within nineteenth-­century political discourse, the university had become a crucial cog in making the nation-state run at full speed. Just like a well-functioning railroad network was seen as essential for the transportation of persons and goods throughout the state, a well-oiled university system was deemed vital for the free flow of ideas, knowledge, and values within the borders of the nation. However, within the new nationalist imaginary, universities are seen as ‘hubs of dissent, symbols of global elitism, and generators of biased research’ (Douglass, 2021a: 22). Once in power, the new nationalist reaction to universities has been characterized by the overt and covert suppression of academic freedom, firing, or even jailing of faculty and administrators and imposing of organizational change to ensure greater control. Exemplary of the new nationalist oppression of universities is the relocation of the Central European University, founded by the Hungarian billionaire George Soros, from Budapest to Vienna. The move is the hitherto last step in a long legal battle between the university administration and the government led by President Orban. It is framed within the president’s campaign against liberal values and dissenting voices via legislative action that excludes particular institutions or hampers their activities (Van der Wende, 2021). An even more telling example comes from Turkey where, by order of President Erdogan, thousands of academics were fired or even abducted and incarcerated if they spoke up for the rival Gülen movement (Douglass, 2021a). However, it would be too easy to narrow down the new nationalist discourse about universities to these exemplary cases of explicitly discrediting academics and undermining universities via populist and often anti-­ intellectualist rhetoric. Next to this populist version of new nationalism, a second discourse can be discerned that pushes a nationalist agenda as part of the strategies of austerity politics. Under the guise of a more technical-­ economic rationality, pressure is being exerted on universities to reverse recent strategies for international cooperation and student exchange. In Denmark, for instance, the center-right government that took office in 2015 chose to reduce the amount of English-language courses based on the argument that the international students attending these programs did not sufficiently benefit the Danish economy. At the same time, new master’s programs were developed that were aimed at working professionals to strengthen the intellectual capacities of the Danish workforce.

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Interestingly, in terms of degree structure, these programs deviated from the frameworks developed as part of the Bologna Process to secure international exchange (Brøgger, 2021). In the Netherlands, anti-­ internationalization sentiments rose due to the increase in attendance of international students after particular study programs such as psychology or business were converted to English. Universities could not handle the amount of students anymore, and student organizations spoke out against the business model of attracting international students for enrollment fee revenue (Van der Wende, 2021). These policy initiatives mark a shift in priority from the integration of national higher education systems into the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) towards a more protectionist stance that relocates the university politically within the borders of the nation. New nationalist movements and discourses have undeniably reconfigured the relation between the university and the nation-state in a variety of ways. Without doing justice to the empirical complexities of these processes of reconfiguration, the concept of new nationalism seems to have been used to capture two slightly different strategies for repositioning the university in relation to the nation-state. Populist new nationalism tends to feed the perception that universities are degenerated institutions that are foreign to the people and serve the interests of a global elite. Their critical and independent stance poses a threat to the authoritarian leadership of autocratic regimes and illiberal democracies. Economic new nationalism, on the contrary, acknowledges the importance of universities for modern statecraft, but it reacts against European and transnational policy initiatives such as the Bologna Process and the Lisbon Strategy, on the one hand, and against the influx of international students which puts pressure on the capacity of national study programs and curricula, on the other hand. Within the economic new nationalist discourse, the national economy still seems to hold pride of place over the global knowledge economy.

Globish Higher Education and the Future of the Nation The urgency for understanding the relation between the university and the nation-state both historically and in its present state is prompted by two contextual factors. First, discourses of globalization have pushed

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forward the ideal of the world-class university of excellence contributing to and competing in the global knowledge economy (Marginson, 2022; Readings, 1997). Secondly, and partly as a reaction to the first tendency, neo-nationalist movements and discourses have tried to curtail the global aspirations of the university while relocating it in a national policy environment. The aim of this chapter has not been to make a normative distinction between good and bad forms of nationalism or to save some original nationalism from some of the twisted versions encountered today. The chapter has distinguished particular forms of nationalism, or perhaps more precisely, different strands of nationalist discourse that each make use of their own set of arguments, to shed light on the changing relation between the  university and the  nation. Different discourses discerned include an elitist nationalism that needs the university for the cultivation of a national culture created by the upper class and seeping down through various social layers, a civic nationalism that urges citizens to contribute to the social and technological progress of the nation-state, a populist nationalism that attempts to tame the university and neutralize the challenges it poses to national culture and politics, and, lastly, an economic nationalism that, in the trade-off between the global knowledge economy and the national economy, again chooses for the latter to the detriment of international cooperation and student exchange. Returning to the question that motivated this chapter and gave it its title, namely concerning the novelty of ‘new’ nationalism in higher education, it seems that what singles out new nationalism in higher education is not so much its rhetoric or its strategies—these are indeed as heterogeneous as those of more traditional forms of nationalism—but rather its explicit hostile stance towards global higher education, or what, perhaps more apt, could be called ‘globish’ higher education, referring to the rather flattened version of English spoken around the world. What is often being promoted as global higher education seems to be indeed a rather decontextualized version of university management originating from the United States that drives towards the ‘worldwide diffusion of neo-liberal norms and policies, social-cultural reproduction of White Supremacy, and linguistic-cultural monoculture in knowledge’ (Marginson, 2022: 17; see Kamola, 2014). It is therefore not really a surprise that the ‘European response to globalization was perceived by some as a neoliberal, Anglo-­ Saxon effort that conflicted with European social values’ (Van der Wende, 2021: 136). In other words, the language of globalism—spoken with an Anglo-Saxon accent—that is promoted by transnational policy-makers

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and think tanks seems to have clashed with the national literacies that national government officials and university administrators have been educated in. In this way, new nationalism, in its different voices, from populist to economic, can be understood as a polyphonous reaction to the Babylonian confusion of tongues provoked by the discourse of global higher education. The question remains now whether the historical connection between the university and the nation really has been severed—the original intuition of this chapter. At first sight, it seems that new nationalist discourses transmit a strongly hostile attitude towards universities, which are either seen as bulwarks of a progressive conspiracy of the global elites or as expendable institutions that could be replaced by more cost-effective research centers and training units. However, upon closer inspection and seen against the background of the variety of historical forms of nationalist higher education, on the one hand, and the diversity of nationalist reactions against global higher education, on the other, the alliance between the university and the nation does not really seem to be harmed by the slander of demagogues or the austerity of bookkeepers. Rather, it seems as if the age-old contract between the university and the nation is up for renewal. Nation-states marked by both forms of nationalism, populist and economic, are eager to exert closer control on the comings and goings of universities. Whether universities are as thrilled about this new alliance remains to be seen.

