Identity, School Textbooks, and Rebuilding Memory

Official school textbooks provide rich sources of material on the greater social effects of schooling. Textbooks provide the official knowledge a society wants its children to acquire—facts, figures, dates, and seminal events. They also frame the facts, figures, dates, and events in larger, though generally implicit, narratives that describe how things were, what happened, and how they came to be the way they are now. A group's representation of its past is often intimately connected with its identity—who “we” are (and who we are not) as well as who “they” are. These narratives provide a story line that helps students make sense of the particular facts, figures, and dates, but perhaps more importantly, convey the communities, often singular and national, to which the child is called to imagine himself or herself a member, as noted by Benedict Anderson.

While textbook analysis provides a lens for examining a nation's hidden social and political curriculum, analysis of the implicit pedagogy of teaching and learning in textbooks provides insight into the relationship envisioned between students and history. Is history presented as an interpretation of events that are socially understood, constructed, and contested, and in which the individual has both individual and social agency, or as a set of fixed, unitary, and unassailable historical and social facts for memorization? Do students have a role in constructing history, or is it external to them? How is recent, contested history presented?

Official school textbooks, like mass formal schooling, are projects of the nation-state. Schooling is one of the core institutions of the state. Even as the state is increasingly understood as only one salient actor in the formation of collective identity (subnational and supernational influences play important roles), the state, given its central role in the provision of schooling, organization of curriculum, and preparation of citizens, is always at the table, even when silent and unacknowledged. Textbooks offer official or semiofficial narratives of the founding and development of the state—their stories play a formative role in helping construct a nation's collective memory. The political reference point for school textbooks is almost invariably one's own nation-state; rarely is global or cosmopolitan citizenship proposed as a serious competing possibility.

In contrast to the founding myths of many states, especially those of historically nonimmigrant countries, most countries are multiethnic—made up of multiple groups identified ethnically, in religious terms, as immigrants, indigenous, and so forth. With globalization, the movement of peoples and capital has led even historically monocultural states such as Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands, and Sweden (excluding the Sami) to face multiculturalism in fact, if not with self-understanding. The representation of the communities students are called to imagine and the correspondence (or lack thereof) to actual membership reveals de facto national policies toward diversity.

Like the sociopolitical institutions that produce them, textbooks may serve different social projects. [Page 1120]Alan Smith and Tony Vaux discuss several possibilities—an assimilationist mission, whereby all groups within a society, however actually diverse, are portrayed as operating under and sharing the values of the dominant group; or a pluralist mission, whereby diverse groups are shown and differences acknowledged. Pluralism may take the form of conservative pluralism, which emphasizes similarities across groups in shared public spaces such as textbooks, with group differences left to the private sphere. Conservative pluralism notes differences but downplays them in favor of commonalities. Liberal pluralism places greater public emphasis on the unique cultural characteristics of groups making up the collective. By emphasizing the identities of diverse groups, these cultural attributes are celebrated as contributing to the nation's rich diversity. A critical pluralism recognizes similarities and characteristic differences across groups, but sees group attributes in light of differences in status, privilege, and power as well as in cultural terms. Critical pluralism envisions social justice as a major purpose of education.

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