History Education at the Edge of the Nation: Political Autonomy, Educational Reforms, and Memory-shaping in European Periphery 3031272455, 9783031272455

Table of contents :
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
List of Tables
Introduction: Denationalising and Reinventing Historical Education—In a Time of History Wars
The History Curriculum: A Focus of Conflict and a Source of Insight
History and Memories Juxtaposed in the Education Context: The Difficult Journey of Narrative Autonomy
Outline of the Book
Canons, Shared Values and Diversity: Future Prospects
References
Part I: Identity Politics, Educational Governance, and the History Curriculum
A Nation-Building Tool Under Pressure?: “Invisible Nations”, European Integration and History Teaching after 1945
Cultural Pluralism and History Teaching: Towards a Polycentric Outlook
Towards a Topography of National Mythologies and Multiple Loyalties. Fragmented Landscapes and Forced Solidarities
The Awakening of Multiple Identities: An Ideological-Political Chronology
From International Understanding to Diversity Training? The Influence of Transnational Bodies and Networks
Regional Revival and History Curricula at the Turn of the Millennium: The Crossed Influences of Deregulation and Identity Politics
The 2000s: The Ambiguities of the “Renationalisation” of History Teaching
References
Websites
The Teaching of History in Schools in South Tyrol, from 1945 to the Present Day: From Promoting Identity to Building a Common History
From Austria to Italy
Birth of the Italian Republic, German-Speaking Schools and the Teaching of History
A Battle over Books
The Second Statute of Autonomy and Re-establishment of Local Identity
From “Autonomous Patriotism” to a “Shared History”?
Archival Sources
References
Secondary Literature
Websites
History Education in Luxembourg’s Secondary Schools in the 1950s–1970s: Ideas and Experiments
Introduction
Ideas of Trainee Teachers in the 1950s
Pupil and Teacher Ideas in the 1960s
Experiments by Trainee Teachers in the 1970s
Conclusion
References
Student Theses (National Archives of Luxembourg)
Laws and Decrees
Handbooks
Secondary Literature
Other
Challenges of Teaching History for the Bosniak Ethnic Community/National Minority in the Republic of Serbia Within the Post-Conflict Setting
Introduction
The Status of National Minorities According to the Legal System of the Republic of Serbia
A Nation Forged in Times of War—Contents and Controversies for History Teaching
Present-Day Situation: Narratives Outside the Classroom
History Teaching for the Bosniak National Minority in the Republic of Serbia—State of Play
Approval of Curricula and Textbooks/Additional Teaching Materials for the Bosniak Minority
References
Swedish School Curricula and Sámi Self-Identification: The Syllabus from 1960s to 2011
Segregational Education, Broken Down by the Ideal of Democratisation
Confusing Curricula and Marginalised Sámi Content Make Teaching More Difficult
The Intentions of Sámi Education in Relation to Its Identity-Creating Message
Tensions Regarding Identity Creation in Curriculum for Sámi Schools
The Position and Rights of “the Other”
Cultural Epithet in Curricula Content Creates Deviant Sámi-ness
Conclusions
References
State Regulations and Inquiries
Part II: Competing Narratives in History Schoolbooks and Teaching Arrangements
Local and National History in Schoolbooks in South Tyrol from the End of the Second World War to the Present Day
History, Schooling, Identity
The Matter of Textbooks After the Second World War
Textbooks in the Sixties
History Textbooks in Schools According to the Second Statute of Autonomy
A Look at the Present Situation
References
Handbooks
Secondary Literature
From Petite to Grande Patrie: The Valle d’Aosta History as Told to Children
At the Borders of the Italian State
A Textbook for Aosta Valley Schools
Legitimising the Special Statute
The Young Generation, Identity and History
References
Sources
Secondary Literature
French School Textbooks on the History of Alsace in the Twentieth Century
A ‘Frenchified’ History During the Interwar Period
After the Second World War
A New Approach at the End of the Twentieth Century
Conclusion
References
Unpublished Sources
Online Sources
Secondary Literature
Part III: Managing Complexity and Multiperspectivity in the History Classroom
Teaching Sami Pasts and Presents: Complexities in Teaching Practice in Contemporary Swedish Classrooms
Politics, Education, and Minority Histories
Minorities and Compulsory Schooling
Sami Pasts and Presents as Controversial Topics?
Educationalisation, Recontextualisation and Remediation
Teaching Sami Pasts and Presents
Methods
Teacher Education and the Lack of Knowledge
Teachers’ Needs
The Issue of Teaching Materials
Concluding Remarks
Excursus: The Practical Outcome of the Interviews
References
Narration and Equivocation: Locating State, Nation and Empire in the Pre-university History Examination Syllabi of England and Scotland
Introduction: Identity and Equivocation
Britain as State, Britain as Place: When Was Britain?
Education, Nationhood and the State
Research Design
Data and Discussion
Syllabuses in Overview
In-Depth Analysis
The Reformation
Empire
The Twentieth Century
Discussion and Conclusions
Appendix (Table 3)
References
Regional Language and Culture Teaching in Alsace from 1982 to 2022: To What Extent Can Language Education and History Education Be Synonyms?
Introduction
Why Do Pupils/Students/Other Learners Have Little or No Real Knowledge of the Sociolinguistic Situation of Alsace?
Regional History Is Not Taught in Schools
How “History” and “Languages” Are Articulated in Alsace
Global Evolution of Language Uses in Alsace
Discourses on Languages/Discourses on Nation(alism)s
Before 1945
After 1945
Language Practices in Alsace Since 1945
Alsatian Teaching/Teaching Alsatian
Positions in Alsatian Society Towards Language-Culture Teaching at School
Institutional Positions: Public Authorities and the Educational System
Positions Towards History Education in the Alsatian Society in General
The Role of University Teaching
Conclusion
References

Citation preview

GLOBAL HISTORIES OF EDUCATION

History Education at the Edge of the Nation Political Autonomy, Educational Reforms, and Memory-shaping in European Periphery

Edited by Piero S. Colla Andrea Di Michele

Global Histories of Education Series Editors

Christian Ydesen Department of Culture and Learning Aalborg University Aalborg, Denmark Eugenia Roldan Vera Cinvestav-Coapa Mexico City, Estado de México, Mexico Klaus Dittrich Literature and Cultural Studies Education University of Hong Kong Tai Po, Hong Kong Linda Chisholm Education Rights and Transformation University of Johannesburg Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa

We are very pleased to announce the ISCHE Global Histories of Education book series. The International Standing Conference for the History of Education has organized conferences in the field since 1978. Thanks to our collaboration with Palgrave Macmillan we now offer an edited book series for the publication of innovative scholarship in the history of education. This series seeks to engage with historical scholarship that analyzes education within a global, world, or transnational perspective. Specifically, it seeks to examine the role of educational institutions, actors, technologies as well as pedagogical ideas that for centuries have crossed regional and national boundaries. Topics for publication may include the study of educational networks and practices that connect national and colonial domains, or those that range in time from the age of Empire to decolonization. These networks could concern the international movement of educational policies, curricula, pedagogies, or universities within and across different socio-political settings. The ‘actors’ under examination might include individuals and groups of people, but also educational apparatuses such as textbooks, built-environments, and bureaucratic paperwork situated within a global perspective. Books in the series may be single authored or edited volumes. The strong transnational dimension of the Global Histories of Education series means that many of the volumes should be based on archival research undertaken in more than one country and using documents written in multiple languages. All books in the series will be published in English, although we welcome English-language proposals for manuscripts which were initially written in other languages and which will be translated into English at the cost of the author. All submitted manuscripts will be blind peer-reviewed with editorial decisions to be made by the ISCHE series editors who themselves are appointed by the ISCHE Executive Committee to serve three to five year terms. Full submissions should include: (1) a proposal aligned to the Palgrave Book Proposal form (downloadable here); (2) the CV of the author(s) or editor(s); and, (3) a cover letter that explains how the proposed book fits into the overall aims and framing of the ISCHE Global Histories of Education book series. Proposals and queries should be addressed to [email protected]. Preliminary inquiries are welcome and encouraged.

Piero S. Colla  •  Andrea Di Michele Editors

History Education at the Edge of the Nation Political Autonomy, Educational Reforms, and Memory-shaping in European Periphery

Editors Piero S. Colla Department of Dutch and Scandinavian Studies University of Strasbourg Strasbourg, France

Andrea Di Michele Faculty of Education Free University of Bozen-Bolzano Bressanone, Italy

ISSN 2731-6408     ISSN 2731-6416 (electronic) Global Histories of Education ISBN 978-3-031-27245-5    ISBN 978-3-031-27246-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27246-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Panther Media GmbH/Alamy This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

I ntroduction: Denationalising and Reinventing Historical Education—In a Time of History Wars  1 Piero S. Colla and Andrea Di Michele Part I Identity Politics, Educational Governance, and the History Curriculum  15  Nation-Building Tool Under Pressure?: “Invisible Nations”, A European Integration and History Teaching after 1945 17 Piero S. Colla  he Teaching of History in Schools in South Tyrol, from T 1945 to the Present Day: From Promoting Identity to Building a Common History 51 Andrea Di Michele  istory Education in Luxembourg’s Secondary Schools in the H 1950s–1970s: Ideas and Experiments 79 Machteld Venken

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CONTENTS

 hallenges of Teaching History for the Bosniak Ethnic C Community/National Minority in the Republic of Serbia Within the Post-Conflict Setting101 Marko Šuica and Ana Radakovic ́  wedish School Curricula and Sámi Self-­Identification: S The Syllabus from 1960s to 2011125 Charlotta Svonni and Lina Spjut Part II Competing Narratives in History Schoolbooks and Teaching Arrangements 149  ocal and National History in Schoolbooks in South Tyrol L from the End of the Second World War to the Present Day151 Roberta Mira  rom Petite to Grande Patrie: The Valle d’Aosta History F as Told to Children181 Marco Cuaz  rench School Textbooks on the History of Alsace in the F Twentieth Century195 Eric Ettwiller Part III Managing Complexity and Multiperspectivity in the History Classroom 219  eaching Sami Pasts and Presents: Complexities in Teaching T Practice in Contemporary Swedish Classrooms221 Anna-Lill Drugge and Björn Norlin

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 arration and Equivocation: Locating State, Nation and N Empire in the Pre-university History Examination Syllabi of England and Scotland245 Arthur Chapman and Joe Smith Regional Language and Culture Teaching in Alsace from 1982 to 2022: To What Extent Can Language Education and History Education Be Synonyms?273 Pascale Erhart, Dominique Huck, and Sarah Ochsenbein

Notes on Contributors

Arthur  Chapman is Associate Professor of History in Education at University College London (UCL) Institute of Education, UK. He taught history and related subjects for 12 years before becoming an academic and he has worked in the universities of Cumbria, Edge Hill and London. Piero S. Colla  is a historian and sociologist who trained in Bologna and holds a doctorate from EHESS (Paris). He is a lecturer at the University of Strasbourg (“Northern European Political Models”) and a researcher attached to the AGORA and Germanic and Northern European Worlds laboratories (Paris and Strasbourg). Since 2006, he has been an official of the European Economic and Social Committee (Brussels). His research interests include the symbolism of the nation and collective identity, the cultural dimension of the welfare state in Scandinavia and the interaction between memory, school reforms and curriculum design in civic education and history. On this last subject, he has been co-leading a seminar entitled “A crisis in the teaching of history in Europe?” (Paris, ENS). He has also been the initiator of several collective works focusing on the comparison of history teaching experiences, in multicultural and minority contexts. His books and articles (which have appeared in Italian, French, English and Swedish) deal with comparative education and the ethos of the welfare state in northern Europe—from education to family policy and urban design. Since 2021, he has been a member of the Scientific Advisory Council of the Council of Europe’s Observatory on History Teaching in Europe.