References Ash, M.  G. (Ed.). (1999). Mythos Humboldt. Vergangenheit und Zukunft der deutschen Universitäten. Böhlau. Brøgger, K. (2021). A specter is haunting European higher education—The specter of neo-nationalism. In V. Bozalek, M. Zembylas, S. Motala, & D. Holscher (Eds.), Higher education hauntologies. Living with ghosts for a justice-to-come (pp. 63–75). Routledge. De Ridder-Symoens, H. (Ed.). (1992). A history of the university in Europe. Volume I: Universities in the middle ages. Cambridge University Press. Douglass, J. A. (2021a). Neo-nationalism and universities: A conceptual model. In J. A. Douglass (Ed.), Neo-nationalism and universities. Populists, autocrats, and the future of higher education (pp. 22–42). Johns Hopkins University Press. Douglass, J. A. (2021b). Neo-nationalism and universities in historical perspective. In J. A. Douglass (Ed.), Neo-nationalism and universities. Populists, autocrats, and the future of higher education (pp. 1–21). Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Geiger, R. L., & Sorber, N. M. (2013). Preface. In R. L. Geiger & N. M. Sorber (Eds.), The Land-Grant colleges and the reshaping of American higher education (pp. ix–xiv). Transaction Publishers. Gingrich, A. (2006). Neo-nationalism and the reconfiguration of Europe. Social Anthropology, 14(2), 195–217. Jusdanis, G. (2019). Why the nation never really went away. In F. López-Alves & D. Johnson (Eds.), Populist nationalism in Europe and the Americas. Past, present, and future (pp. 40–57). Routledge. Kamola, I. (2014). US universities and the production of the global imaginary. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 16(3), 515–533. Kushnir, I. (2016). The role of the Bologna process in defining Europe. European Educational Research Journal, 15(6), 664–675. Labaree, D. F. (2017). A perfect mess. The unlikely ascendancy of American higher education. University of Chicago Press. Lawn, M., & Grek, S. (2012). Europeanising education. Governing a new policy space. Symposium. Marginson, S. (2022). What is global higher education? Oxford Review of Education. Advance online publication 18 May. https://doi.org/10.108 0/03054985.2022.2061438 Nash, M. A. (2019). Entangled pasts: Land-grant colleges and American Indian dispossession. History of Education Quarterly, 59(4), 437–467. Nelson, A. R., & Wei, I. P. (2012). Conclusion: Lessons from the past, considerations for the future. In A. R. Nelson & I. P. Wei (Eds.), The global university. Past, present, and future perspectives (pp. 255–265). Palgrave Macmillan. Özkirimli, U. (2010). Theories of nationalism: A critical introduction (2nd ed.). Palgrave Macmillan. Perkin, H. (2007). History of universities. In J. J. F. Forest & P. G. Altbach (Eds.), International handbook of higher education. Part I: Global themes and contemporary challenges (pp. 159–205). Springer. Readings, B. (1997). The university in ruins. Harvard University Press. Renan, E. (1990). What is a nation? In H. Bhabha (Ed.), Nation and narration (pp. 8–22). Routledge. (Original work published 1882). Rüegg, W. (2004). Themes. In W.  Rüegg (Ed.), A history of the university in Europe. Volume III: Universities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (1800–1945) (pp. 3–31). Cambridge University Press. Slaughter, S., & Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic capitalism and the new economy. Markets, states, and higher education. The Johns Hopkins University Press. Stein, S. (2020). A colonial history of the higher education present: Rethinking land-grant institutions through processes of accumulation and relations of conquest. Critical Studies in Education, 61(2), 212–228. Tenorth, H.-E. (2018). Wilhelm von Humboldt. Bildungspolitik und Universitätsreform. Ferdinand Schöningh.

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Tröhler, D. (2017). Progressivism. In Oxford research encyclopedia of education. https://oxfordre.com/education/view/10.1093/acrefore/978019 0264093.001.0001/acrefora-­9780190264093-­e-­111. Accessed 11 Aug 2021. Tröhler, D. (2018). Internationale Provokationen an nationale Denkstile in der Erziehungswissenschaft: Perspektiven Allgemeiner Pädagogik. Bildungsgeschichte: International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 8(2), 173–189. Tröhler, D. (2020). National literacies, or modern education and the art of fabricating national minds. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 52(5), 620–635. Tröhler, D. (2022). Magical enchantments and the nation’s silencing: Educational research agendas under the spell of globalization. In D. Tröhler, N. Piattoeva, & W. F. Pinar (Eds.), World yearbook of education 2022: Education, schooling and the global universalization of nationalism (pp. 7–25). Routledge. Van der Wende, M. (2021). Neo-nationalism in the European Union and universities. In J. A. Douglass (Ed.), Neo-nationalism and universities. Populists, autocrats, and the future of higher education (pp.  117–140). Johns Hopkins University Press.

PART VI

Commentary

CHAPTER 16

Reflections on States, Schools, and National Literacies David Labaree

This book arose from an intellectual community fostered by Professor Daniel Tröhler, and the contributors to this volume are members of this community, who have shared a rich set of conversations over the years about what Tröhler calls ‘national literacies’. In this final chapter, my assigned task is to synthesize the analyses from the first 14 chapters and tie them up into a neat bundle. Good luck with that. Trying to develop a succinct summary of this book is a fool’s errand or certainly well beyond my limited abilities. And even trying to do this would be grossly unfair to the empirical and analytical richness of the wide array of contributions to the book. What I decided to do instead is something less ambitious but possibly more useful—to write a reflective essay spelling out some of the thoughts that these 14 chapters provoked in me as a reader and member of the community. After all, the best research is a provocation. It compels you to

D. Labaree (*) Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Fox, L. Boser (eds.), National Literacies in Education, Historical Studies in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41762-7_16

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think about familiar issues in fresh ways, and that is certainly the effect that this book has had on me. My plan, therefore, is to do the following. First, I give a brief overview of some of the central themes that run through these insightful and diverse analyses of national literacies. Then, I try to extend the historical framework of these studies up to the present, looking at how national literacies have adapted to the contemporary world well beyond the context of nation formation in which they first arose. National literacies are both embedded in and created by national systems of schooling. Everyone knows that schools promote literacy in the literal sense, teaching the young how to read and write the local language. It’s in this form that we talk about the level of literacy in a particular country. But schools are also places that construct and instruct a national literacy, which constitutes the shared language of political discourse and of national identity. This is the language that gives meaning to the imagined community of citizens in a nation state. The construction of national literacies is grounded in a broad and foundational relationship between schooling and the nation state. The nation state and public schools grew up together, with each enabling the development of the other and with each serving as the precondition for the other. No nation, no school. No school, no nation. Systems of public schooling gave the emerging nation state an institutional mechanism for turning subjects of the crown into citizens of the state, by forming a common culture and shared experience that would draw a dispersed, dissociated, and culturally heterogeneous populace into a civic community with a shared national identity. At the same time, the emerging nation state provided schooling with the fiscal, ideological, and political support that enabled schools to evolve into a massive public enterprise, which has come to consume so much of the time and treasure of modern societies. (Labaree, 2022: 35)

In this way, nationality is tied up with personal identity. Your nation is not just where you live; it’s who you are. You’re Swiss, French, Swedish, or American. And these identities are formed in national systems of schooling, where students learn the language of membership in a civic community, a language that is deeply imbued with the values and norms of that community. Individual contributions to this book demonstrate the variety of approaches that researchers can take in trying to understand more fully the

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nature of national literacies and the nation-school relationship across national boundaries. For just as nations differ, so do school systems. Different national literacies arise from different kinds of schooling in the different nations, with the nations serving as both cause and effect of these systems of schooling. The chapters examine a wide range of national settings within which these national literacies emerge, including: Argentina, France, Germany, Switzerland, Israel, Norway, Turkey, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. One theme that arises from these chapters is that while national literacies are distinctive from each other, that does not necessarily mean they are parochial. A number of these studies trace the way key components of national literacies are capable of traveling across national borders in remarkably complex ways. These are not simple cases of copying patterns from elsewhere, however. Instead of adopting foreign concepts, national school systems are more likely to adapt these concepts to fit into the already existing literacy within a nation. As a result, national literacies are distinctive but not unique. They share a lot of elements of political and religious culture while at the same time maintaining national character. Another theme in the book and in Tröhler’s work in general is that, by seeing the construction of national literacies as a central component of why we have schools and of what schools do, we are at the same time defining a much broader and richer purview for the academic field of education than what is currently the norm in educational research organizations and journals. Most of the field of education today is focused on producing studies that are intended to help reengineer the educational system and educational profession in order to meet current societal policy objectives. This defines educational researchers as functionaries in the ongoing, massive enterprise of public education. We’re supposed to help tinker with the system in order to make it a more efficient and more effective agent for public policy. We’re trying to make schools better at increasing economic productivity and GDP and to deploy education effectively in the effort to solve a large array of social problems, such as ameliorating social inequality, improving public health, fending off foreign challenges, and reducing crime. As the studies in this book demonstrate, however, the field of educational research has bigger fish to fry. We’re not just trying to repair the machinery of public education. We’re striving to understand why these systems came into existence in the first place and why we continue investing such vast amounts of time and treasure to keep these systems going.

