Interrogating Nation-Statehood and the Citizen in Curriculum Development: Comparative Historical Cases

This book dives into the histories of nation-state-building and curriculum formation to explore the ways that they intertwine, form and inform each other.

This book follows the understanding that nation-states have – and still do – develop their educational institutions, curricula, and teaching materials with specific goals and with a specific idea of the ideal student and citizen they want to create in mind. In particular, it advocates that analyzing multiple, idiosyncratic cases can inform the connection between what we learn, how we learn it, and who we become as citizens and further, that this is related not to linear or global phenomena, but to particular nation-states, curricula, and time periods. This book focuses on the comparison between four cases during the time of the large, map-changing events and period of the Prussian Wars (1864–1871) to make the intertwined relationships between nation-states and their curricula, designed to create future loyal citizens, more apparent. It makes a point of reconstructing each of the nation-states' historical national-political and educational processes, and then the reconstructed trajectories are compared both in their own trajectories over time throughout the 19th century and up until World War II and in relation to other nation-states' trajectories over the same long timespan.

Exploring a new pathway into research on the intersection of education, curriculum, and nationalism and providing a new, extensively researched and formed methodological framework, it will appeal to researchers, academics, and postgraduates with interests in comparative and international education, curriculum studies, the history of education, nationalism, state-building, and textbook analysis.

Nicole Gotling is a Post-Doctoral University Assistant in the Department of Education at the University of Vienna, Austria.