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Marco Cuaz  is Adjunct Professor of Modern History at the Aosta Valley University, Italy. Among his books include Alle frontiere dello Stato. La scuola elementare in Valle d’Aosta dalla restaurazione al fascismo (Milano: Angeli, 1988); Le nuove di Francia. L’immagine della rivoluzione francese nella stampa periodica italiana (Torino: Meynier, 1990); Valle d’Aosta. Storia di un’immagine (Bari: Laterza, 1994); Alle radici di un’identità. Studi di storia valdostana (Aosta: Le Château, 1996); Le Alpi (Bologna: il Mulino, 2005); I rumori del mondo. Saggi sulla storia dell’alpinismo e l’uso pubblico delle montagne (Aosta: Le Château, 2011); Storie valdostane (ancora da raccontare) (Aosta: La Vallée, 2021). Andrea  Di  Michele  is Associate Professor in Modern History in the Faculty of Education at Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy. His research focuses on the history of fascism in Italy, particularly in the border areas, on the policies of the Italian state towards linguistic minorities, on the history of republican Italy, on the history of Italians in the AustroHungarian Empire and on Italian-Austrian relations. He is a member of the scientific committee of the Istituto Nazionale Ferruccio Parri—Rete degli Istituti per la storia della Resistenza e dell’età contemporanea, Milan, and a board member of the Società Italiana per la Storia Contemporanea dell’Area di Lingua Tedesca (SISCALT). His past work includes Rethinking Fascism. The Italian and German Dictatorships (ed. with F. Focardi, Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 2022); La difficile riappacificazione. Italia, Austria e Alto Adige nel XX secolo (ed. with A. Gottsmann, L. Monzali, K. Ruzicic-Kessler, Roma: Viella, 2022); Tra due divise. La Grande Guerra degli italiani d’Austria (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2018). Published also in German and in Russian); Storia dell’Italia repubblicana 1948–2008 (Milano: Garzanti, 2008 [reprint 2015]). Anna-Lill Drugge  is Senior Lecturer in Sámi Studies in the Department of Language Studies at Umeå University, Sweden. Her research interests include research ethics, gender, education and critical perspectives on Sámi research in both historical and contemporary perspectives. Pascale Erhart  is Senior Lecturer (Maître de Conférences) in Dialectology and Sociolinguistics and head of the Alsatian and Mosellan dialectology section at the University of Strasbourg, France (http://dialectologie.unistra.fr/; Facebook: Département de dialectologie alsacienne et mosellane— Unistra). Her research focuses on the use of dialect speeches in the Alsatian media, as well as on language attitudes and ideologies in general. She is

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also in charge of promoting the training in standard and dialectal German for students who want to become teachers in primary schools in Alsace, since teaching German is mandatory for them. Eric Ettwiller  defended in 2017 a thesis on “The Secondary Teaching of Girls in Alsace-Lorraine and in the Academy of Nancy from 1871 to 1940” from the University of Strasbourg, France. He is an Agrégé in History and a secondary school teacher in Sélestat/Schlettstadt. Since 2019, he has also chaired the Unsri Gschìcht Association (Our History, in Alsatian), which promotes a history of Alsace free of nationalist clichés, particularly in the field of memory. Dominique Huck  is Professor Emeritus and former head of the Alsatian and Mosellan dialectology section at the University of Strasbourg, France. His work is rooted in the field of dialectology, sociolinguistics and language policies, particularly in the field of education, especially in the Alsatian area. He is the author, among others, of Une histoire des langues de l’Alsace (La Nuée Bleue, 2015), and the scientific co-editor and one of the contributors of “Droits linguistiques” et “droits à la langue”. Identification d’un objet d’étude et construction d’une approche (Lambert-Lucas, 2016). Roberta Mira  holds a PhD in Modern and Contemporary History and is Adjunct Professor of History of Mass Communication at the University of Bologna, Italy. Her main research interests include Fascist movements, war violence, memory studies and didactics of history. Björn Norlin  is Associate Professor (Docent) of History and Education in the Department of Education at Umeå University, Sweden. He is currently involved in several publications and activities concerning Sámi educational history, historical justice and history education, as well as the role of history and educational history in contemporary reconciliation processes. Sarah Ochsenbein  is a German teacher in the Académie de Strasbourg and taught Alsatian dialects and culture at the University of Strasbourg, France, from 2017 to 2022. Drawing on her own teaching experience, her research focuses on the teaching of non-standard languages, and mainly on the teaching of Alsatian to young adults. The question of spelling and variation is particularly central to her research. Ana Radaković  is a PhD student and research assistant in the Department of History at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade. She is currently working on the thesis “European Dimension and Development of Historical

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Consciousness in History Teaching in Serbia (1990–2020)”. She assists the courses at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade: history didactics and initial teacher training. She is a vice-­ president of the organisation “Education for the 21st Century”, a member of the Research Steering Committee for the project Learning History that is not yet History II done by the European Association of History Educators (EuroClio) and a researcher in the “Museum of the nineties” initiative. Joe Smith  is Lecturer in History Education at the University of Stirling, UK. He holds a Doctorate in Education from Keele University and was previously employed as History PGCE Course Leader at Edge Hill University, Lancashire. Before moving into higher education, he was head of History at a Liverpool comprehensive school. Lina Spjut  is an associate professor in the Department of Education at Umeå University, Sweden. She defended her thesis on pedagogy at Örebro University in 2018 but has since then worked at Umeå University as a postdoc and associate professor. Spjut’s research focus is on nineteenth- to twenty-first-century compulsory schooling in Sweden and Finland, textbooks, Swedish national minorities, curriculum theory and critical discourse analysis. Marko  Šuica  is a professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, Serbia. His domain of expertise includes mediaeval Balkan history, history didactics, curricula design and assessment. He is active in educational projects and teacher trainings on national, regional and international levels. He is the author of several books, textbooks, additional teaching materials, education standards and history curricula. He is a consultant on the Council of Europe anti-discrimination and national minorities programmes, member of Scientific Advisory Council of Observatory on History teaching in Europe and member of European Association of History Educators (EuroClio) and the International Society for History Didactics. Charlotta Svonni  is Doctoral Student in History of Education at Umeå University, Sweden, and affiliated to Várdduo, Centre for Sámi Research. Her dissertation project is on the education system for Sámi’s in Sweden within the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The focus of Svonni’s research field is curriculum theory, Sámi education and Sámi’s educational rights in relation to national and international laws and regulations. Svonni shall defend her thesis in 2023.

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Machteld Venken  is Professor of Contemporary Transnational History and head of the research unit on Contemporary History of Luxembourg at the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH), Luxembourg. She studied Slavic languages and cultures, European studies and history in Belgium, Poland and Ukraine. Venken holds a PhD in 2008 from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, and Habilitation in 2018 from the University of Vienna, Austria. Her main research interests are transnational, transregional and comparative histories of Europe, migration, borderlands, oral history, the history of families and children and citizen science.

List of Figures

The Teaching of History in Schools in South Tyrol, from 1945 to the Present Day: From Promoting Identity to Building a Common History Fig. 1 Language distribution in South Tyrol and Trentino. Source: wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Language_distribution_in_South_Tyrol_and_Trentino.png53

Challenges of Teaching History for the Bosniak Ethnic Community/National Minority in the Republic of Serbia Within the Post-Conflict Setting Fig. 1 Front cover of the History textbook for the 7th grade in Bosnian language. Publisher: Klett

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French School Textbooks on the History of Alsace in the Twentieth Century Fig. 1 Illustration from Histoire d’Alsace (1946). The choice, to evoke the eighteenth century, of a ceremony celebrating the “reunion” of Alsace with France, intends to show the adherence of the population to its French destiny Fig. 2 Illustration from Histoire d’Alsace (1946). The caption, “The Alsatians left Alsace en masse to avoid becoming Germans”, suggests an exodus of the majority of the population, which is far from the reality

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List of Figures

Teaching Sami Pasts and Presents: Complexities in Teaching Practice in Contemporary Swedish Classrooms Fig. 1 Repatriation and reburial of Sami remains in a ceremony in Lycksele, August 9, 2019 (the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples). Sami skeletons—mostly skulls—were dug up from burial sites in both Sweden and other parts of Sápmi during the nineteenth century and up to the 1950s, in order to facilitate research into archaeology, craniology and race biology. This was done with the complicity of local priests and often without consent of the local Sami community. The remains were later deposited in various institutions and museums. Since 2007, official demands to set up public institutions for Sami remains and return them to their original burial grounds have been raised by Sami organisations (Ojala 2016). The repatriation of Sami remains—from 25 individuals—in Lycksele involved several stakeholders but was also a part of the reconciliation processes between the Church of Sweden and the Sami. It marks the biggest large-­scale repatriation in Sweden up to the present day. Photo: Petter Engman (Västerbottens museum)

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Narration and Equivocation: Locating State, Nation and Empire in the Pre-university History Examination Syllabi of England and Scotland Fig. 1 English, Scottish and British History in the Scottish and English Pre-University Syllabus Documents: overview

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Regional Language and Culture Teaching in Alsace from  1982 to 2022: To What Extent Can Language Education and History Education Be Synonyms? Fig. 1 Bilingual street sign in Strasbourg

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List of Tables

Swedish School Curricula and Sámi Self-­Identification; the Syllabus from 1960s to 2011 Table 1 Provisions from Section 1 of Lsam11 and Lgr11, “Fundamental values and tasks of the school”

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Narration and Equivocation: Locating State, Nation and Empire in the Pre-university History Examination Syllabi of England and Scotland Table 1 Topics related to the British Empire and the geographical context to which they are allocated by SQA Table 2 The Twentieth Century coverage in all four specifications Table 3 Timeline of England and Scotland’s constitutional relationship

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Introduction: Denationalising and Reinventing Historical Education—In a Time of History Wars Piero S. Colla and Andrea Di Michele

The History Curriculum: A Focus of Conflict and a Source of Insight This book looks at the complicated relationship between political conflict, social memory and history teaching in schools, in a cross-border perspective: a topic that has already attracted a significant and broad corpus of literature.1 However, the questions and methodological reflection around 1

 Among the most representative and recent examples, see Delgado and Mycock (2023).

