The impact of Albanian schools in the Nation-building process

Abstract

Education is often perceived as an individual will of citizens to become part of the social edifice, in which they learn the history of their ancestors and their country despite of the political sphere. In this paper I’ll try to argue that not only education isn’t an independent category of knowledge, but also that the whole process of learning is marked and shaped by a given political goal, namely the construction of a solid social space which defines our political identity as members of a community. A further study of the historical contexts in which education gave birth to a unified social community will give an answer to the issue if education is a field deprived of any political argument but only objective truths, or if this field performs specific functions to unify a functionally divided society and its mission comes from outside the education system. This issue will be treated through a comparative analysis between two opposite scholars of nationalism such as Isa Blumi and Denisa Kostovicova. Firstly I’ll try to argue the impact of schools and mass education on the construction of national myths from the perspective of the contemporary theories of nationalism which will be explained in the discussion between the primordialist (learning has always existed and it contains historical truths despite of the political sphere with the final mission of nationally promoting mother tongue) and the instrumentalist (learning is shaped as a political instrument with a specific function) viewpoint.