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This moves education away from a narrow utilitarian frame and toward a broader examination of the way that school and nation have continually served to construct each other through the medium of national literacies. And this in turn means digging into the way schools shape how we think, how we relate, and who we are. Such a vision of education as an academic field takes an approach to its subject that is profoundly historical. We can’t understand school and state without figuring out how they came into existence in a process of co-creation. And we can’t understand who we are as citizens without examining how we came to be. So let me build on the core historical approach to education demonstrated by the contributions in this book by linking the discussion of national literacies to the more recent history of state and school. Yes, schools are critically important for the process of founding a nation state. But consider the role that the production of national literacies in schools plays after the state is comfortably established. When the state’s existence is no longer in jeopardy and national identity is firmly forged, what role, if any, does schooling continue to provide for the state? And once schooling is solidly institutionalized and thoroughly integrated into the life course of a nation’s citizens, in what ways does it still need the state that created it? The second question is easier to answer than the first. Modern systems are massively expensive institutions that require gobs of government money in order to maintain themselves. But the answer to the first question is more intriguing for our purposes. So, let’s examine it more closely. I suggest that there are three forms of national literacies that continue to be essential for modern nation states to survive and thrive: the language of community; the language of productivity; and the language of legitimacy. As we will see, one key problem is that the third language undercuts the first. In this discussion, I’m going to be drawing on the example of the United States, which is the case that is most familiar to me. Developing the language of community continues to be a central component of what schools do for the state, long after the state is well established. As Benedict Anderson has shown, there is nothing natural about national identity and no obvious reason for why individuals scattered across a large country should feel a strong connection with total strangers who are hundreds of miles away. It takes schools to perform the alchemy that turns these strangers into fellow citizens. And this need doesn’t disappear over time. Young people who continually enter into a society need to learn this connection anew and so do recent immigrants from other countries. And schools in established states continue to play this role effectively.

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They draw all young people in the community into a single institutional setting, expose them to a common curriculum and a shared experience of social learning, and connect these students to the core beliefs, political principles, and civic culture that constitutes that state’s national literacy. The language of community is most effectively learned in the most communal component of the school system, and that is the lower grades. It’s here that the academic curriculum is focused on the general skills of literacy and numeracy and the nonacademic curriculum aims to develop the norms and values needed to get along in society outside the family. It’s also here that learning is most likely to occur in a single classroom with a single teacher over the course of a year. It’s where students are all the same age and thus where students from diverse family backgrounds find themselves developing into a single group of, say, third-graders, who then move on the next year as a group to become fourth-graders. It’s hard to think of an institutional structure that is better suited to promoting communal literacy. But, as we will see, this communal structure shifts over the years into a more differentiated and stratified structure in high school and even more so in university. The result is that higher levels of schooling can pose a significant threat to the language of community and to a shared civic culture. Consider another form of literacy focused on productivity. Schools were initially established for the political aim of forming the nation state, but then they began to accumulate additional social functions that weren’t present at the beginning. One of these is that they come to be seen increasingly as places for learning the skills that students will need in order to play productive roles in the workforce. This economic role for schooling came rather late in the game. Throughout the nineteenth century, school enrollments were expanding rapidly in the United States as students came to spend an ever-increasing part of their lifetimes in school. By 1900, the average teenager in America had accumulated eight years of schooling. But this growth had nothing to do with an economic demand for better educated workers, since during the same period, industrialization was steadily reducing the skill level of the workforce. You no longer needed to hire people who knew how to make a shoe; you only needed people who could produce one small part of the process along the assembly line. However, toward the end of the century, once the corporate structuring of industry required a large managerial bureaucracy—filled with clerks, managers, engineers, and the like—demand emerged for workers who had developed higher level verbal and computational skills and who thus could

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perform this new white-collar work. The result was a boom in the growth of education at the high school and college levels. Industry needed these skills, and individuals had a strong incentive to acquire them in order to work in the new, clean, safe, respected, and well-paid white-collar occupations. School became the place that fostered the language of productivity, which has come to dominate the rhetoric of educational policy across the globe. It is now customary for political leaders, policymakers, and pundits to talk reverently about the need to invest in education. The idea is that this investment will pay off in the form of workplace productivity, economic growth, and national power. In addition to making loyal citizens, we see ourselves as producing human capital. In the United States, we find this language permeating educational reform efforts such as the 1983 A Nation at Risk report and the 2002 No Child Left Beyond Act. It’s also rife in the literature of the OECD, and it lies at the heart of the PISA program, OECD’s global testing regime, which is designed to push nations to adhere to the new human capital gospel: Schools are the engines of economic growth. A third literacy that is emergent from contemporary schools is the language of legitimacy. Even in an authoritarian state, force alone is not sufficient to maintain control. States in general need a compelling rationale that justifies their rule. For the Roman Empire, it was bread, circuses, and protection from enemies. In the modern state, the key emerging issue is fairness. Modern societies are supposed to be guided by the achievement principle, which decrees that social position should arise not from the accident of birth but from the demonstration of individual merit. And schools are ground zero for the development and maintenance of this new meritocracy. They are the ideal instrument for promoting, measuring, and certifying personal achievement, with school credentials becoming the formal criterion for allocating people to jobs and thereby establishing their positions in the social hierarchy, where rewards are much higher at the top than the bottom of the system. As long as schools are able to promote the belief that these inequalities are justified according to individual merit, however, this system of inequality acquires the aura of fairness. Everyone has a chance to get ahead, and the state that oversees this system has earned its right to rule. Through schools, the state makes sure that people get what they deserve thus assuring the state’s legitimacy. The problem, however, is that the meritocratic language of legitimacy seriously undermines the democratic language of community. Part of the

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issue is that meritocracy fosters an extreme form of inequality, reinforced by the principle of just deserts. Citizenship can tolerate a degree of inequality, but it still depends on the ideals that every citizen gets one vote and that all citizens are equal before the law. But the school-based meritocracy produces radical differences in income, wealth, and health between the top and bottom of the system. Life’s ugly in the basement. More significantly, however, for the welfare of both school and state, is that the meritocracy not only glorifies the winners in the academic contest for the best credentials; it also demeans the losers. It defines people who are less successful in the game of schooling as performing jobs that are less worthy of respect. Just as your state is not just where you live but who you are, so too your credential level measures not just how you did in school but also defines your worth. The division is sharpest between those who have a college degree and those who don’t. The latter—no matter how essential their contribution is for the functioning of economy and society—are seen via the meritocratic language of legitimacy as beneath contempt. You only need to look at the growing political divide in countries around the world to see the dire effects of this invidious distinction in educational credentials. So, as state and school have matured over the years, the state has continued to be dependent on the school—not only to promote community but also to promote productivity and legitimacy. Even though these functions are often at cross purposes with each other, they nonetheless remain critically important for the state’s institutional viability. As a result, the states have not just maintained support for public schools but have sharply increased the level of this support. They have augmented the legitimacy of schools, which comes from being officially authorized by the state, by making it mandatory for all young people to attend them. And at the same time, they have steadily ramped up the public funding of schooling to a remarkable—even possibly unstainable—level. Consider the current fiscal burden that schools impose on the public purse. In the 50 American states, which are the primary funders of education, the cost of elementary, secondary, and higher education consumes more than one-third of the entire state budget. How did the cost grow so high? The key reason is that the average level of schooling in the population has been rising steadily over the last 200  years while the cost of schooling per student at each higher level of the system has been markedly greater than the level below. At one teacher per class, elementary schooling is a relative bargain. But as the number of teachers per class increases

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in middle and high school, so does the overall cost. When you get to undergraduate education, the number of faculty and the size of the infrastructure required for the same number of students jumps up by another large increment. And then there’s graduate school, the most labor-intensive part of the system. Over time, the rate of increase in years of schooling per person has risen arithmetically while the rate of increase in cost of schooling per person has risen geometrically. In the United States, this has led to an ongoing fiscal crisis and to populist efforts to roll back taxes and mandate greater accountability for schools. In summary, therefore, the recent history of state and school has demonstrated that they need each other more than ever but that their once untroubled relationship has become increasingly fraught. They can’t live with each other and can’t live without each other.

