Revising the Nation through Schooling: Citizenship and Belonging in Slovak Textbooks, 1918-2005.

Abstract

Historically, school systems arose in conjunction with the nation-state and have served to construct and enforce a sense of national community. To what extent does regime type predict the inclusive or exclusive nature of those national and civic narratives told in state schools? And how do these narratives manage antecedent conceptions of national identity propagated under previous regimes? This dissertation addresses these questions through a comparative study of the relationship between schooling and the articulation of national and civic identity across time and regime change. The data included over 400 state-approved history and civics textbooks for elementary and secondary schooling published between 1918 and 2005 in Slovakia. Slovakia provides a fascinating case for examining how textbooks reflect images of the national “we” because its recent history captures a veritable gallery of political regime types, moving chronologically through the empire, bourgeois democracy, nationalist dictatorship, Communist state, and parliamentary democracy from the beginning to end of the twentieth century. This variation allows for the investigation of how different regimes revise national identity narratives to legitimize their own rule. A major finding of this analysis is that textbooks reflect a political dialog that happens not just between authors and their anticipated student and teacher audiences, but also among authors across generations of political regimes. Authors in their accounts of history and civics must contend with the contemporary political ideology of the regime in power, but also with a cadre of expected heroes, villains, events, and symbols that are embedded in a tradition of imagining the nation. In addition, this dissertation elucidates a consistent pattern of relationally imagining the national self against various categories of the “other.” This study suggests that effective and enduring narratives of identity depend on a mixture of both broad and particular notions of belonging. The challenge then for history and civics textbooks in democracies echoes the very tensions of the nation-state itself: a need to balance the inclusive ideals of democracy with a circumscription of belonging that is particular and detailed enough to effectively unify and mobilize a community.