P. S. Colla (*) Department of Dutch and Scandinavian Studies, University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France e-mail: [email protected] A. Di Michele Faculty of Education, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bressanone, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. S. Colla, A. Di Michele (eds.), History Education at the Edge of the Nation, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27246-2_1

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which this book revolves occur at a particular juncture of the European debate on this issue. The question of teaching history in schools has in fact become a gauge of the tension and identitarian unease emerging in advanced societies in a more general manner. In the sphere of social sciences and pedagogy, the possibility of teaching history—or, in other words, the legitimacy crisis that affects the subject—represents a leitmotif of the 2020s. A quick glance at some of the most recent conference titles— Why history education?,2 A future without history teaching?3—is sufficient to confirm this claim. That such a state of mind should evoke alarm among professional historians is not surprising, even though this distress is paradoxically contradicted by the growing popularity of history (or rather, the  uses of the past4) in the public sphere. But similar concerns are also beginning to spread through the political world: reflecting the fact that history teaching retains a significant identity-making value, as well as the transnational character of the epistemological tensions that it seems to be experiencing. There are too many examples to list here. It is enough to mention the open letters and public petitions in the last three or four years that (in countries like Italy, France, Spain or the United Kingdom) have shared the common denominator of concern regarding the precarious position of the subject in school curricula, with the sensation that this position is no longer guaranteed in the face of current educational imperatives. A conceptual unease is fostered by the bitter conflicts around curricular topics in

2  International Society for History Didactics, Lucerne 16–18 September 2021 https:// www.phlu.ch/_Resources/Persistent/b/3/4/8/b348b9a25c615663c36b0ce7722c096300dda242/Programm_14.9.21.pdf (accessed on 4 April 2023). 3  Council of Europe, Strasbourg 1–2 December 2022 https://www.coe.int/en/web/ obser vator y-histor y-teaching/-/-a-future-without-histor y-teaching-ohte-annual-­ conference-­opens-registrations (accessed on 4 April 2023). 4  L’histoire n’est peut-être nulle part, mais le passé partout (“History, maybe, is no longer found anywhere: but the past is omnipresent”. P. Nora, Presentation). “Le Débat”, La culture du passé, 5, 2013, p. 3.

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history teaching and the approach to be favoured (Identity-making? Academic? Preparatory to civic education?).5 In 2020, the establishment of the “Observatory on History Teaching in Europe” by the Council of Europe was a response to the Europe-wide difficulty in asserting the importance of the subject and the feared repercussions of this for society: in terms of self-awareness, respect of otherness, comprehension and communication between generations.6 The problem underlying this unease, which is shared by the university world and education governance, can be summed up in two questions: “Which history is really legitimate?” and “What type of mental relationship with the past is history teaching required to establish?” In the twentieth century, conflicts on the educational use of history were concentrated on a dichotomy of a social nature: the juxtaposition of history of subaltern classes versus institutional history; today, however, the epistemological identity of the subject is challenged by a multiplicity of alternative claims. A radical hypothesis, raised by the Council of Europe following the tragedy of the Second World War—would it not be better to abandon history teaching in schools entirely? (Beer 1997)—seems to have surreptitiously made its way back. Which is, in fact, the legitimate referent in the teaching of this subject? While most controversies over curricula are still directed against the state, which is perceived as the main regulating and controlling agent, history teaching is moving away from dominant master narratives in many national communities. In recent decades, other narratives (regional and territorial) have proliferated from national minorities, which in some cases represent the majority of the local population and at times are in open conflict with the national narrative. In public memorials, in the choice of 5  We cite, for the Italian context, the appeal “La storia è un bene comune” (History is a common good), signed by three leading figures and publicised by the newspaper “La Repubblica” (25 April  2019,  https://www.repubblica.it/robinson/2019/04/25/news/ la_storia_e_un_bene_comune_salviamola-224857998/ accessed on 28 May 2023) or—in a completely different political context—the strong criticism from universities that greeted the concentration of history curricula in secondary schools on the contemporary age, as decided by the Sanchez government in Spain (2022). Regarding Great Britain, reference can be made to the annual reports published by the Historical Association (https://www.history.org.uk/ secondary/categories/409/news/4014/historical-association-secondary-survey-2021). 6  https://www.coe.int/en/web/observatory-history-teaching. It is no less symptomatic that—faced with this initiative by the French government—a significant number of governments (Italy, Germany, all of northern Europe) have decided not to take part for the moment.

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museums and cultural institutes, as well as in the disputes which, from the 1970s and 1980s onward, mark the return of historical narratives that have been downtrodden or discriminated against in society, the nation-­ state is now one figure among many. In addition, it more often seems to be on the defensive rather than emerging as a subject of celebration. In this perspective, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 contributed to unifying Europe, extending to the post-communist area the nemesis and democratic revindications of minorities  who had suffered neglect, discrimination, or persecution. Yet the process is anything but linear, as it has seen the prominent arrival of a reverse phenomenon of reassertion—and institutional legitimisation—of the nation-state as a community of destiny. The cases of the Western Balkans, Hungary and Poland are, in this sense, representative.7 What has been defined as the process of “Europeanisation” of historical memories—characterised by the central role of the victim—is a phenomenon that simultaneously builds bridges between national memory cultures, and fractures them internally (Pakier and Stråth 2010). As we know, the relationship between historical memories (or rather, between layers of belonging: ideological, ethnic, local) does not allow compromises, since such memories are by definition categoric and insensitive to the feelings of others. It is as though the tensions that run through the concept of citizenship, the role of the state or the reduced social mobility, all take the shape of representations of the past. History will remember these years as those in which America’s “History Wars” (Guyver and Taylor 2012), the conflict over legitimate historical memory, invaded the European public sphere and created tensions around its entire historic and symbolic heritage.8 It is probable that only warning signs of this entropy are visible. In the long term, it could turn out to be a parenthesis, but one which (paraphrasing Nora’s introduction to Realms of Memory 30 years ago) forms part of the history of “our” time.9 Any reflection on the contemporary era must take this into consideration.

 For a comparative approach, cf. Maissen and May (2021).  For the impact of these disputes on contemporary British consciousness, cf. Evans (2021). 9  La tyrannie de la mémoire n’aura duré qu’un temps - mais c’était le nôtre (“The tyranny of the historic memory will have lasted for one era only, but that era is ours”. Nora 1996). 7 8

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History and Memories Juxtaposed in the Education Context: The Difficult Journey of Narrative Autonomy The problem mentioned above is particularly relevant—even though the issue remains partially invisible to the collective consciousness—in a sphere that for two centuries has represented the symbolic projection of the national project: the school system and the historical canon that it endorses. It would be rash and anachronistic to claim that this problem is unprecedented. Since the two world wars, and the politics of ethnic and cultural cleansing that they aroused, the national foundation of history curricula has been questioned, provoking calls for reform initiatives and raising disputes. Since that time, recognition and respect of otherness have been transformed—from a blind spot of teaching into a common rule to be followed. This is demonstrated in the first essay (by Piero S. Colla) of this book, which highlights the uninterrupted succession of international agreements and resolutions by political entities on this aspect. In fact, it is now possible to frame the phenomenon retrospectively, historicising it and assessing it in different contexts, beginning with those—invoked in this book—where the conceptually revolutionary notion (le roman national, “the national novel”) seems to have disappeared from the picture. In countries like Belgium, two different national histories have been taught since 1989: the canons, just like the management of education and curricula drafting, are completely distinct between the two main language communities of the country, in Flanders and Wallonia. Since the 1990s, there have also been different national curricula in England and Wales, and since the 1980s, the breadth and approach of regional history canons in the autonomous Spanish communities has been a constant topic of innovation and debate. Since 2022, in the traditionally centralist Kingdom of Sweden, 64 of 247 curricular pages have been dedicated to teaching for minorities (Skolverket 2022). It seems undeniable that “Europe of the regions” that stemmed from the Maastricht Treaty also made a deep impact on the teaching of history. However, it did so in a particular way: disjointed, unstable and often without the awareness of the general public (outside of the region in question or adjacent countries). School history teaching is in fact a subject of

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disputes analogous to the intrafamilial querelles:10 despite extending over a long-term period (as in the case of the neo-Bourbon récit in Italy or the most politically relevant tensions surrounding the legacy of colonialism), they remain generally invisible, if not actually incomprehensible, beyond a specific geopolitical sphere. It should again be highlighted that this process of partial fragmentation of history teaching occurred in varying ways and at different times, and particularly regards Western Europe, where the first sporadic examples date back to as early as the nineteenth century. This heterogeneity is not surprising, given that the autonomist claims develop from different premises, with the variable impact of forced migrations, particularly during the last world war. While it is difficult to achieve an overall view, a clear realisation inspired this book project: the growing abundance of data and critical reflections on the impact of diversity in teaching and a focus, no less revealing, on the remaining common denominator, in terms of goals of the education system and expectations of the public.11 The focus of educational research on the issue of diversity is a direct reflection of the sensitive nature of this topic. As shown by a recent Canadian publication (Bouvier et  al. 2022), the debates in Europe and the other continents regarding the goals of history teaching have striking parallels. In the most recent works, it is not simply a question of “recognising” otherness, asking oneself how to give it a place in the master narrative, or building it as an alternative narrative—a work undertaken systematically also in seminars organised by the Council of Europe since the 1990s. The issue, instead, explicitly involves the problem inherent in teaching “of” tensions between minority and majority groups, of constructing such tensions as a subject to be taught (Bouvier et al. 2022). Obviously, concerning this topic, there are views, projects and educational solutions that are not only distinct but also in contrast with each other. Should the particular or “minority” narratives be reconciled or counterposed?12 It is foreseeable that the tensions involved in this question (which have recently animated electoral campaigns in France and Great 10  It is no coincidence that the same expression roman national (“national novel”), introduced by Nora in 1992, is borrowed from psychoanalysis. 11  The very search for a “common denominator” is at the heart of a comparative analysis that focused on the appropriation of the national history by high school students, carried out a few years ago (Lantheaume and Létourneau 2016). 12  “Is there a legitimate place of roots and moorings?” asks, for example, Gérard Bouchard in the first chapter of the aforementioned Quebec anthology (Bouvier et al. 2022).