Reference Labaree, D. F. (2022). The fraught connection between state and school. Kappan, 104(4), 34–40.

PART VII

Conclusion

CHAPTER 17

The Multiple Perspectives on National Literacies Stephanie Fox and Lukas Boser

Not long ago, Daniel Tröhler published an edited volume entitled Education, Curriculum and Nation-Building (Tröhler, 2023a). In the first chapter of this book, together with Veronica Maricic, Tröhler analyzed the extent to which education was mentioned in the 28 most relevant, that is, ‘dominant’ (Tröhler & Maricic, 2023: 7), monographs on theories of nation and nationalism. They concluded that, even though the authors of all 28 books they examined assume that education is involved in nation-building in one way or another, none based this argument on academic research. They remark on this phenomenon as follows: ‘It seems [that] we are dealing with a strange, perhaps unique phenomenon: educational knowledge … is certainly present in the theories of nations and nationalism’ yet S. Fox (*) University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] L. Boser University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 S. Fox, L. Boser (eds.), National Literacies in Education, Historical Studies in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41762-7_17

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is seems to be treated as something ‘rather ordinary, not very specific, [and] not backed up by research’ (ibid.: 30). Existence of this research gap is also recognized by Michael Billig who contributed an insightful concluding chapter to the book Education, Curriculum and Nation-Building and was the author of one of the 28 books on nation and nationalism that Tröhler and Maricic analyzed. ‘How on earth,’ Billig asks himself after reading the text by Tröhler and Maricic, ‘did I fail to notice that? How could the gap be so obvious that it escaped my attention?’ (Billig, 2023: 251). Whatever the reason may have been for this omission, Billig is not to blame for such oversight, as it is normal for scholars to notice one thing and miss another. Scientists are neither omniscient nor all-seeing. Incidentally, this is also a perfect justification for considering research a social activity, as one person can often see what the other(s) have overlooked. In the introduction to Education, Curriculum and Nation-Building, Tröhler calls for investigations on ‘how schools succeed in “doing nation” …, that is, in teaching children not only simple literacies but also national literacies by making them certain kinds of (national) people’ (Tröhler, 2023b: 4; his italics). This call is heeded by 22 authors who contributed nine insightful empirical papers to that volume in an attempt to address this research gap. However, as a closer look at Education, Curriculum and Nation-Building reveals, there is at least one significant gap in this line of research that is not adequately discussed in this book, for we still cannot precisely define ‘national literacies.’ Indeed, whenever ‘national literacies’ are mentioned, this is done either when quoting Tröhler or in reference to learning to read and its role in the shaping of the national mind. Several authors also combine the notion of ‘national literacies’ with those related to ‘national mythology,’ ‘national knowledge,’ and ‘national identities,’ but they do not explain conclusively how these notions relate to each other. While there are some evident similarities, those notions are not identical and are therefore not synonymous. Thus, convincing explanations of what ‘national literacies’ are and what the added (epistemic) value of this notion is, are still lacking, or more precisely, they are still a work in progress. To facilitate this endeavor, we asked the 15 scholars who have contributed to our book to address the above-mentioned research gap. Some of them have chosen to discuss real-world examples in detail, while others have offered more (meta-)theoretical considerations. In the following

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sections, we will give a brief overview of every chapter before we come back to the research gap and this book’s contribution to closing it. In the first chapter, William F. Pinar reads Tröhler’s work through the lens of a scholar known as a specialist in the field of curriculum theory. By eloquently and insightfully connecting several of Tröhler’s writings, Pinar focuses on the argument that (historical) research is not only about the things that happened in the past, but also about the researchers, that is, an awareness of their worldviews and epistemological frameworks. Pinar connects this idea to his field of expertise by noting that the ability to contextualize oneself requires the capacity to decode ‘our conditioning that occurs through curriculum, through family and friends, the very banality of our national formation.’ In this regard, national literacy is not only a concept that helps us understand the relationships between education, nations, and nationalism, but is rather, as Pinar argues, a ‘subjective necessity.’ Tröhler’s argument that scholarly work is embedded in national thought styles and that scholars adhere––even if unconsciously––to a national thought style could be understood primarily as a provocation, to which he admits (Tröhler, 2018). With the second chapter, however, by combining the concepts of academic literacies and national literacies into ‘national academic literacies’ Robert Cowen shows that Tröhler’s approach is, in the best sense, a provocation of thought. ‘This chapter,’ Cowen writes, ‘will try to find a way to think about the theme of this book using comparative education itself as an illustration.’ In doing so, its content serves a much greater function than a simple melding of two concepts. It is a wonderful example of how the concept of national literacies can be used as a tool to think about the dominant epistemologies and how they are changing (in) one’s own academic field. In a brief but lucid chapter, Mette Buchard elaborates on the concept of national literacy by highlighting a central aspect of Tröhler’s work, which she calls ‘the double concept of “forms of confession” and “forms of governing.”’ As Tröhler has argued in several texts, if our aim is to analyze Western concepts of education, we must examine the ideological languages in which those concepts are expressed. In Western Europe and the United States, the home to Roman Catholicism, state churches such as Anglicanism or Gallicanism, or the many varieties of Protestantism–– which often also evolved into state churches––such as Lutheranism, Zwinglianism, Calvinism, Baptism, and so on, these ideological languages are typically formed and expressed against the background of distinct

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denominational thought styles. Thus, it is not surprising that educators–– theorists and practitioners alike––who were born into one of these denominations will grow into the respective thought styles and then theorize and act accordingly. In other words, just as national thought styles influence educational research and practice, so do these confessional thought styles. Hence, in order to understand national literacies, we must also acknowledge the confessional thought styles that are conveyed through particular ‘languages of education.’ However, in her chapter, Buchardt not only acknowledges and demonstrates the usefulness of Tröhler’s work on ideological languages of education for analyzing national developments in education, but also highlights its potential for further research in history of education and beyond. In this sense, Buchardt’s text is an excellent example of how in the process of addressing gaps new gaps emerge. It also shows that Tröhler’s work can have an impact beyond the disciplinary boundaries of educational research. By exploring the question of citizenship education through the example of female education in nineteenth-century France, Sophie Pia Stieger adds the aspect of gender to the discussion of national literacies. As the notion of gender(ed citizens)––here exemplified by women––is a missing piece in Tröhler’s elaboration of national literacy, this contribution enriches the concept. In her chapter, Stieger discusses the contested process of producing ‘citizens without citizenship,’ that is, women who ‘were simultaneously included and excluded from the French nation.’ Stieger also applies the epistemic lens of national literacies to analyze the different (and sometimes contradictory) notions of belonging to the French nation-­ state that resulted from Catholic Church-led education for girls on the one hand and national secular education for boys on the other. Thus, Stieger’s contribution is a great example of how a concept can be taken seriously and carried forward at the same time. Some educational phenomena can best be understood by analyzing them from their margins. This is what Michèle Hofmann does in her chapter on the education of ‘feebleminded’ and ‘imbecile’ children in Switzerland at the turn of the twentieth century. At that time, children diagnosed as ‘mentally impaired’ were nevertheless educated, albeit in special classes or special schools. Although these children were not expected to learn or have the same skills and knowledge as their so-called ‘normal’ peers did, they were still expected to become citizens of Switzerland. In this sense, they were also to become nationally literate, as Hofmann argues. This ‘basic patriotic knowledge,’ as Hofmann calls it, can be

