Teaching the nation: history and nationalism in Polish school history education

This article aims to analyse Polish history teachers’ understanding of the role of teaching history. Drawing on the results of qualitative research conducted in Wroclaw, we argue that teachers see history education through the prism of nationalism. Teachers construct the past in equivocally nationalist terms. They regard nationalist representations of the past as taken for granted. Moreover, teachers reproduce a dominant nationalist discourse by using history to promote the idea of the homogeneous nation. We argue that teachers see their role primarily in terms of imposing the dominant structures of collective memory on the pupils. We also discuss the differences between teachers pertaining to the understanding of the concept of the nation, the way of teaching Polish history and the type of obligation towards the nation. We also demonstrate that teachers do not see a contradiction between history defined as an objective science and history understood as a ‘nationalising’ tool.     

对心理教育与思想教育相关性的思考

心理与思想具有内在的一致性,因而心理教育与思想教育相结合就具有必然性和重要意义。当前,面对各种社会思潮和纷繁复杂的心理、思想情况,如果把心理教育与思想教育有机地结合起来,那么二就能够相互补充,互相促进,共同提高,从而使心理和思想教育都收到事半功倍的效果。     

Multidirectional war narratives in history textbooks

This article aims to contribute to the field of textbook research by exploring a new approach in textbook analysis. Inspired by Michael Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory, this article examines multidirectional narratives in history textbooks: narratives that combine different histories, places and times in a productive way. They generate new meanings by combining histories and help us understand new, unknown situations by putting them in familiar frames of reference. The study of multidirectional textbook narratives precisely brings to light how authors make sense of the past and how continuity and meaning interact with interpretations of the present and the future. The analysis of multidirectional textbook narratives enables textbook researchers to examine how past experiences and future expectations are organised. To illustrate this, this article examines how textbook authors generated continuity and meaning by establishing narrative links between the past, the present and the future in English history textbooks for 11- to 14-year-old students in the 1920–1960 period. A case study presents the English defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588: how and why does the narration of the 1588 event interact with the narration of other historical events, and do these interactions change after the Second World War?     

Conceptualising the compulsory education policy apparatus: producing and reproducing risky subjectivities

A governmental research inquiry was conducted into the policy to raise the school leaving age in Western Australia. The study aimed to problematise the policy so as to identify and examine the rationale and intervening practices with young people who were deemed to be at-risk of not meeting the new school leaving age requirements. Drawing on interviews and policy documents, this paper elaborates the concept of ‘apparatus’ as defined by Foucault and Agamben to identify the contexts and consequences of the way the policy produced and reproduced an ‘at-risk’ youth subjectivity. The paper shows how a binary between school completers and non-completers emanated from a context about a crisis in falling retention and early school leaving, myopically focusing on NEET (Not in Employment, Education or Training) subjectivities as both the cause and solution to the policy objectives. Consequently, the policy apparatus is productive of the very circumstances it seeks to address, and therefore it recursively cycles around a problem it does not solve.     

From dictatorship to democracy: history of education in Spain

In a book published in 1995 providing an overview on the state of the art in European educational historiography in Europe, Marie-Madeleine Compère referring to post-Franco Spain, emphasised the “dynamism” and “the capacity to mobilise” that had arisen among Spanish researchers by “any collective initiative.” Moving on, this article intends to clarify: a) to what extent Compère is right; and b) what caused the changes in the Spanish educational historiography during the last four decades. It also deals with some of the prevailing trends and issues facing this academic and scientific field today.     

Buzzwords at play: gender,education, and political participation in Kenya

The discourse around development is full of buzzwords, including gender and a myriad of variants that underscore the importance of development policies addressing gender imbalances. Despite their prevalence in development policy and research, terminology related to gender is often used broadly, inappropriately, and without nuance. For international education policy in particular, discussions related to gender equality and equity in education are engaged in such a way that assumes shared meanings between policy designers and policy recipients. Using Kenya as a site of analysis, and in the spirit of a vertical case study for data collection, this study explores how the abstractness of a buzzword functions in the microcosm of the school classroom. In comparing gendered representations in textbooks with students' perceptions of those representations to explore how development discourse plays out in Kenyan schools, findings here demonstrate that there is minimal impact due to textbooks' mixed messages, reinforcing women's marginal position in community and political engagement and demonstrating that broad-based understandings of gender empowerment are not always translated in application.     