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Britain) are destined to worsen, thus indirectly increasing the need to provide clarity on the concepts. Faced with the importance that the issue has gained in the field of education studies, and social sciences in general,13 our book intends to adopt an original approach in its reflection: centring on different contexts— peripheral, regional, minority—in which the emergence of alternatives to the nation-state brought legitimacy and codification of different stories within the official national history. The nucleus of the reflection is a research project launched in 2022 with the support of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, focusing on three countries: Italy, Sweden and France.14 In this first stage, strong differences emerged along the same fault lines that are highlighted in this book: the relationship between the idea of citizenship and adherence to a founding narrative and chronology; political significance of the issue of local autonomy; the relationship between education autonomy (at local level) and the building of a separate identity-­ making sphere. Inevitably, the analysis of the periphery brings us to the differences between national cultures. A common feature of the selected approach and choice of case studies is the fact that these new histories have been politically validated and integrated within a movement—the recognition of national minorities according to the definition adopted in 1993 by the Council of Europe and later by the European Parliament.15 With a collection of works located at the intersection between study of political cultures, history of local self-government and history teaching, we set out to  deepen a trend that is clearly emerging in educational research: looking at history taught from the dual perspective of its relationship with political institutions and social memory and thinking about the complexities of this relationship. Thus far, minority groups’ criticism of the state’s symbolic monopoly has been studied mainly “from the centre”, as an ideological challenge for standard narratives. Comparative attempts so far have privileged one dimension—the inclusion of otherness in teaching practices 13  The question of (re)construction of otherness and minority identities in history teaching was tackled in 2022, at an interdisciplinary seminar organised at the University of Quebec at Trois-Rivières by the International Research Association for History and Social Sciences Education (www.uqtr.ca/fc.airdhss2022). 14  https://scohisto.projects.unibz.it/. 15  Recommendation 1201 (1993) of the Council of Europe and Report A6-0140/2005 of the European Parliament.

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(Tutiaux-­Guillon 2018) or the way political conflicts create implications for school teaching (Cajani et  al. 2019)—but have not focused on the chronology of the reforms and the simultaneous historic and cultural nature of recognition of minority identity. The singularity of this collection lies in the association of a diachronic and comparative approach: searching for common trends and roots, by juxtaposing highly heterogenous examples, trajectories and outcomes. The hypothesis is that the nations—custodians of the “sense” of history teaching—also interact and influence each other in terms of the way inner diversity is represented and confronted. The aim is to overcome the usual restraints of research into history teaching—the fact of analysing it and representing it from the centre, under the influence of a “methodological nationalism” already conveniently criticised in studies that have proposed, in place of comparison, an “entangled History” (Zimmermann and Werner 2006). The peripheral realities that the book will outline share the fact that all these realities have experienced progressive recognition of their specific identities—with an osmosis between social memory and structure of the curricula and other teaching tools (books, disciplinary corpus, etc). The “diversity” that they embody has distant origins but is translated in various phenomena: multi-lingualism (Alsace, South Tyrol), heterogeneity of legal systems (Great Britain) or, as in the very particular case of Sami identity in Scandinavia, reference to a singular ethnic origin and a past marked by racialist discrimination. The cross-national character of our book does not mean we presume to offer an exhaustive overview. The reader cannot find in our book “all” the minorities that feature in contemporary debate but will encounter regions which, while affirming their political autonomy, offer (for various reasons) a distinct character as regards historic memory and strive to assert it through the education system. Herein lies the originality of our approach: in the diversity of the cases and results, we asked the authors to tackle historically the journey of recognition of canons, historic memories and sub-national issues. It is pursued by showing the path undertaken from when—between the two world wars and in recognition of the dramatic consequences of imperialist nationalism—the issue of denationalisation of history teaching was spotlighted for the first time. The result is a collection of cases that stand out as much for the composition of the empirical support (directed at a comparative attempt and the identification of common variables) as for the research

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question implied: to determine to what extent the conflicts between nationstate and social actors that contest its cultural monopoly in the public sphere may influence a specific field—the history taught in schools.

Outline of the Book The common topic of all the essays—the educational reference to a shared past—is analysed from different perspectives: from the tools used to drive it (textbooks), the tensions it raised (debate on reform) and the original narrative solutions resulting from the issue of recognition of otherness. The central perspective, in the first section, is provided by the governance of systems: the interaction between political autonomy and dialogue around communality and identity, on the one hand, and the transformation of the school system, on the other hand. The contexts analysed are strongly heterogenous but, in each case, the central management of the education system—with its various tools (teacher training, drafting of curricula)—is faced with the challenge of identitarian plurality. The reorganisation of canons is the litmus test, where the issue at stake is the legitimate image of the local population (minority or majority community of the region). At times, the handover of new self-government tools to local educational authorities is the driving force. These tools are used fully in the first case analysed. South Tyrol (dealt with in the essay by Andrea Di Michele) ostensibly represents a “unicum” in Europe: here the nation-state is not a stakeholder in the education system and finds itself competing—in terms of the winning national narrative—with a “minority” that represents the majority of the region and has held wide powers in the education system and history curricula for 50 years. This history revolves basically around the tale of the struggle for autonomy and emancipation from centralised state control. In this case, the discussion on the official historic memory had a political value from the very beginning. From 1945 to today, the evolution was sufficiently strong as to approach a form of “nation-building” legitimated through the curriculum: the formation of a history canon juxtaposed with the Italian national story, where the very question of autonomy is reframed as a source of pride and an international success story. One may wonder why this process arrived, in this precise context, at such a strong dissociation between national and provincial stories and which factors neutralised the drive for re-centralisation. In this way, the story of a “periphery” returns us to a particular concept of Italian identity and educational autonomy.

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The case of Luxembourg, discussed by Machteld Venken in a paper centred on teachers’ training and self-perception, adds another piece to the complex puzzle of national stories and challenges linked to their renewal in a changing socio-political environment, that is, the situation of small countries, whose history and culture made it difficult, even in the context of nineteenth-century ethno-nationalist invention, to build a sustainable “national history”. Luxembourg thus emerged as a sort of “minority” among the large European nations—crushed between strong identity and colonising attempts, in the market of national narratives. The question of teachers’ training, cultural identification and geographic mobility—which the author tackles in an extended chronological period of the twentieth century—appears to be the deciding factor here. The essay by Marko Šuica and Ana Radaković highlights the results of post-1989 ethnic conflict on the teaching of history in the Western Balkans, revealing the influence of two juxtaposing trends: the re-­ emergence in post-communist European education systems of ethno-­ nationalist myths and the structural connection between democratisation and the protection of minorities. Serbia and Bosnia in the 2000s are not simply precarious and complex national constructions resulting from the breaking up of Yugoslavia, exposed to the difficulty of re-weaving a plausible “tale of the origins” in a democratic context. They are also countries for whom the neighbouring populations represent a new minority with specific rights on the domestic front: international diplomacy and educational policy intersect. The creation of curricula for national minorities, in this context not yet reconciled in terms of institutional memory, is a true intellectual challenge surrounded by contrasting ideological pressures. The experience analysed by Charlotta Svonni and Lina Spjut moves towards the extreme northern edge of Europe to the Sami lands whose inhabitants are tied to a nomadic heritage (as well as to a story of discrimination and stigmatisation) and co-exist amidst the resident population of four countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia). The essay tackles the stages of the complicated inclusion of the Sami community story in the history curricula of one context (Sweden) where this population was traditionally relegated within a differentiated education system. The recognition of the Sami as an “indigenous” population  (1977), and then as a “national minority” (1999), created the conditions for a proactive inclusion of their experiences in the curricula, as part of an all-encompassing, identity-reinforcing ideology. But in the absence of official content and suitable teacher training (as revealed in the essay by Anna-Lill Drugge and

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Björn Norlin), this intention has not managed to satisfy the expectations of local activists. Inevitably, the areas of conflict or, in any case, tension between centre and periphery, include the didactic tools used in schools, particularly the history textbook. The second part of the book deals with this question. Roberta Mira looks at the case of South Tyrol, showing how immediately after 1945 the German-speaking school in the border area between Italy and Austria had the possibility of strongly differentiating content for teaching, especially by using textbooks from abroad (Germany, above all). The extensive teaching autonomy guaranteed by the Italian constitution meant that teachers were relatively free in their action and could choose which textbooks to use. The very fact that this was an Italian territory that could offer an education system with teaching in the German language led (thanks to the use of textbooks from abroad) to an early and profound split between history education content in South Tyrol and the rest of the country. As time goes on, this distancing has only increased. Marco Cuaz looks at another Italian border region, in an essay about the Aosta Valley, a small mountain region on the border with France. Also here, textbooks are discussed, in particular the selection process of a history textbook to be used in elementary schools. The author tells us about the extraordinarily enduring success of a local history and culture textbook which has been used for at least three generations of Aosta Valley residents since the early twentieth century, instilling in them a love for their small homeland. Much more recently, from the 1980s, the local institutions again promoted the creation and distribution of a local history book with the clear aim of consolidating a specific local (as opposed to national) identity. Today, however, it would seem that the ever-solid link of the inhabitants with the region is based increasingly less on a history narrative aimed at emphasising the “diversity” of the Aosta Valley residents, who are increasingly uninformed of local history events but no less convinced of their true, or presumed, uniqueness. The tension between the French roman national and Alsatian identity is dealt with in the essay by Eric Ettwiller, again considering the school textbooks used locally over a lengthy period between 1920 and 1990. In the years between the two world wars, those textbooks were assigned the specific role of inserting the history of the border region into the historic narrative of France to which Alsace was handed over after the Great War. A similar situation occurred with the new school books published after the

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annexing of Alsace to Nazi Germany between 1940 and 1944; again, the historic narrative was assigned the task of diminishing the particular characteristics of a region midway between the French and Germanic worlds. A more neutral approach was established in the 1970s and 1980s, in a historic period which (even in a centralist country like France) seemed to reveal an opening up to processes of regionalisation like the rest of Western Europe and a dialogue between ethno-regionalist demands and the organisation of the school system. In the third section, the analysis of three very different cases assesses the complexity of the centre-periphery and majority-minority relationship, revealing the different ways that the school system—solicited by social debate on recognition of cultural autonomy for minorities—has undertaken to create, or reinvent, a more inclusive and respectful attitude to diversity. Anna-Lill Drugge and Björn Norlin overturn the predominant perspective of the book, analysing the way in which the centre sees and teaches the periphery. Specifically, the researchers investigate how teachers of social studies, history and civic education conform to the guideline on integrating teaching topics related to the Sami culture. This happens in a situation characterised by a paradox: despite the recognition guaranteed to the Sami population as a “national minority” and the state’s declared intention to spread knowledge and the culture of the five recognised minorities around the country, teachers—as the authors prove in their empirical study, based on interviews carried out in the county of Västerbotten—complain about the absence of specific teaching material and even of a mere generic knowledge of the minority contexts mentioned (but not articulated) in the school curricula of the last decade. The United Kingdom offers an atypical case in terms of the relationship between the dominant narrative and national minorities: in effect, Britain is made  up of at least three distinct national identities, and the British identity is superimposed on these rather than replacing them. In this situation, it seems inappropriate to talk about majority and minority cultures: it is instead particularly interesting to understand how the identities of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales interact with the British identity. The negotiation between the two different identity layers in England and Scotland is considered by Arthur Chapman and Joe Smith, who compare the history curricula of the two countries to understand the way in which each country articulates the concepts of nation and “British-ness”.