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considered a minimal form of national literacy. In Switzerland, where a fully fledged male citizen was also a soldier who was able and willing to defend his fatherland, a minimal amount of ‘patriotic knowledge,’ that is, a minimal amount of national literacy, was required to pass the entrance exams for the military. In a detailed historical analysis, Hofmann also shows that the curriculum in Swiss schools for ‘abnormal’ children aimed precisely at this minimal national literacy. Hofmann argues that, in comparing the educational measures taken for ‘abnormal’ children in Switzerland, Austria, and Germany, it also becomes intelligible which ideas and concepts of future citizens dominated educational and social discourses at a particular time and place. Focusing on the well-known Swedish children’s book The Wonderful Adventures of Nils and its use in the expanding Swedish primary school system as an example, Johannes Westberg examines ‘the educational setting of national literacies,’ as well as the ‘complexities of national literacies.’ He shows that the story of Nils served not only to teach Swedish children to read, but also to arouse emotions that were then linked to a national imagination. The Wonderful Adventures of Nils is therefore an excellent example of how national imaginaries and national identities were closely intertwined with emotions and feelings of love, pride, and loyalty––or, as Westberg calls it, ‘affective nationalism.’ National literacy in this respect is also an ‘emotional literacy.’ His chapter also includes a rich and detailed historical analysis of real-life examples that is an essential part of this book. In presenting his case study, Westberg also proves that the usefulness of the concept of national literacy is not limited to curriculum studies or studies of nation-building and nationalism, as it holds great value for social historians as well. Another excellent case study full of details that help us expand our understanding of national literacy and its function in nation building is presented by Marva Shalev Marom who aims to elucidate what it means to be literate as an Israeli. She answers this question by dissecting a ‘key word’ in contemporary Hebrew communication: kapara. According to Shalev Marom, the formula kapara on you is a seemingly absurd combination of martyrdom and routine, doomsday and everyday judgment. Yet in Israel’s national mind, this hodgepodge of meanings and practices at the ‘vibrant intersection of Jewish national identity, religious practice, state law and street culture’ becomes the perfect tango best described by a ‘key word’ through which Israeli national literacy becomes intelligible. As Shalev Marom explores the cultural, religious, and national significance of

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the formula kapara on you, she also analyzes the ‘grammar’ of Israeli national literacy. Since Tyack and Cuban’s (1995) seminal work on the grammar of schooling, the term ‘grammar’ has been ubiquitous in educational sciences. However, it has rarely fit as well as in Shalev Marom’s chapter. While the authors of other chapters in this book address Tröhler’s concept of national literacy either theoretically or empirically, Nicole Gotling focuses on methodological questions that arise in using this concept. She opens her analysis with Tröhler’s call for more research on the nexus between nations, nationalism, and education, after which she elaborates on the methodology that allows us to conduct such research in a meaningful way. In her chapter, Gotling makes a strong case for historical comparative curriculum studies as a means to better understand the nationally literate citizen through the phenomena of nationalism, citizenship, and education, as well as their interactions. Still, she cautions that the aim of such an endeavor should be twofold: to understand nationalism, citizenship, and curriculum as discourses, but also to take the perspective of the longue durée when engaging in the respective historical (discourse) analyses. Like other scholars who contributed to this book, Berit Karseth is interested in global and national contexts. Nonetheless, in her chapter, she uses examples from Norwegian curricula to show the concept of national literacies as a tool for advancing curriculum analysis. ‘I hope,’ she writes, ‘this chapter contributes to further contemporary analysis of curriculum work as well as the work of the curriculum, with regard to defining who we are and who we should become.’ For Karseth, Tröhler’s concept also serves as a stimulus for developing new research questions, which she indeed poses at the end of her chapter, confirming that the research conducted by Tröhler and many of his friends and colleagues over the past decade is far from complete. In the next chapter, Kevser Muratović presents a detailed non-­European case study involving Robert College located in Istanbul. Once the capital of the Ottoman Empire, Istanbul later became the capital of the Turkish Republic, but in extending across both banks of the Bosporus River, it has long been a cultural hub and a link between the West and the East. Asking ‘whether the history of Robert College’s seemingly smooth transformation into a Turkish university can tell us something about Daniel Tröhler’s concept of “national literacy,”’ Muratović develops the case of a double transformation: a school becomes a university while an empire transforms

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into a nation-state. From her engaging and insightful writing, we can learn how entangled educational institutions are with nation-building and how they are used as instruments to accompany political agendas. Her study also decodes the ‘interconnectedness of education and nationalism,’ by showing how a school that began as a Western, Protestant (i.e., American) missionary project became a place where Turkish national elites were formed. Muratović emphasizes that, in her story of how a national literacy was created and how it intervened in the process of nation-building, the phenomenon of international and intercultural borrowing and lending of ideas also played an important role. Therefore, Muratović’s case study also shows how closely nationalism and globalism are intertwined. In that sense, her chapter illustrates very well French historian Anne-Marie Thiesse’s statement that ‘nothing is more international than nationalism’ (Thiesse, 2001: 11). Felicitas Acosta appreciates the concept of national literacy for ‘offering a synthesis as well as openness.’ As she rightly argues in her chapter, synthesis means that the concept allows us to integrate both the aims as well as the content of education, whereas openness implies that it prompts us to think about schooling in different times and places. Taking this dual approach, Acosta applies Tröhler’s concept of national literacies to analyze the case of the colegios nacionales in Argentina. In doing so, she presents not only another non-European case, but also one that is situated in a (post)colonial context. Similar to Muratović, Acosta focuses on ‘the formation of national identity in a web of transnational circulation’ of educational ideas and practices. Both case studies also show that the concept of national literacy and its emergence can be applied to different school levels. While in Switzerland, Sweden, and Denmark, focus tends to be given to elementary schools, Muratović’s and Acosta’s analyses are at the secondary level. This is a deliberate choice, given that, as Acosta argues, in the nascent Argentinian nation-state, secondary education had the task of producing a ruling class capable of serving in the ‘emerging republic’s institutions.’ Later, she purports, the aim of secondary education in the colegios nacionales shifted to building a ‘republican identity faithful to the homeland.’ The argument Ethan Hutt develops in his chapter is that national literacy is not only taught and learned in schools, but that schools—or more specifically public political discussions about schools and their structure— are themselves part of national literacy. Consequently, the structure of the American educational system, including its contradictions and

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ambivalences, is interwoven with the U.S. national identity, which is in turn shaped (at least in part) by comparisons with other nations. Hutt discusses three possible explanations for why the complicated and often contradictory discourse about American schools can make sense in the specific context of the production of an American identity through schooling. Hutt also criticizes theories according to which a uniform world culture is created by homogenizing forces such as the OECD or the hegemonic aspirations of American culture. This myopic perspective, according to Hutt, ignores the fact that national idiosyncrasies of school systems play an important role in shaping national identities and national cultures. Accordingly, in his chapter, Hutt also emphasizes that schools are not simply containers of (national) ideologies, but are the product of those ideologies and therefore embody them. School systems and the discussions about them are, to quote Tröhler, ‘objectifications of national thought styles.’ In her chapter, Nelli Piattoeva probes the relationship between the global and the national by examining ‘the role of education in nation-­ building in the context of the ongoing digitalization of education.’ Digital technologies, such as computers, cell phones, streaming services, and the World Wide Web, seem to be accelerating the process of globalization. However, as Piattoeva writes, ‘those who engage with the topic argue that national borders persist rather than being transcended on the World Wide Web … The Internet and digital media technologies often accentuate rather than undermine national identities, efficiently reproducing affiliations across vast distances in both established nations and diasporic communities.’ She thus develops ‘some initial ideas on (the question of) how the historical role of educational institutions as conduits of national socialization is enacted through the digital policies and practices constituting contemporary education.’ By examining the seemingly ‘obvious,’ Piattoeva does what Tröhler has advised us to do in so many texts and discussions, which is to question what is usually taken for granted. She also adds some provocative thoughts to the discussions on nationalism and national literacies by suggesting that digitalization in the Western world has become a ‘yardstick of a nation’s distinctiveness and (future) vitality, even superiority.’ She also broadens the scope of these discussions by not only asking ‘how the nation came into existence in the past and through past and present policies and practices,’ but also by inviting scholars to study ‘nationalism as a future-oriented endeavor.’