诚信教育是大学生思想政治工作的重要课题

诚实守信是一切道德的基础和根本。当前发生在大学校园的诚信缺失现象相当突出,考试作弊、剽窃论文、求职资料造假,不按期归还助学贷款、毕业生违约等现象时有发生。一些大学生诚信缺失,反映了公共理性与私人意识的矛盾、实用理性与超越意识的冲突以及“义”与“利”的对立。提高大学生的诚信水平是高校的一项长期而艰巨的任务。     

多元社会思潮视域下的高校思政理论教育审视

当今社会是多元社会思潮流传和交锋最为活跃的时代,高校思想政治理论教育面临着多元社会思潮的强烈冲击,要通过更新教育理念、丰富教学内容、改进教育方法、拓展教育渠道,积极推进思想政治理论教育的改革创新,主动回应各种社会思潮的挑战。     

Disciplining the conduct of young people in compulsory education policy and practice

Disciplining and pastoral power are central to the strategies and practices of intervening in the lives of young people deemed at risk of disengaging from school, or not completing their compulsory education. As an expression of power concerned with young people's welfare and self-improvement, disciplining and pastoral practices push young people towards greater responsibilism and employability. From 2004 to 2008, the State Government of Western Australia embarked on legislative change and policy implementation to increase the minimum compulsory school leaving age from 15 to 17. This facilitated a programme of interventions with some groups of young people deemed at risk of not meeting the newly minted minimum education requirements. Drawing on governmentality theory, research into this policy identifies and problematises its disciplining and pastoral practices. Interview data and policy documents are analysed to reveal the way that practices with young people, although framed as empowering and benign, worked to further connect them with the imperatives of neoliberalism.     

论古希腊音乐教育的历史地位和现实影响

古希腊音乐教育内容丰富,几乎包括了除体育以外的所有科目。古希腊人有一套特色的音乐教育理论,音乐教育被纳入哲学范畴里进行理解和定义。西方艺术音乐的历史渊源是古希腊音乐。古希腊音乐教育对人的素质形成和社会发展起到巨大的推动作用,它给现代教育体系和教育内容改革以启迪。     

In search for the ideological roots of non-formal environment-related education in Finland: the case of Helsinki Humane Society before World War II

So far the research on historical environment-related education has focused on scientific rather than ‘humanistic’ (including Romantic and religious) educational approaches and ideologies. In the field of non-formal education implemented by associations these have, however, been common. We used content analysis to study two membership magazines of a prominent Finnish animal welfare organization, Helsinki Humane Society, before the Second World War. Our results show that the educational ideology of Helsinki Humane Society was based on romanticist and humane ideas. They emphasized especially the development of a human being’s total personality and a kindness-to-animals ethic as a solution to social problems. In the early 1900s, humane education seems to have been an effective way of advancing the animal welfare cause, but its importance declined by the 1930s. We believe that today’s environmental and sustainability educators could benefit from a better understanding of how historical animal welfare organizations were able to combine romantic and humane ideas with environmental goals.     

The representation of the Cold War in three Estonian history textbooks

The article looks at the discursive strategies different Estonian history textbooks employ to represent the Cold War period, and the ‘commonsense’ ideologies instilled through these representations. The textbooks analysed include two history books dating back to the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic and, for contrast, one written during the second period of Estonia’s independence. This lends the analysis a temporal perspective, making it possible to look at the changes over time and differences between the attitudes projected. The study focuses on the rhetoric and metaphors used in connection with the Cold War period. The practices of different textbooks are compared to one another using discourse analysis. The purpose is to bring out the commonsense elements of the textbooks’ discourse. The goal is to understand the ideological processes in these texts’ discourse and how they (in)directly intend to shape the reader’s worldview through language and rhetoric.     

The history of secondary education in History of Education

History of Education has published a steady stream of papers on the history of secondary education over the first 40 years of its existence. This corpus of research has been generated in the context of renewed interest in the history of secondary education that has been stimulated by developments in social and historical inquiry as well as by the contemporary onset of intensive reform of secondary education in many countries. History of Education has made a distinguished contribution to this new literature, especially in relation to an understanding of the secondary school curriculum, elite forms of secondary education, and increasingly in relation to secondary education for girls and secondary education policy. Some other key themes and topics have been generally less to the fore and require further detailed investigation.     

