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Review
| The Nation, Europe and the World: Textbooks and Curricula in Transition, edited by Hanna Schissler and Yasemin Nuhoglu Soysal. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005. 258 pages. $25.95, paper.
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| This collection of eleven essays written by an international array of historians, sociologists and anthropologists, is taken from a series of conferences held in the United States, Britain and Italy. The goal of the conferences was to discuss "the need for history to be taught differently" given the "ongoing process of transnationalization" in Europe and the realization that "national narratives were no longer sufficient to educate students" (viii). As the editors note, "Education has been one of the most important tools in the short but determined career of the nation-state as the organizer of collectives," and, "Historically, subjects were transformed into citizens through the teaching of history, geography, and the language of the nation" (p. 1). Since the teaching of history in public schools has been a major means for creating citizens dedicated to the preservation of nation-states, it seems a worthy endeavor to examine the curricula of major European nations to see how changes in the nature of Europe are reflected or resisted in national history curricula. The essays in this collection explore changes in secondary and post-secondary history education in Germany and France and compare these changes to trends in peripheral European states and the United States. |
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This book is divided into three sections. In "Part I: Europe Contested," the authors discuss changes and trends in history education in Germany and France, with one important aside into the Netherlands. In "Part II: Europe Seen from the Periphery," the authors explore history education in Greek, Turkish, Bulgarian, Russian and Spanish textbooks. Finally, in "Part III: Global Frameworks and Approaches to World History," the authors discuss ways in which world and global history are practiced and give the reader insight into the origins of world history as a teaching field and its future as a research area. Part I consists of four essays, each of which relies on quantitative and qualitative examination of history textbooks to seek out trends and transformations in the conceptualization of Europe and the world in national curricula of the core European states. French and German history curricula have changed greatly since 1900, and the chapter authors articulate how this happened, why it happened, and what cultural and political limits there were to changes in how national histories were taught. The four essays in Part II are equally illuminating. The cases of Greek and Turkish history curricula allow the reader to see how problematic national histories can be in the face of European economic and political integration after World War II. Likewise, one sees how difficult it can be for Bulgarians to see themselves as "European" when the standard for comparison is France or Germany. Finally, in Robert Maier's exceptional essay, "Learning about Europe and the World: Schools, Teachers and Textbooks in Russia after 1991," we see how different the creation of a Russian corps of history teachers has been from that of the Western European or United States experience, and how the very nature of teacher education in Russia has undermined attempts to revise the history curriculum. As Maier notes, "Russian teachers as a rule do not possess the knowledge, skills or experience to develop more investigative approaches to the study of the past" (158). This leaves the teachers at the mercy of textbook writers, who have gone from "communist doctrines to what might be described as a nationalist ideology, which threatens to keep Russia in an isolated spot internationally" (158). The final three essays of the collection form Part III, which is less quantitative and less focused on textbooks. Rather, these essays are concerned with the historiography of world history as a discipline and its current and future role in history education. |
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Overall, this is a gem of a book. Well focused and informative despite covering a broad sweep of geography and time, this is exactly what one wishes for in an edited volume. There is not a bad essay in this collection and some essays, such as Michael Geyer's "World History and General Education: How to Bring the World into the Classroom," truly excel. Highlights for teachers and students alike include the excellent bibliographies following each essay. This book would be useful in advanced courses in history education or in social science education. Students in such courses will see that the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s in the United States were by no means isolated phenomena, and will see how other nations have dealt with the increasing importance of world history and global contexts in the creation of education standards. |
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| Hampden-Sydney College |
Robert Blackman |
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