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In the introduction to this book, we argued that, once the Cold War had ended, scholarly interest in nationalism quickly abated and was replaced for a time by interest in globalism. In his chapter, Hans Schildermans reminds us that things are actually more complicated––and therefore more interesting––than that. Nationalism and globalism, as Schildermans argues, are not the two sides of a coin that always shows only one side. On the contrary, globalism and nationalism are always apparent simultaneously. Schildermans justifies this claim by stating that globalism drives nationalism. Guided by this premise, Schildermans discusses the claim made by Tröhler and others that universities are, if not the only, then very important birthplaces of national identities, national thought styles, and national literacies. Building on this argument, Schildermans analyzes the historical relations between nations, states, and universities through two case studies, conducted in the United States and Germany, respectively. His interest is not merely historical, however, as he uses history as an intellectual starting point to explore the changes in national higher education systems that have been driven by neo-nationalist movements around the world. Looking at the rhetoric of contemporary nationalist(ic) movements, it appears that universities are under heavy attack. Yet, Schildermans challenges this view by stating that ‘[r]ather, it seems as if the age-old contract between the university and the nation is up for renewal,’ as both the new populist nationalism and the new economic nationalism seek to ‘exert [close] control on the doings and goings of universities.’ This book appropriately closes with a concluding essay authored by David Labaree where he elaborates on the overall idea of the book, its topic, and its relevance. As another important cornerstone of this intellectual community and a good friend of Daniel Tröhler, Labaree was the perfect choice to write such a chapter. These are our brief reflections on the chapters of this book. As the book editors, we are well aware that, due to their condensed form and our biased view, they cannot do justice to the richness and thoughtfulness of the texts. We nonetheless hope that we have at least succeeded in conveying the essence of each chapter and the insightful expertise with which all contributions have been produced. In closing, we will revisit the research gap we described earlier in this chapter. Has this gap been filled by this book? Did the contributing authors succeed in defining national literacy? Do their texts allow us to

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formulate a concise and consistent theory of national literacies? Do we know exactly what the added (epistemic) value of this notion is? The answer to all these questions is most likely ‘no.’ Still, we do not believe that our book is a failure because, as far as we know, Tröhler never intended to create a theory of national literacies. By the same accord, we do not feel compelled to do so. As we understand it, Tröhler wanted us to do something else. In his inaugural lecture (Tröhler, 2018), in which he presented the research project on national literacies, he called this a provocation for national thought styles in education. We interpret this as a genuine desire to spark curiosity that would lead to more thorough, in-depth, and detailed research on the historical nexus of education, nations, and nationalism. Moreover, this research should help us as individuals, but also as members of a research community, to become more self-aware. Tröhler borrows this latter idea from Quentin Skinner, who wrote that ‘to learn from the past––and we cannot otherwise learn at all––… is to learn the key to self-awareness itself’ (Skinner, 1969: 53; see also the chapter authored by William F. Pinar). In the end, we are well aware that, as Billig (2023) so astutely noted, in addressing one gap, others are inevitably created either tacitly or intentionally. Admittedly, this outcome is at least as interesting as the motivation behind its emergence. After all, science is driven by questions, not answers.

References Billig, M. (2023). Concluding chapter: Education, nationalism, and internationalism: Gap-filling and gap-creating. In D. Tröhler (Ed.), Education, curriculum, and nation-building. Contributions of comparative education to the understanding of nations and nationalism (pp. 249–263). Routledge. Skinner, Q. (1969). Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas. History and Theory, 8(1), 3–53. Thiesse, A.  M. (2001) La Création des Identités Nationales [The creation of national identities]. Éditions Seuil. Tröhler, D. (2018). Internationale Provokationen an nationale Denkstile in der Erziehungswissenschaft: Perspektive der Allgemeinen Pädagogik [International provocations to national thought styles in education: Perspectives of foundations of education]. IJHE Bildungsgeschichte—International Journal for the Historiography of Education, 8(2), 173–189.

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Tröhler, D. (Ed.). (2023a). Education, curriculum, and nation-building. Contributions of comparative education to the understanding of nations and nationalism. Routledge. Tröhler, D. (2023b). Introduction: Understanding nationalism through the lens of education. In D. Tröhler (Ed.), Education, curriculum, and nation-­building. Contributions of comparative education to the understanding of nations and nationalism (pp. 1–6). Routledge. Tröhler, D., & Maricic, V. (2023). Education and the nation: Educational knowledge in the dominant theories of nationalism. In D. Tröhler (Ed.), Education, curriculum, and nation-building. Contributions of comparative education to the understanding of nations and nationalism (pp. 7–33). Routledge. Tyack, D., & Cuban, L. (1995). Tinkering toward utopia. A century of public school reform. Harvard University Press.

Index1

A Abdülhamid II, 151, 152 Academic literacy/academic literacies, 43–45, 51, 231 Adult education, 130, 190 Afghanistan, 42 Africa, 47 Aliyah, 117 America, 8, 24, 28, 50, 181, 181n2, 182, 184, 223 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), 144–148 Ancien Régime, 71, 207 Anderson, Benedict, 4, 7, 9, 10, 190, 193, 222 Anderson, C. Arnold, 48 Argentina/Argentine Republic, 159–171, 164n1, 221, 235 Argentineness, 169, 170

Arithmetic, 72, 85, 87, 89 Armstrong, John, 7 Ashkenazi, 115, 117n1, 118 Assmann, Aleida, 8–10 Atatürk, Kemal, 153 Atonement, 112, 113, 118, 119 Auclert, Hubertine, 77 Auer, Konrad, 82 Austria/Austro-Hungarian Empire, 61, 83, 84, 88–91, 233 B Banal nationalism, 9, 14, 32, 33, 44, 78, 114, 196 Baptism, 231 Barth, Marquis of, 149 Battle of Sedan, 90 Bebek Seminary, 147 Beglinger, Paul, 87

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2023 S. Fox, L. Boser (eds.), National Literacies in Education, Historical Studies in Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41762-7

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INDEX

Bereday, George, 46, 48 Bible, 99, 120, 148–150 Bildung, 25n6, 27, 28n13, 29, 33, 207 Billig, Michael, 8, 9, 14, 32, 44, 58, 114, 230, 238 Bloch, Marc, 10 Boğaziçi University, 144, 153 Bologna Process, 203, 212 Böök, Frederik, 106 Bowman, Mary Jean, 48, 148 Brazil, 8 Breuilly, John, 7 Brickman, William, 46 Bristol, Mark Lambert, 153 Britain, 49, 147 Bulgaria, 149, 150 Bürger, 70 C Calvinism, 25n6, 35, 231 Canada, 23, 194 Capitalism, 26, 26n10, 27, 179, 191 Catholicism, 25, 35 Children’s books, 95, 102, 103, 233 China, 203 Church, 34–36, 51, 72–76, 78, 98, 106, 131, 145n1, 231 Citizenship, 9, 25n6, 57–59, 61, 63, 64, 69–73, 75–78, 87, 103, 116, 117, 128, 151, 153, 184, 225, 232, 234 Civic education, 9, 75, 128, 168, 169 Civic nationalism, 209, 213 Clemenceau, Georges, 76 Climate change, 132, 210 Cold War, 7, 25n1, 28n14, 47, 178, 181, 185, 189, 205, 237 Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, 165 Collective identity, 25n4, 70, 91, 96, 113, 114, 116, 118, 129, 144, 160, 206