Case studies in history education: thinking action research through an epistemological framework

ABSTRACT

Key studies in history education (from France and the USA) are discussed and compared in order to explore their methodological issues in terms of the types of knowledge they can generate about teaching and learning. An epistemological framework that relates the history of historians as an inquiry to that of the classroom provides the criteria for this comparative analysis, which is inscribed in Abbott’s epistemologico-institutional social sciences analysis through the identification of two basic debates that structure history education research, namely subject-matter knowledge vs pedagogical practices, and teaching and learning rules of methods vs habits of thinking. This analysis points out the conditions for the development of a formative school history inquiry (to have students work on their own explanations, to put into play their set of beliefs about history), which determine the modalities of a specific action research. These modalities are detailed by the example of an action research on the case of the teaching of the French Revolution in the last grade of primary school: the sharing of pedagogical (by the professor) and academic (by the researchers) decisions, the collective production of data throughout the process.     

Higher education and the marketization of compulsory schooling: english universities and academy sponsorship

ABSTRACT

Recent policy emphasis on market mechanisms to drive up the performance of education systems has resulted in rising fees and increased competition in higher education in England, and in the creation of different types of self-governing state-funded schools run independently of municipal authority in compulsory schooling. University sponsorship of Charter Schools in the US raises issues which this article examines in relation to university sponsorship of academies in England. The article provides a quantitative overview of university sponsorship of academies over the last decade and explores how the policy context has shaped the discursive construction of sponsorship by the institutions concerned. Different patterns of sponsorship linked to institutional position and differentiated discourses of ‘sponsorship’ consistent with ‘academic entrepreneurship’ are identified. The discursive function of sponsorship is argued to extend to a legitimation of the policy itself reflected in increasing government pressure on universities to sponsor academies.     

论高校形势与政策课程的思想政治教育功能

高校形势与政策课程是大学生思想政治教育的重要途径之一,它担负着高校思想政治教育的重要功能,因此提高形势与政策课程思想政治教育功能的实效性具有重大的现实意义和长远的战略意义。     

The sublime objects of education policy: quality,equity and ideology

Quality and equity are touchstones of education policy in the twenty-first century in a range of global contexts. On the surface, this seems fitting: after all, who could object to more quality and greater equity in education? Yet what do we mean by quality and equity, and how are they related? This paper draws on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to argue that not only are quality and equity far more complex than education policy formulations typically imply, but also that despite their elevated place in policy debates they remain elusive, serving as sublime objects that function as sites for the investment of desire, while simultaneously covering over and compensating for the ultimate impossibility of a complete and harmonious society. The paper argues that it is a result of their occupying this empty place, and through their holding out the (illusive) promise of enjoyment, rather than as a consequence of their specific or intrinsic content, that sublime objects such as equity and quality exert their particular ideological force.     

Review of periodical literature on the history of education published in 2016

This review considers the periodical literature on the history of education published in 2016. It discusses general long-term trends in the field, but focuses mainly on the key areas of research in 2016 itself. The review is divided into several sections: ancient, medieval and early modern history; schooling and education policy; the history of universities and vocational education; histories of literacy, biography and gender; race, ethnicity and colonialism; youth and youth movements; science, medicine, health and welfare; and textbooks and the history curriculum.     

The duration of compulsory education and the transition to secondary education: Panel data evidence from low-income countries

A straightforward way of keeping children in school is increasing the duration of compulsory education. Evidence of the impact of this type of policy in Western countries is abundant. However, its effectiveness has been rarely tested in low-income countries. Using panel data of low-income and lower-middle-income countries covering the period 1996–2017, this paper analyzes the impact of lengthening the duration of compulsory education on the progression of children from primary to secondary education. The empirical results show that in those countries where this policy is implemented, there is a significant increase in the share of children progressing from primary to secondary education but only in those countries where after the reform the duration of compulsory education becomes longer than the duration of primary education.     

当前我国高校双语教学政策的发展初探

本文梳理了我国高校双语教学政策的历史脉络,剖析了当前我国高校双语教学政策面临的现实挑战,指出双语教学的相关立法应在适当的时候被提到议事日程使双语教学有法可依,以更好促进我国双语教学的良性发展。