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Pascale Erhart, Dominique Huck and Sarah Ochsenbein return to the case of Alsace but from a viewpoint rarely provided in the literature on history teaching: tackling the question of books from the perspective of sociolinguistic scholars, interested in understanding the way in which language teaching—specifically the German dialect of that region (characterised by a complex relationship with standard German)—intersects with the knowledge and study of local history. All this takes place in a context where regional history teaching is not allocated  ordinary teaching hours (except in very limited numbers) and where the use of the Alsace dialect in daily life has reduced dramatically over the last few decades. What relationship could be established—ask the authors, based on their university experience of teaching Alsatian at Strasbourg University—between the two forms of social memory embodied in each of these fields of knowledge?

Canons, Shared Values and Diversity: Future Prospects The essays in this book do not reveal a single trajectory and even less so a forecast for the near future. The fluctuations that the articles demonstrate are linked to various factors: first and foremost, the depth of ethno-­cultural differentiation according to a nation’s historic experience and its political legitimacy. Some national cultures, and some self-narrative styles that a political community cultivates, are more malleable than others. All the examples offer, however, one insight: the rupture of the national canon—even when it is strongly desired, pushed (as in the Swedish case) as a goal in itself—is neither easy-won nor painless. It may be that it evokes a counter-reaction: an issue not addressed in the essays other than indirectly in the work by Chapman and Smith. In the last two decades, the nostalgia for a national “canon” has been clearly perceived and featured at the centre of reforms and new political uses of history teaching in schools— in France, the Netherlands and Denmark (Grever and Stuurman 2007). The reason why this issue has not been tackled in this book is because it has been stirred up not so much as a reaction to the positioning of regional identities but against other minorities or other uses (universalist, emancipatory, academic) of history. A forewarning remains, conjured up by these 12 journeys from different points of view and source material, in the “periphery of the nation”: it

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would be misleading if not dangerous to expect that a national narrative can be perceived in the same way across a country, and that the collective memories, in an era like our own, does not interact (even in an irreverent form) with school-taught history. The conflictual events and difficult unstable negotiations which this book recounts are, surely, part of a history in the making.

References Beer, Ann-Low. 1997. The Council of Europe and School History. Strasbourg: Conseil de l’Europe. Bouvier, Félix, Pierre-Luc Fillion, and Marie-Claude Larouche, eds. 2022. Tensions dans l’enseignement de l’histoire nationale et des sciences sociales. Vues québécoises et internationales. Québec: Les éditions du Septentrion. Cajani, Luigi, Simone Lässig, and Maria Repoussi, eds. 2019. The Palgrave Handbook of Conflict and History Education in the Post-Cold War Era. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Delgado, Ander, and Andy Mycock, eds. 2023. Conflicts in History Education in Europe. Political context, History Teaching and National Identity. Scottsdale, AZ: IAP-Information Age Publishing. Evans, Richard J. 2021. The History Wars: The Role of the Past in British Politics Today. https://historiografija.hr/?p=27970 Grever, Maria, and Siep Stuurman, eds. 2007. Beyond the Canon. History for the Twenty-First Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Guyver, Robert, and Tony Taylor, eds. 2012. History Wars and the Classroom: Global Perspectives. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Lantheaume, Françoise, and Jocelyn Létourneau, eds. 2016. Le récit du commun: l’histoire nationale racontée par les élèves. Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon. Maissen, Thomas, and Niels F.  May, eds. 2021. National History and New Nationalism in the Twenty-First Century. A Global Comparison. London: Routledge. Nora, Pierre. 1996. Realms of Memory. Rethinking the French Past. New  York: Columbia University Press. Pakier, Małgorzata, and Bo Stråth, eds. 2010. A European Memory ? Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Skolverket. 2022. Läroplan för grundskolan, förskoleklassen och fritidshemmet  – Lgr22, Stockholm. Tutiaux-Guillon, Nicole. 2018. Enseigner l’histoire en contexte de pluralité identitaire. La revue française d’éducation comparée, 17. Zimmermann, Bénédicte, and Michael Werner. 2006. Beyond Comparison: Histoire croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity. History and Theory 45: 30–50.

PART I

Identity Politics, Educational Governance, and the History Curriculum

A Nation-Building Tool Under Pressure?: “Invisible Nations”, European Integration and History Teaching after 1945 Piero S. Colla

Cultural Pluralism and History Teaching: Towards a Polycentric Outlook Since its emergence in the early 1980s, the analysis grid that social sciences have applied to school history narratives has been shaped by a marked one-dimensional character. Personal school memories, on which historical accounts of educational content often drew, resonated with the experiences of fellow countrymen, accustomed as they were to cherishing the same myths and “great (mostly) men”: a state-sanctioned past, celebrated throughout generations in the public sphere and popular literature (Agulhon 1979; Ozouf 1984; Nora 1984–1992). The archaeology of national identities, on the one hand, and the account of edifying tales

P. S. Colla (*) Department of Dutch and Scandinavian Studies, University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. S. Colla, A. Di Michele (eds.), History Education at the Edge of the Nation, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27246-2_2

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embedded in textbooks and history curricula, with their pantheon of familiar heroes, on the other hand, seemed to mirror each other (Gellner 1983; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Anderson 1991). Ideas and controversies that originated from those canons—in terms of counter-narratives, didactical experimentation and curriculum revisions—may well have taken different paths. Nevertheless, both the contestation and the self-praise of a “canonised” narrative featured one key character: the nation-state, within its political borders, and its self-construction as a community rooted in time and culture, a natural stage of any conceivable future. This common focus might be explained with the long-lasting political functions served by school history and the central power that legitimised it: two factors that led towards the fabrication of cogent narrative syntheses (Green 1990). Due to this perceived homology, most critical accounts of history education in major European countries have produced analyses whose underlying assumptions were interchangeable. Schools’ master narratives have been framed as the archetype, the disseminator and the crystallisation of most received ideas about a nation’s place in the order of things. This understanding appears as a common thread in the foundational critique that—since the late 1960s—has equated official history canons with indoctrination and false consciousness. From Susanne Citron’s trenchant critique of acculturation to the French “national myth” (Citron 1987–2008) to Herbert Tingsten’s book on “God and fatherland” in the Swedish patriotic catechism (Tingsten 1969), political construction of the nation and didactic construction of standard history narratives emerge as two sides of the same coin. Pierre Nora was the first to use the metaphor of the “national novel“ (roman national)1 in reference to the inertia of history curricula (Nora 1984–1992), providing a model that has proved fruitful in a number of contexts outside France. In his account of the “Lavisse”, the canonical manual for three generations of Frenchmen, a reflexive dimension is not only central, but overtly claimed. It resonates as a nostalgic harking back to the myths that populated the scholar’s childhood.2 As a child of a double otherness (religious and geographical), Nora does not conceal from his readers the strength of his own sentimental involvement in an assimilationist enterprise to which one would tend to attach negative connotations today: the stigma of alienation, of cultural colonialism.  This expression was borrowed from S.Freud’s concept of the “family novel” (roman familial in French). 2  A “poetics of memory”, or a “grieving process”, following Patrick Garcia (Garcia 2000). 1

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Perhaps as a result of the enterprise of intellectual self-distancing inaugurated by Nora, the attitude of research studies towards the “novel” is now becoming less anxious and self-lacerating. In the past two decades, on a scholarly level, two ruptures have clearly emerged that indicate a deviation from standard interpretative patterns. They fuel the impression that domestic deconstructions of national narratives might have achieved their goal, or are about to become irrelevant, due to the exhaustion of their target. The first shift consisted in broadening categories such as the “national novel” to a transnational and comparative plane. This has made it possible to consider national memories and their crystallisation in school rhetorics on a European or even global scale. Constants, symmetries and mutual influences which until then had escaped systematic analysis have been submitted to diligent scrutiny and cross-examinations, both in the Francophone (Falaize et  al. 2013; Dubois and Legris 2018) and Anglophone intellectual spheres (Symcox and Wilschut 2009). The second shift in focus can be considered in the framework of an overall “comparative turn” in educational surveys and historical research (Leuze et al. 2007). Upon closer inspection (from the comparison of curricula to the analysis of textbooks and teaching practices), well-established narrative constructions proved to be less monolithic and self-sufficient than they had appeared in the hour of their greatest glory. It is mainly when the focus turns to reception that the variability and lability of the canons become more apparent (Grever and Stuurman 2007). In the footsteps of the pioneering inquiry on Youth and History (Angvik and Bodo 1997), it has become routine to look at the foundational relevance of history teaching “from below”. Seemingly uncontroversial master narratives turn out to be fragile artefacts, complex and subject to change: their relationship to the cultural-political diversity that each nation encompasses admits nuances, compliances and silences. The school’s own legitimising role is relativised, since pupils’ permeability to new media and peer group influences are considered and empirically substantiated (Lantheaume and Létourneau 2016). History education, in this new light, is not only the arena of reconciling opposites and consensus-building, but also a breeding ground for conflicts and unrest (Cajani et  al. 2019). According to the late Peter  Seixas, the ever-renewing entropy of social imageries and the need for synthesis and conceptualisation, embodied by history as a (state-sponsored) science, interoperate in a circular form (Seixas 2018). However, the history of educational systems has not always left room for healing wounds and

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reconciling memories. More often than one would think, the educational construction of the past does not lead to a unified narrative, but results in invisible memory threads that run on parallel tracks and aspire to the same legitimacy. This makes it interesting to dwell not only on common tendencies and homogenising logics, but also on singularities, local divergences and temporary compromises. By emphasising the historicity of history’s subject content, and widening the scope from the latter to the regulatory frameworks that steer it (curricula, inspection systems, teacher training and duties, etc.), one thing becomes apparent: the rise of a political use of history, in the Europe of mass schooling, may well contain some common traits, but these are inscribed in highly diversified meta-narratives of nationhood, citizenship and boundaries. From Germany to Italy, from Russia to France, the “national myth” coagulates around mythemes of a different nature; it gives rise to more or less narratively consistent, stable and uniform canons over the territory; it establishes a different relationship with the “history of the Other” (European or extra-European), while the very professional culture of history teachers, their status and their relationship with the political field differ case by case. Although the inspirational “novel” described by Nora can be tracked through all nation-building contexts, its texture is differentiated although continuing to display in every situation a specific, cultural-­ determined “moral of the story”. Not to mention other obvious divergences: the public use of the myth of historical continuity has served globally in both authoritarian and inclusive uses, democratic or totalitarian, aimed at external (as in the case of great empires) or internal colonisation. At times, historical experience has strengthened the myth. At other times (through military defeats or political failures), it has enforced sensational denials, weakening its attractiveness. This was precisely the case with Germany, after 1945. The nation’s own legacy can be perceived in school narratives as an object of embarrassment and denial, as well as of pride (Falaize et al. 2013: 55–63). In this variegated landscape, one fact is blatant: the function assigned to the teaching of history—between levels of education, between states and between territories within the same state—is neither self-evident nor fixed. Its description requires a variety of measuring instruments, variables and points of view. One major factor of diversity, and a common field of polarisation in educational policies, is offered by the articulation between central and peripheral power, between state and regions, and by the educational response given to the cultural diversity from which national communities