Colonialism, 49–51 Communism, 47 Comparative education, 6, 41–52, 183, 231 Competence/competencies, 33, 127, 130–138, 200, 207 Compulsory education/ compulsory schooling, 82, 85, 86, 88, 161, 169 Confession, 31–37, 231 Constitution, 69, 72, 136, 150, 152, 161, 163, 164, 164n1, 169, 170, 178 Core curriculum, 130–134, 137, 139 Cosmopolitanism, 204 Cultural heritage, 130, 132, 133, 207 Cultural nationalism, 168 Cultural thesis, 23, 114, 129, 161, 210 Curriculum/curricula, 6, 23, 33, 59, 86, 107, 120, 125–139, 150, 162, 180, 206, 223, 231 Curriculum theory, 6, 129, 231 D Dale, Roger, 47 Dati, 113, 115–118, 116–117n1, 120, 121 Democracy/democracies, 26–29, 36, 75, 133, 166, 169, 179–181, 191, 210, 212 Denmark, 35, 61, 62, 211, 235 Dewey, John, 26, 26n7, 26n8, 28, 29 Digitalization, 189–200, 236 Digital technologies, 137, 192–194, 197–198, 236 Diversity, 36, 127, 128, 132, 133, 135, 191, 214 Doing nation, 78, 230 Dundas-Grant, Valerie, 46 Durkheim, Émile, 46, 48 Duruy, Victor, 73

 INDEX 

Dwight, Harrison Otis, 147 Dwight, James H., 147 Dwight, William B., 147 E Eckstein, Max, 46 Economic growth, 185, 224 Economic nationalism, 213, 237 EczacıbaşI, Nejat, 153 Educability, 82–84 Educationalization, 28, 28n14, 56, 154, 155, 164 Educational policy, 6, 42, 47, 126, 224 Educational theory, 33, 34 Education policy, 25, 179 Education reform/education reforms/ educational reforms, 35, 47, 74, 75, 100, 101, 126, 127, 181–185, 224 Education system/educational systems, 5, 6, 31–34, 42, 46–48, 71, 72, 76, 96–101, 116, 116n1, 138, 145, 168, 180, 182–185, 191, 207, 212, 221, 235, 237 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 47, 50 Elitist nationalism, 209, 213 Emigration, 104, 107 Emotional literacy, 103, 108, 233 Emotions, 32, 95–108, 233 Enlightenment, 26, 149, 161, 206 Enrollment, 98, 101, 166, 212, 223 Epistemology/epistemologies, 32, 33, 42, 46, 51, 231 Equality, 128, 133, 137, 184 Erdogan, Reccep Tayyip, 211 Estonia, 191, 194–197 Europe, 7, 8, 15, 47, 48, 50, 51, 111, 116, 203, 205, 210 Everyday practices, 25n2, 44, 50, 58, 78, 190

243

Experience, 25, 25n3, 26, 29, 51, 59, 98, 99, 103, 108, 115, 117–119, 130, 150, 151, 160, 163, 220, 223 F Fairy tale/fairy tales, 105–107 Falloux Law, 72 Fatherland, 77, 87, 88, 91, 103, 104, 106, 107, 145, 233 Female education, 70, 74, 232 Ferry, Jules, 75 Ferry Laws, 74, 75 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 206 First Peoples, 23 Fitz-Simon, Santiago H., 166 Flag, 58, 114, 118, 194 Fleck, Ludwick, 34 Formal epistemic reproof (FER), 45, 48–51 France, 8, 35–37, 46, 61, 69–78, 126, 128, 147, 207, 221, 232 Freedom, 26n10, 88, 133, 149, 207, 211 French Revolution, 207 Fukuyama, Francis, 8 Future citizen/future citizens, 9, 10, 12, 14, 56, 81–91, 116, 125, 128, 144, 154, 233 G Gates, Caleb, 148, 151–153 Gellner, Ernest, 7, 9, 190 Gender, 23, 24, 70, 73, 78, 85, 232 Geography, 48, 60, 77, 87, 96, 97, 99, 101, 102, 128, 136, 150, 153, 162, 168, 198, 207 Germany/German Empire, 8, 27, 28, 46, 83, 84, 88–91, 126, 147, 206, 221, 233, 237 Girls’ education, 70–78

244 

INDEX

Global elite, 210, 212, 214 Globalization, 36, 47, 126–129, 192, 196, 203–205, 212, 213, 236 Grammar, 33, 102, 112, 121, 234 Greece, 46 Guizot Law, 72 H Halls, Bill, 46 Hamlin, Cyrus, 147–149 Haredi, 113, 115, 116, 117n1, 118, 120 Hearden, Arthur, 46 Higher education, 6, 113, 130, 144, 145, 153, 165, 180, 203–214, 225, 237 Hiloni, 115, 116, 118, 120 Historiography, 32, 60–62 History of education, 6, 13, 32, 43, 107, 232 Hobsbawm, Eric, 7, 9, 58, 97, 105 Holmes, Brian, 46, 48 Homeland, 24, 163, 166–171, 235 Hulusi, Hüseyin, 152 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 206 I Identification, 11, 103, 104, 128, 136, 161, 166, 194 Ideology/ideologies, 6, 25n6, 28n14, 33, 60, 118, 127, 144, 154, 155, 206, 236 Imagination, 95–108, 116, 233 Imagined Communities, 4, 7 Imagined community, 8, 9, 189–200, 220 India, 203 Inequality, 72, 179, 184, 224, 225 Inkeles, Alex, 47 Inönü, Ismet, 153

Intellectual community, 4, 5, 14, 15, 219, 237 Intellectual disability, 84, 88 International comparison/ international comparisons, 13, 177–185 Ireland, 128 Israel, 111–121, 221, 233 Italy, 49, 147 J Japan, 47–49 Jews, 112, 115–118, 117n1, 121, 151 July Monarchy, 72 K Kandel, Isaac, 45, 46 Kapara, 111–122, 233 Kazamias, Andreas, 46 Key, Ellen, 100 King, Edmund, 46, 48 Klein, Joel, 182 Kulturkampf, 61 L Lagerlöf, Selma, 95–98, 100–107 Land-grant, 208, 209 Languages of education, 10, 11, 32–37, 232 Langue, 33, 121, 194–196, 199 Lausanne Conference, 152, 153 Lauwerys, Joseph, 46 Lifestyle, 115, 145, 146, 195 Ligthart, Jan, 106 Lincoln, Abraham, 208 Lindgren, Astrid, 95 Lisbon Strategy, 203, 212 Long, Albert, 149 Longue durée, 57, 59–63, 234

 INDEX 

Loyal citizens, 56, 69, 78, 161, 210, 224 Loyalty, 78, 104, 233 Lutheranism, 25n6, 231 M Mallinson, Vernon, 42, 46 Mass schooling, 4, 76, 83 Mathematics, 13, 47, 165, 181 McCarthy, Joseph, 47 McKeen Cattel, James, 28 Meri, Lennart, 197 Meritocracy, 224, 225 Methodology, 4, 11, 36, 234 Michelet, Jules, 74 Middle East, 116, 153 Missionary work, 145, 146, 148, 149 Mitre, Bartolomé, 165 Mizrahi, 115–118, 120, 121 Modernity, 26, 48, 197 Modernization, 34, 36, 48, 163, 166–167, 209 Modern nation-states, 4, 5, 9, 56, 70 Monarchy, 35 Moral education, 131 Moral values, 72, 178 Morrill, Justin, 208 Muslims, 151, 152 Muslim students, 151 Myths, 113, 198 N Nager, Franz, 87 Napoleonic Code, 71 Napoleonic Wars, 61, 206 National borders, 8, 190, 221, 236 National character, 32, 42, 207, 221 National citizen/national citizens, 4, 5, 56, 57, 63, 70, 88, 91, 96, 107, 114, 117, 131 National community, 4, 190, 193, 205

