Modernity, State-Formation, Nation Building, and Education in Greece

Abstract

In Europe, North America, Asia, and certain countries of the Middle East, e.g., Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, and Cyprus, institutionalized education in schools and universities and more broadly paideia/culture, have been considered to be important mechanisms in the formation of modern states and the building of nations since the period of the Enlightenment in the closing decades of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. From this perspective, education has been examined both as a factor contributing to nation/state-building and as a function of it (Green, 1990). By the role of education in the process of state-formation and nation-building in modern democratic polities one understands its (education’s) role in cultivating social cohesion, citizenship, national culture, and national identity as well as in the education and training of personnel for the civil bureaucracy and the national and local state government apparatuses. This chapter investigates the formation of the modern nation-state of Greece and the role of education, both in the narrow sense of schooling and in the broader sense of paideia, in this nation-building process. The case of Greece represents an empireto-nation-state transformation, namely, the emergence and construction of a modern national state from the Ottoman Empire after a War of Independence in the 1820s. The affl atus for the political formation of the Greek nation-state and the concomitant formation of a national system of education was the Western European mixture of institutions and magma of signifi cations known as the Enlightenment, which, inter alia, included constitutionalism, republicanism, democracy, the notion of the ‘citizen’ (citoyen), progress, rationalism, liberty/freedom, secularism, nationalism, the nation-state, the separation of Church and State, and a national public/state system of education (Harvey, 1990). The method of approach of this study may be called ‘comparative historical analysis.’ Following an overview of the premodern traditional Ottoman Empire setting, the Greek nation-building historical trajectory will be examined, paying particular attention to the role of education in the modernization and concomitant nation-state building process. The key concepts in this historical analysis are empire, state, nation, modernity, modernization, westernization, Europeanization, secularism, education, democracy, education, and paideia.