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have sprung. Through this confrontation, the clash of antagonistic memories takes shape and claims a role.3 The weight of recent or ancient territorial reconfigurations, as a result of bloody conflicts, forced exiles and population transfers, resurfaces (Opiłowska 2016). And along with it, the increasingly persuasive and legitimate call of local loyalties reverberates. Until a few decades ago, this plural dimension—the resistance posed by deep-rooted territorial memories against master narratives—was mainly reflected in studies focused on peripheral experiences in history didactics, carried out among school populations of diverse ethnic backgrounds (Blanco and Tamanini 2015), but it barely breached the image of the “nationalising” function of state-sanctioned history. Such negligence would hardly be excusable in current research practices: in post-national and post-ideological Europe, familiarisation with cultural and memorial otherness has become a mission that is not only legitimate, but actually central to the teaching of history.4 Cultural diversity seems to operate, according to some readings, as “a new normative framework” of reference (Lantheaume 2011) in the transnational governance of education: a fact no modern education system can disregard any longer. More and more often, it peeps out in the official self-image of the school systems, forcing acknowledgement within its own framework of deviations from a master storyline. In educational regimes used to a unitary, state-sanctioned educational ethos, such as in Sweden, ad hoc curricula for “national minorities” are being designed and promoted as a sign of modernity and political sensitivity of regulatory authorities.5 As a result, reviews of the impact of the focus on minorities in history teaching across Europe are rapidly proliferating—both at the level of individual states and at the level of theoretical and transnational analyses (Tutiaux-Guillon 2018). The perception of a newly won consensus can be misleading; diverging premises and value judgements muddle the apparent unity of rhetorics. 3  Conflicts in which, from the French Vendée to the Protestant valleys of Italian Alps or Northern Ireland, the peripheral condition often overlaps with an ideal, political or religious otherness. 4  Its relevance is constantly reaffirmed in reform projects, statements by ministers, international agreements or intergovernmental declarations. The role of Council of Europe initiatives in this area will be addressed later. 5  “The national minorities in the syllabus”. https://www.skolverket.se/undervisning/ grundskolan/aktuella-forandringar-pa-grundskoleniva/andrade-laroplaner-och-kursplanerhosten-2022/nationella-minoriteter-i-kursplanerna.

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What is a minority—for the purpose of managing an education system? A consensual definition is still lacking, despite the efforts of transnational public bodies in this direction. Which cultural difference is considered legitimate and worthy of investigation—the recent or the ancient, the one rooted in traditions or that substantiated by the social movements of the present? In this article, we will tackle this vast problematic area from three perspectives. The first has to do with the seeming desynchrony of the Europe-­ wide breakup of canons centred on the nation-state and hence with the very relevance of using the emergence of sub-national or infra-national narratives as a criterion for comparison. Do they really constitute a unitary trend, a transnational dynamics, or are they merely an indicator of the constitutive diversity upon which history teaching practices are built? This includes an assessment of parallel chronologies of power devolution in history education and an analysis of the similarities and cross-references that link its many expressions in public debate. Albeit in different forms, the right to be “different” must compete with an all-pervasive will to “create commonality” (faire du commun) through schooling (Lantheaume and Létourneau 2016) or (which amounts to the same) to use the past as a warning and as a cure for the evils of the present. An entangled history is to be told of the impact on curriculum writing regarding the recurring controversies on the “crisis” of core civil values through Europe (Colla 2018).6 Another layer of verification pertains to spotlighting the various stakeholders, from institutions to policy makers, who drive this outcome on a European scale: the links between active policies promoting a post-national and inclusive citizenship, in response to new demands from minority groups, and national curriculum writing. The increasing internationalisation (by structures such as UNESCO or the OECD) of the evaluation of school systems and the rise of a European arena for defining core educational skills provide a striking example of the intermingling among geopolitics, new cultures of public governance and the imaginary foundation of history teaching. The last element to be assessed is the impact of the new sub-national legitimacy frameworks in the practical organisation of history teaching and in its goals. One might wonder why, even today, recognition of regional, 6  The creation at the Council of Europe of a “European History Teaching Observatory” in 2020 is part of this transnational movement.

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sub- or supranational identities emerges in such disparate forms among neighbouring nations and with such varying degrees of social consensus. The limited space available will only allow us to outline this programme and indicate a few leads for comparison, bringing into a more general framework the national case-studies, which the contributors to this book have investigated in greater detail.

Towards a Topography of National Mythologies and Multiple Loyalties. Fragmented Landscapes and Forced Solidarities The increasing narrative pluralism that most of the contributions to this anthology illustrate suggests that a linear evolution, from unity to diversity, has contributed in recent years to accelerating the disruption of the statist foundation of history teaching. The search for a “breakthrough” puts the researcher in a dilemma: a common driver of change seems to be relevant to all European nations but both the justifications behind it and its impact on the organisation of teaching are fundamentally different. If didactical cultures and the main trends of research in education differ so greatly among European countries, this is not at all surprising: the very objects they have to account for is variegated. The map of national cultures in Europe shows an inherent diversity in the manner of drawing frontiers of citizenship and the way the relationship between historical narratives and national traditions is articulated. This diversity transcends the subject of this volume and has its roots far ahead of the historical period covered in most of the essays. Across Europe, the question of a “continuous” (national) history canon has assumed different shapes, for the simple reason that the articulation between state authorities and culture, and between school and common memories, has rarely followed the same path. Let’s focus on two extreme cases, Switzerland and the UK. In the first case, we find a confederal state that after state unification in 1848 turned local particularism into a cornerstone of its idea of nationhood and where educational systems in different languages have coexisted ever since (Falaize et al. 2013: 45–53). Cultural and memory pluralism, also reflected in the structure of legal and administrative systems, were an integral part of the nation-building process. The national narratives then took the form of metahistorical traditions, with a founding pact and a folk hero—William

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Tell—unifying a community of autonomous cantons. Legends and traditions survived within a wide variety of administrative forms, resulting in today’s striking diversity of approaches to history teaching between French-speaking, German-speaking and Italian-speaking Switzerland (De Mestral 2018). In the second case, that is, the UK, political power, nationhood and cultural memory have retained a strong autonomy, with an inevitable impact on the founding principles of history teaching in schools. In Scotland, an autonomous kingdom survived up to the early eighteenth century; the educational system has never corresponded to that of England, with marked decentralisation based on the tradition of local religious authorities’ control over schools, and autonomy of universities, allowing the preservation of a legitimate sub-national cultural identity. Since the latter part of the nineteenth century, “nationalisation” was driven more by social factors—the circulation of intellectual elites, including teachers, and networks of university education—than by a central strategy based on compulsory curricula, an integrated school system and common textbooks. In this context, the movement leading at the turn of the 1990s to a codification of England’s National Curriculum in history and civics (Phillips 1996; Smart 2009) provoked in return an acceleration of educational separatism. The devolution laws of 1997, the electoral assertion of an autonomist line and the assimilation of greater powers in educational matters by the Scottish national administration would confirm that choice (Wood and Payne 1999). Even beyond these extreme trajectories, the mythopoetic power of Etatist centralism never went unchallenged in the educational design. A fundamental peculiarity of federal or confederal nations pertains to the decentralised nature of regulatory responsibilities. For the majority of Western European countries—from Great Britain to Federal Germany or the Netherlands—the promotion of a national historical consciousness was not bound to the existence of a centrally run educational system and was conveyed more efficiently by other channels, from media discourse to political culture or social reforms. The pivotal role in steering the educational content thus fell into the hands of private and religious entities, placing restrictions for the central state on the very possibility of imposing a universal history curriculum. This situation existed also because another condition was lacking for a long time: a common education system, compulsory and uniform, for the entire population. For the first generation of Western Europeans educated

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after the war, comprehensive schooling represented not the norm but the exception—with Sweden as the first, pioneer test case during the 1950s. A social fracture is superimposed, in most cases, on regional and cultural fractures. However, in post-war years, the diversity of forms of schooling did not imply an emphasis on distinctive identities and historical trajectories. On the contrary, even in federal or plurinational states, the context of the reconstruction and the Cold War would accentuate the appeal of national (or rather “imperial”, in the case of France or Great Britain) mythologies.7 The case of centralised, or authoritarian, nation-states rests on the other polarity of an ideal map of reference models of history teaching. In this context, the emergence of the theme of autonomies and de-­nationalisation follows a more linear and recognisable path, although centralism always represent an outcome, not a given fact. In Spain, France and Italy, a “Catalan”, “Alsatian” or “Slovenian” school issue spans across the nineteenth century: the recent revivals of peripheral narratives come from afar. Far from being an old issue, the imaginary communities of the nation-­ states are the bloodstained fruit of the cultural myths of the nineteenth century and the world wars of the twentieth century. Both these wars were ignited by violent assertions of infra- or transnational identities and vindication; legacies that still stir (from Flanders to Catalonia, from South Tyrol to Romania or Slovakia) tensions, perceived otherness and inherited feeling of injustice. It was the logics of geopolitics that would temporarily plunge this diversity into invisibility after 1945. From Poland to Greece to Italy’s eastern borders, peace treaties forcibly reunited ethnic groups by moving borders and populations, crystallising the order established in Yalta. The differences created by forced displacement had to be (as in Poland or Czechoslovakia) denied or made invisible. Curricular responses to the theme of the unity of national memory represent, in most cases, laborious reworkings of the fabric of the nineteenth-century national “novel”: a forced identification between culture and memory, between ethnos and demos—which the experience of the last world war had disavowed. In recomposing its unity, Europe had to overcome its own internal troubles. And it is when restoration intervened on a shaky identarian fabric 7  In France, the post-war period marked a resurgence of the Jacobin model, hostile to territorial identities. The strong autonomist demands of the 1930s were discredited by their association with the ruralist rhetoric of the Vichy regime (Youenn 2014).

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that consequences on the educational order can be discerned in the first two decades after the war. With the war barely over, Italy’s educational policy had to admit the existence of divergent instructional languages, textbooks and contents at the Austrian border in South Tyrol, partly as a consequence of the restoration of cultural autonomies stifled by fascism and partly to contain separatist ambitions of the German-speaking community, represented by a majority political force that had been claiming a distinct school system since 1945. In Belgium, the political wounds of the Nazi occupation and the royal exile aggravated the linguistic divide between Walloons and Flemings. In both these countries, the teaching of history would become a heated issue between the 1960s and 1970s under the impetus of genuinely separatist pressures. A new autonomy status for South Tyrol (allowing the German minority substantial self-determination) would be approved by the Italian Parliament in 1972, while in Belgium the conflicts around the canon were temporarily appeased with the silent removal of any reference to the genealogy of the nation from history curricula—encouraged by the country’s particular sensitivity to the drive for European integration (Wils 2009; Van Nieuwenhuyse 2020).