245

National consciousness, 193, 208 National context, 13, 128, 129, 135, 159, 162, 234 National culture, 29, 198, 207–209, 213, 236 National defense, 181, 185 National economy, 137, 212, 213 National education, 73, 78, 99 National identity/national identities, 8, 10–13, 23, 34, 42, 69–78, 96, 101, 112, 115, 117, 121, 125–139, 159, 160, 162, 163, 168, 170, 171, 189, 190, 210, 220, 222, 230, 233, 235–237 National idiosyncrasies, 59, 62, 84, 90, 91, 236 Nationalist discourse/nationalist discourses, 8, 191, 210–214 Nationalist movement/nationalist movements, 13, 96, 116, 205, 212 Nationalist rhetoric, 195 Nationally minded citizens/nationally-­ minded citizens, 78, 91, 129, 160, 205 National mind/national minds, 12, 112–114, 121, 230, 233 National narrative/national narratives, 137, 191, 194 National reproduction, 189, 194 National sentiment/national sentiments, 96, 114, 128, 129 National socialization, 191, 236 National symbol/national symbols, 13, 14, 25n4, 70, 78, 91, 95, 96, 103, 107, 108, 113, 114, 129, 144, 198 A Nation at Risk, 181, 224 Nation branding, 195, 196, 199 Nation building/nation-building, 32, 33, 96, 120, 161, 190–196, 198, 206–209, 229, 233, 235, 236

246 

INDEX

Nationhood, 33, 70, 72, 77, 190, 191, 193, 195, 197 Nation state/nation-state/nation states/nation-states, 4, 6, 8, 29, 31–33, 42, 56–64, 69, 74–78, 96, 113, 116, 121, 127, 139, 145–147, 154, 155, 160–171, 190, 193, 204, 206–214, 220, 222, 223, 232, 235 Native American people, 209 Netherlands, 212 New nationalism, 203–214 Noah, Harold, 46 No Child Left Behind, 183 Non-citizens, 71, 78 Nordics, 35–37, 61, 130 Noreen, Adolf, 102 Norway, 126, 131, 133–138, 221 O Olander, Valborg, 96, 97, 100–106 Orban, Victor, 8, 211 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 25n1, 27, 114, 126, 127, 134, 135, 185, 195, 224, 236 Ottoman Empire, 143–149, 234 Ozga, Jenny, 47 P Palestine, 120 Pamuk, Orhan, 144 Parole, 33, 121, 194 Parsons, Talcott, 47–48 Path dependency/path dependencies, 114, 154 Patriotism, 32, 103, 167 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich, 11, 27 Philosophy, 3, 4, 27, 28n14, 150

Pocock, John G. A., 11, 33 Poland, 8, 46 Political discourse, 178, 211, 220 Populist nationalism, 213, 237 Pragmatism, 25n3, 27, 28n14 Preferred epistemic frame (PEF), 44–46, 48, 50, 51 Primary education, 74, 130, 164 Primary school, 72, 81, 82, 87, 97–101, 103, 107, 233 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), 13, 25, 25n1, 25n5, 28n14, 41, 43, 185, 194, 196, 224 Progress, 26, 28, 47, 146, 162, 163, 191, 194, 196, 199, 209, 213, 230 Progressive education, 98, 106 Progressivism, 137, 145 Propaganda, 165, 210 Protestantism, 25–27, 25n6, 143, 154, 231 Prussian Wars, 61 Psychology, 12, 27, 28, 28n14, 212 Public discourse/public discourses, 9, 118–121, 129, 138 Public education, 76, 116, 116n1, 206, 221 Public schools/public schooling, 8, 69, 71, 113–118, 120, 121, 179, 181, 220, 225 R Ranger, Terence, 7, 9 Reid, William, 127–129 Religion, 4, 8, 32, 34–37, 72–74, 85, 89, 99, 115, 119–122, 133, 144, 146, 147, 206 Religious instruction, 35, 131 Renan, Ernest, 7, 14, 33, 114, 120, 161, 206

 INDEX 

Republicanism, 11, 26, 33, 36, 74, 75 Rice, Condoleezza, 182 Richer, Léon, 77 Rickover, Hyman G., 181, 181n2, 182 Riggs, Elias, 150 Robert, Christopher Rheinlander, 147, 148 Robert College (RC), 143–155, 234 Robertson, Susan, 47 Rojas, Ricardo, 169 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 11, 161 Russia, 8, 46 S Saami people, 105 Sacrifice, 88, 112–114, 117, 119–121, 206 Sadler, Michael, 42, 46 Sandström, Anna, 100 Schall, Gottlieb, 89 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 206 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 206 School children, 96–99, 103, 107 School subject/school subjects, 85, 89, 99, 128, 131, 132, 136–138, 150, 196 School system/school systems, 6, 61, 71, 74, 76, 97–99, 101, 107, 113, 115, 117, 118, 170, 180, 181n2, 184, 185, 221, 223, 233, 236 Secondary education/secondary school, 71, 73–75, 130, 132, 164, 235 Second Empire, 73 Second Great Awakening, 145, 145n1 Second Republic, 72, 73 Sephardi, 116, 117 Shaftesbury, Earl of, 149 Singapore, 179 Six Day War, 119

247

Skinner, Quentin, 11, 24, 146, 146n2, 238 Slaveykov, Pencho, 150 Slaveykov, Petko, 150 Social inequality, 130, 221 Social progress, 145 Social science/social sciences, 4, 46–48, 136 Sociology, 4, 47, 48, 127 Soldier/soldiers, 75, 85, 87, 88, 90, 91, 112, 119, 233 Solidarity, 70, 133, 135, 206 Soros, George, 211 Soul, 26, 28, 29, 29n15, 34, 105, 145, 145n1, 167, 168 Southeast Asia, 47 Spain, 49, 160 Special classes, 83, 85–87, 90, 91, 232 Sputnik, 181 Standardized assessment, 134 Standards, 6, 99, 102, 180, 182, 183, 190 State law, 112, 119, 233 State schooling, 78, 164 Sweden, 35, 96–102, 104–107, 221, 235 Switzerland, 6, 12, 27, 83–91, 181n2, 221, 232, 233, 235 T Taken for granted, 25n1, 31, 36, 115, 236 Teachers College, 45, 50 Teaching orders, 72 Testing, 47, 132, 177–186, 224 Textbooks, 9, 32, 60, 62, 86, 89, 90, 97, 99–102, 151, 153, 154, 196 Third Republic, 35, 74 Thought style/thought styles/ thought-style, 5, 6, 13, 45, 49, 51, 121, 207, 231, 232, 236–238 Tomiak, Janusz, 46

248 

INDEX

Torah, 118 Tradition/traditions, 5, 98, 105, 116–118, 117n1, 120, 121, 126, 128, 130, 131, 133, 161, 162, 168, 183, 190, 195, 199, 207 Traveling ideas, 154 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), 185 Tröhler, Daniel, 4, 23, 31, 42, 55, 69, 81, 96, 113, 125, 143, 159, 180, 189, 204, 219, 229 Truman, Harry, 179 Turkey/Turkish Republic, 144, 151–153, 211, 221, 234 U Ukraine, 8 Ulich, Robert, 46, 49 UNESCO, 27, 49 United Kingdom (UK), 8, 45, 49, 221 United States (USA), 6, 8, 23, 27, 28n14, 33, 44–51, 70, 144, 145, 145n1, 146n2, 148, 208, 209, 213, 221–224, 226, 231, 236, 237

Useful citizens, 101, 102 U.S.S.R., 47, 48, 181 V Vernacular, 24, 102, 148, 151, 193 Vietnam, 47 W Washburn, George, 148–150 Welfare state, 32, 35, 184 Wilson, Woodrow, 50 Working class, 78, 209 World culture, 127, 128, 236 World War, 8, 61 Y Yom Kippur, 111, 112, 119 Yom Kippur War, 113, 115, 118–121 Z Zimbabwe, 42 Zionism, 120 Zionists, 116–119, 117n1