Introduction: Views of Others in School Textbooks—A Theoretical Analysis

Abstract

It is generally assumed that school textbooks play a prominent role in children’s cultural upbringing. In their formative years, children’s minds are particularly elastic and vulnerable. School textbooks have the capacity to influence their value system and this change may well remain with them for the rest of their lives. This renders the school system and textbooks in particular key tools with which states can inculcate its citizens with a shared collective identity. Each generation transmits to the next its traditions, norms and values (Berghahn and Schissler 1987: 1–2; Pingel 1999: 7). No other instruments of socialisation can be compared to textbooks “in their capacity to convey a uniform, approved, even official version of what youth should believe” (Mehlinger 1985: 287). Textbooks are thus often implemented in order to promote a certain belief system and legitimise an established political and social order. In other words, the curriculum is never simply a neutral assemblage of knowledge incidentally appearing in the texts and classrooms. Rather, the selection and organisation of knowledge for schools is an ideological process that serves the interests of particular classes and social groups (Apple 1993: 1–14, 44–63). In his analysis of the US education system, Michael Apple has concluded that what counts as legitimate and official knowledge “is the result of complex power relations and struggles among identifiable class, race, gender/sex, and religious groups” (Apple and Smith 1991: 2–3). Both curricula and textbooks provide “battlegrounds” on which questions of power and cultural authority are contested (Lassig 2009: 4). The result is a reflection of the discourse of the hegemonic group in a society (Nasser 2005: 47). An analysis of school textbooks can therefore provide a window, or rather a mirror, through which the researcher can gain valuable insights as to the social and political parameters of a given society, its anxieties and trepidations as well as the processes of nation-building, identity construction and social change (Schissler and Soysal 2005: 7).