The Awakening of Multiple Identities: An Ideological-Political Chronology To sum up, in pre-1970 Europe the main instances of differentiation of canonised national narratives are limited to two main scenarios: confederal, plurinational states by its very definition, on the one hand, and unfinished nation-states, on the other hand, where educational autonomy becomes a part of political responses to disruptive tendencies. In one case, autonomy is a constitutive element of the legitimacy of power; in the other, a concession granted in the absence of a theoretical elaboration. What common features exist in these two cases, driving these patterns towards an ideological convergence? First of all, it is necessary to nuance the idea that—outside these early breaks of consensus—national “novels” are basically and invariably consensual. Often born from a patchwork of artificially combined legacies (Legitimism, Revolution, and Bonapartism in France; Monarchy and Republic in Italy), they all seem to re-emerge from the trauma of the Second World War. The disenchantment that Pierre Nora attributes to the

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lacerating experience of foreign occupation of 1940–1945 and the resulting decoupling of national legitimacy had a clear impact, according to some scholars, on the prestige of the traditional paradigm of transmission of national heritage (Loubes 2001; Megill 2008). In Germany, the discontinuity is particularly striking: after the defeat of 1945, the centrality of the main stages of the epos of a cultural nation—from the Holy Roman Empire to Luther’s reform universalism, from Prussian military tradition to Colonialism—was undermined. One could no longer evoke the fatherland without embarrassment and distinctions: history education would have to redefine itself, quite quickly, as an education in democratic awareness and self-criticism (Falaize et al. 2013: 55–63). Even leaving aside new state formations based on radically new ideological and geopolitical foundations (from Yugoslavia to Poland to West Germany), the whole of post-1945 Europe found it difficult to re-­establish a history canon as a direct legacy of the erudite, self-centred genealogies of the past. Within a decade, the baby boom and the broadening social base of education would necessitate another register, a closer relationship with the pupils’ actual experiences and a less cogent link with an academic and aristocratic pantheon of memories. In this field, too, the Nordic countries—where a systematic effort to overcome prejudice and nationalism in the representation of neighbouring countries had been carried out since the 1930s—serve as forerunners. At the same time, school policies did not yet allow for a discernible common ideology of the right to deviate from a master narrative. Within the next generation, this disenchantment would grow and take on a more unified meaning, with two apparent driving factors. The first was the impetus of the 1968 cultural revolution. In the main centralist states of Western Europe, localist claims surfaced in a variety of expressions, as an unconscious symptom, or a sublimating form, of individualism and anti-authoritarianism. What we are interested in emphasising is the historical setting and the inter-relatedness between different temporalities. The anti-centralist revolt in Belgium, which originated in the universities of Flanders as an appendix to the student revolt in the name of linguistic and organisational autonomy, is perhaps the most emblematic case in terms of political impact. The conflict erupted with the anti-francophone riots at the University of Leuven (Louvain) in 1967–1968, resulting in a demand for broader cultural and political autonomy for the university in Flanders. The theme of bilingualism and federalism intertwined, in a

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programmatic manner, with that of democracy and the contestation of authority in educational establishments (Lechat 2008). Far beyond this case, the violent forms of revolt of those years seem to lend a model to revindications that the political left “discovered” and sometimes actively supported (Kernalegenn 2018). Capitalising on and reactivating an earlier autonomist tradition, the French minorities—in Brittany, Corsica and the Basque Country (le pays basque)—evolved towards militant and vocal forms, often inspired by far-left militantism: grassroots  organisations, leafleting, popular schools. When the claim results in the legal recognition of autonomy, this creates the conditions for an impact on curricula. The article of the Italian constitution of 1946 providing for the creation of regions with autonomous powers was implemented with the Law 281 of 16 May 1970: the reform did not have an impact on curricula, but indirectly paved the way for the educational autonomy campaigns of the 1980s and 1990s and the devolution reforms of the following decade. The Südtirol-Paket (Pacchetto per l’Alto-Adige in Italian) approved by Austria and Italy in 1969 provided the basis for the reform of the statute of the region of South Tyrol—including the educational sphere and history curricula. This is probably the first politically legitimate example, among democratic nations in Europe, of explicit acceptance of a divergent (not to say antagonistic) national canon in public education. Another crucial political trigger was the impact of decolonisation on the national canon—and the vocal presence of “other” minorities, competing with the national tropism of educational rhetoric. Again, the fragmentation did not strike uniformly but produced comparable effects and a chain process of emulation. It can be divided into two main discourse areas. The first is the self-emancipatory struggle, prompting consideration of the invisibility of regions as a further aspect of stifled diversity within the nation. In imperial powers, such as France and Britain, the claims are directly inspired by the ongoing process of decolonisation. “External” colonialism is equated to an “internal” (and social) colonisation triggered by schooling.8 The critique of the unifying impact of

8  On the concept of “inner colonisation”, see Lafont (1967). The outrageous slogan— “decolonise” the French province—is taken up as early as 1966 by reformist socialist and future presidential candidate Michel Rocard. Philippe Joutard has noted the close correlation between the re-emergence of local identities and the topicality of the theme of memory in France (Joutard 2013: 23–26, 39–44).

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advanced capitalism nourishes, in the French case, a path of self-criticism of centralism, by the political left. Regions such as Corsica or Occitania would be subjected to a cultural oppression because of a Jacobinism considered as levelling and of a tourism denounced as folklorizing. (Kernalegenn 2018)

The second driver, historical and moral, is the burden of twentieth-­century guilt and genocides. The voice of the victims becomes a factor that society feels rising within. As late as 1969, the renowned movie “Le Chagrin et la pitié” was turned down by French national television: the dramatic evocation of deportation would break myths “that the French need”. However, the film’s popularity signalled a shift in sensibilities. As Philippe Joutard and Henry Rousso have shown, the reflection on the Shoah would symbolically break a unifying mythology: showing one’s own people as capable of the worst, it brings out a victimhood history that both incriminates and seduces (Joutard 2013: 44–56). The right to recognition and escape from oblivion, and the popularity of memory as a cultural and ethical function, proceed in parallel (Ledoux 2016). In seeking reasons for the many examples of a regionalist dimension penetrating the curriculum, we should not think of a conscious project, but of the silent infiltration of the theme of multiple identities (in the name of democracy) into common sense. The appeal of a new ideological climate, inclined to the disruption of uniform narrative canons, is expressed on multiple, apparently distinct, levels: the decentralisation of management responsibilities, a more affirmed subjectivity on the part of teachers and local actors and a reformist educational discourse that legitimises the search for new perspectives and methods, from oral history to a focus on subjectivity and subaltern groups. Its coincidence with the advent of forms of self-organisation in educational planning and school management (democratised in Italy with the “Delegated Decrees” in 1974) gives further impetus to this trend. The different manifestations were not initially perceived as a part of a transnational impetus: nonetheless, the new relevance of local history is a common pattern, as much in the UK as in France or Italy, of the renewal of history didactics (Davies 2011). Its growing topicality (expressed through congresses, study projects, new associations focused on the local dimension and training courses) has been assessed both at national level

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and within the framework of international organisations (Gusso 2015; Beer 1997).9 The extent to which state authorities incorporated these new trends and the ideological relevance assigned to it are obviously very diverse. In France, for example, change was driven top-down and inspired by epistemological motivations, from academic backgrounds. Curriculum design (at primary school level) would emphasise laboratory methods, active learning and interdisciplinarity rather than regional or municipal identity-­ building. The strength of the breakthrough of the late 1960s, challenging well-established, unifying patriotic myths, was enough to provoke strong counterreaction at a political level in the early 1980s. In Scandinavia too, the 1980s curriculum preparation was characterised by a new view on historical literacy, more focused on the local dimension, subjectivity and analysis of near-environment (Skolöverstyrelsen 1980).

From International Understanding to Diversity Training? The Influence of Transnational Bodies and Networks The reform trends examined above are marked by a certain non-­ homogeneity. Is there a common driver that might have oriented them? On the political level, European integration (in the broadest sense of the concept) stands out as the most influential and legitimate factor behind the decoupling of identity-building politics in education from their traditional referent: the nation within its physical borders. Since the memory of the cultural implications of this process tends to fade, or be taken for granted, it can be useful to recall its relevance to the focus of this article— although its influence, as we shall see, is operating unequally, indirectly and partly fortuitously. In the path leading from the Maastricht Treaty (1992) to the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (2000), proclaiming the respect of “cultural, religious and linguistic diversity” within the EU, to the treaty of Lisbon (2007), which introduced into EU primary law the term “persons belonging to minorities”, the political integration of the continent coincided with a push to dismiss any monocultural definition of nation-states, 9  Within a project on “Local and Regional History” by one of the Council of Europe’s sub-organs (1991–1992), strengthening this dimension stands out as a tool for the Europeanisation of history education.

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enhancing cultural diversity within political formal boundaries. The articulation between the two phenomena, however, was not linear. The European Union welcomes centralist and confederal, pluricultural and monocultural nations; it has never attempted to intervene in the terrain of the constitutional and historical-symbolic foundation of states, and it would be futile to look for explicit initiatives in this direction in its policy-making. In the history of EU cultural politics, the promotion of diversity and pluralism has surrogated, in some way, the lack of a federalised cultural policy in competition with the nation-state. The same remark applies— mutatis mutandis—to educational policy.10 In its relationship with historical or cultural legacies, the nation-state’s primacy was fought “from below”, according to the principle of “subsidiarity” (a keyword of European integration since 1992), well supported by indirect governance tools. In other words, the emphasis on both local government empowerment and macroregional solidarities has downplayed the importance of borders, without directly addressing this issue, but promoting—through the EU’s action programmes targeting cities, regions or transnational entities—the valorisation of cultural diversity within historical nations. Only in the mid-1990s, in the perspective of preparation for enlargement of the EU to include former Communist countries, would respect for national minorities acquire a strategic relevance, becoming part of the political-legal conditions for the accession of new countries. However, the consequences of this attention were neither uniform nor immediate. In sharp contrast, the pursuit of a direct impact on the goals and tools of history teaching and the promotion of a post-national approach to the subject matter have constituted for decades an essential component of the policies of another institution: the Council of Europe. Three factors contribute to the significance of the work of this body, which now includes 46 member states, including Turkey:11 a fully intergovernmental decision-­ making system; a focus on cultural cooperation and mutual understanding (bringing together governmental and non-governmental stakeholders, independent experts, teachers’ associations, etc.) and its formal commitment, since its creation, to the areas of democracy enhancement and 10  According to EU treaties, initial education and school curricula do not fall within the scope of the EU law, except in a very indirect manner. 11  Following the conflict in Ukraine, Russia (a member of the CoE since 1996) withdrew its membership in September 2022.

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human rights. This means that the goals of initiatives related to the teaching of history spring from exogenous and extracurricular purposes: from international understanding, respect for human rights and the promotion of democratic mores. The long series of recommendations, resolutions and agreements signed on this issue over the past 30 years include precise commitments and transnational policy for monitoring measures related to national minorities. In this area, the institution has worked as an open forum where policymakers, experts, historians and teachers could gather. While not benefiting from decision-making prerogatives of its own, this allowed it to prompt, in the absence of filters or obstructive political vetoes, an evolution of the doxa. Because of the importance assigned to data collection, teaching practices monitoring and development of guidelines, this institution’s records can also be used as an ultimate indicator of the openness, or fragmentation, of monocultural referents of history curricula. By no means does this involve any action favouring the emergence of new regional or separatist canons. On the contrary, in its first phase of activism (1950s–1960s), regional variations and minority rights within national education systems were virtually absent from the agenda. In the aftermath of the Second World War, eradicating bias and prejudices, with a focus on a single tool—the history textbook—was viewed as the main priority. Therefore, rather than investigating peripheral narratives within nations, the Council of Europe’s activism focused on the rivalry between them. While calling for mutual respect and sound historical reasoning in textbooks and teaching, expert meetings and projects did not strive to challenge the state-centric nature of the self-understanding that inspires official narratives. The organisation of public conferences for history teachers reflects the gradual move away from that reading, which indirectly confirmed a state-­ centric bias. While the conferences organised in the 1950s and 1960s were mainly concerned with the treatment of particular cultural contents, events or topics in schools, from the 1980s onwards, the focus shifted to the contents and, above all, to teaching methods. From the end of the 1960s, a “new history”—experimental and emancipatory—made its voice heard in the expert networks organised and supported by the Council of Europe (Stradling 2003). Critical approaches, open to the interaction between history and social sciences and pleading for a non-submissive approach to national myths, came to the fore. This explains why, after the 1960s, the situation of “forgotten” social categories and minorities present in the

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majority of countries, such as the Roma, was addressed long before the question of national minorities. However, it was the epoch following the peaceful revolutions of 1989 that clearly endowed the institution with a new role and representativeness. As early as the spring of 1989, individual east-European countries joined the Council of Europe as observers. Soon, the new member states found themselves involved in joint discussions on the revision of school curricula and history textbooks, in the name of the common values of tolerance and alertness to otherness. As the only transnational institution with a focus on cultural cooperation, rights and cultural heritage policies, the Council was bound to accompany the democratic transition in such troubled ethnocultural contexts as Southeastern Europe. In this context, the treatment of minorities became problematised “per se”—as an indicator of the degree of inclusiveness. The proceedings of conferences and symposia testify to changes in the vision of the actors and a shift away from a purely national perspective. The Symposium “History Teaching in the New Europe” (Bruges, 9–13 December 1991) was the first pan-European intergovernmental conference since the recent changes in Central and Eastern Europe. Both the national reports and conference conclusions, approved at the end of the congress, document the rapidity of the changes taking place. They include a compendium of national reports (requested from the 31 participants) on the state of history teaching. A national frame of reference still prevailed. Local and regional history were evoked, initially, as a means of bringing the subject closer to the horizon of experience of the younger generation. The following years would be characterised by a further evolution, reflected by the topicality of the issue of minorities, with an increasing impact also on the level of general ethical principles first and the regulatory and binding framework later. Evidence of this change is, for example, the signing (1992) of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, also on the initiative of the Council of Europe. In this document, the pivotal attention to the promotion of linguistic diversity opens up to memory pluralism. Article 8 (g) of the Convention invites the states to take steps to ensure the teaching of the history and culture of which the regional or minority language is an expression.

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From that moment, the treatment of minorities was taken as a dynamic indicator of the democratic evolution of societies. A new normative framework saw the light of day, whereby diversity became both a task for educational systems and—ultimately—an educational object. The initiatives and solemn declarations to follow could now count on unambiguous political support from governments in Western Europe. Indeed, national minorities would be a key issue in the context of the European project, reviving the difficulties inherited from the population shifts following the Second World War. In June 1993, “respect for and protection of minorities” became part of the “Copenhagen criteria” laid down by the European Council, in preparation for the start of accession negotiations with former communist countries. The Council of Europe contributed to the codification process through the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (1995)—the first legally binding multilateral instrument devoted to the protection of national minorities worldwide.12 With its specific efforts to accompany educational reforms in Eastern Europe, the exchange initiatives favoured by the Council of Europe had a lasting effect. They embodied the first examples of a problematisation—in an operational, consensus-driven perspective—of the nationalist bias of history teaching and provided a language for conceptualising the invisibility or denial of minorities, turning it into a positive challenge for teaching, while imposing a common understanding—especially with regard to “itinerant” minorities, such as the Roma, who often lack recognised representatives to assert their cultural rights. The launch and operationalisation (in countless publications and conferences) of the concept of “multiperspectivity”, as a tool for integrating and managing the idea of cultural diversity in diverse educational settings, is emblematic. Its genesis is a good illustration of how international cooperation in the field, triggered by the geopolitical context (namely, the conflict between Serbia and Kosovo and the complex issues this raised in educational contexts), enables theoretical breakthroughs. After appearing sporadically in the early 1990s, particularly at in-service teacher training workshops organised by the Council of Europe and EUROCLIO, this concept was instrumental in the context of the “Working Group on 12  It is worth noting that four European countries (Belgium, Greece, Iceland and Luxembourg) have signed but not yet ratified the convention, while France has neither signed nor ratified it.

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History and History Teaching in South East Europe” that the Council was invited to coordinate within the framework of the Stability Pact for South East Europe. The mission resulted in the drafting of a guidebook for teachers and subsequent regional training initiatives, both within the framework of the Stability Pact and in the former Soviet Union, based on the outcomes of expert consultations and field-tested practices (Stradling 2003). The insistence on the possible use of history to disarm a stereotypical image of the “other” among pupils was put to immediate use in the context of other regional conflicts (Chechnya, Georgia, Nagorno-Karabakh), but it also served a more general purpose, in bringing about a critical attitude towards the inertia of national narratives and their impermeability to conflicting views and interpretations. The ratification in 2001 by the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers of a “Recommendation on history teaching in twenty-first-century Europe”13 can be seen as an official sanction of the educational dimension regarding the issue of national minorities and the newly won consensus surrounding it. The text—which alluded to the need to adapt curricula, textbooks and teaching methods to the new imperatives—proposed to counter the “abuses of history” and to develop a critical attitude in pupils through the search for historical evidence and through open debate based on multiperspectivity, especially on controversial and sensitive issues.

The progress made within 5–6 years, in terms of political and regulatory relevance, was considerable. It shifted from mere declarations of intent towards the codification of binding standards to solemn declarations with explicit reference to the educational system.14 The rapidly enacted reforms in countries such as Romania or Poland, with a recognised space for national minorities in education, and (in the case of Romania) autonomous curricular pathways for members of countless minorities (18  in 2022), or the recognition—since 1997—of the Swedish Sami as 13  Recommendation Rec (2001)15 of the Committee of Ministers to member states on history teaching in twenty-first-century Europe. 14  The provisions of the Framework Convention (1995) are complementary to those under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages and cover both teaching in and teaching of minority languages, in public and private schools and at all levels, as well as teacher training and access to textbooks. The Council of Europe was also given the task of monitoring implementation of the Charter.

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­ indigenous people” with the right to education in its own language are “ signs of the homogenising effect of these drives for national regulations. A similar boost arrived a few years later, with international initiatives to promote teaching about anti-racism and discrimination against Jews and Roma.15

Regional Revival and History Curricula at the Turn of the Millennium: The Crossed Influences of Deregulation and Identity Politics The path to recognition of minority rights, in scholarly debate and international arenas for history didactics, can be described as the major paradigm shift summarised above, marked by a new, supranational consensus in the name of a democracy-enhancing, empowering use of historical legacies and reparative history-writing. At the level of national reform agendas, the increasing visibility of peripheral and minority viewpoints in teaching canons is also favoured by an anti-centralist trend which underwent acceleration in the last decade of the twentieth century and that spread, once again, from Western Europe to the rest of the continent. I am referring to the crisis of nation-state supremacy as a regulatory instance and as an evident normative reference, both in public governance and in cultural and educational policies. The phenomenon concerns, in fact, two quite distinct aspects. On the one hand, a general crisis hit the state as a source of political and cultural identification. Across large state-nations such as Italy, Spain and the UK, autonomist political instances gained ground; in the 1990s, they would trigger structural reforms that attempted to incorporate sub-national identity politics into the constitutional order. By the year 2000, regional or even (in the case of Scandinavia) ethnic-based parliaments and governments, more legitimate and empowered than the local governments of the past, were emerging in several European countries. On the other hand, in public management and in education, a cross-­ cutting consensus favoured reforms in the direction of decentralisation and marketisation. Both these trends have the potential to affect the status 15  On the latter level, the production of new standards can be linked to the creation since 1998 of an international task force for collaboration on Holocaust-related education, which was transformed in 2000 into the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance—consisting of 35 member countries and 10 observers.

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and goals of history teaching. Firstly, memorial claims and separatist demands from minority groups place the legitimisation of local identities (and sometimes reparation of the past) at the centre of curriculum writing. Secondly—in the name of economic efficiency and individual self-­ determination—the state monopoly to define curricula design, teachers’ tasks or the choice of textbooks is challenged by new power layers. In most cases, the two drives—towards management autonomy and political self-assertion—converge and have a joint effect. Interestingly enough, the turning point in Western Europe seems to be situated around 1989, at the same moment when, in Central and Eastern Europe, the issue of minority rights reached the forefront of the institutional debate, and educational reforms. In Belgium, it was precisely in 1989 that the management of the education system was completely devolved to the two large linguistic-­ administrative communities: Flanders and Wallonia. Flanders’ demand for greater autonomy led then, in the framework of a comprehensive constitutional reform, to the inclusion of education among the competencies exercised in full autonomy by the federated entities. In the context of the EU at the time, that evolution brought Belgium’s level of self-­determination in education close to the German federal model, with one important difference: in this case, the federated entities pertained to different cultures, spoke different languages and cultivated a different vision of the future (since only Flanders saw itself as a nation in power and advocated further confederalisation of the country). From this moment on, the canon of history (as of other school disciplines) was completely split between the two parts of the Kingdom. In the case of Sweden, the reforms initiated by Göran Persson in the years 1989–1990 marked the end of central powers of inspection and validation of texts, the legal equalisation between public-run and private-run schooling and the evolution of curricula and timetables towards an uncoercive structure where teachers and schools could decide on school content based on local needs. Without a direct derivation from this development (but rather as a consequence of the transposition of the CoE’s Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities in national legislations) Sweden’s main historical minority, the Samis, would be awarded the status of “indigenous people” at the end of the decade. The reform would be followed by the recognition, in 1999, of four other “national minorities” (the Roma, the Jews, the Swedish Finns and Tornedalers) and legal provisions to protect their respective languages and

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cultures.16 This would lead in turn to an amendment of school curricula at the end of the decade to enshrine its presence in teaching courses; a similar process was initiated in Finland and Norway, countries where this minority is historically settled, along with Sweden and Russia. In Italy as well, the rise of the populist “Lega Nord” in the major regions of the North marked the emergence of separatist agendas in the political sphere. The phenomenon was accompanied by measures of deregulation and power devolution in education. Being part of a broader rationalisation of the public sector,17 the provisions on school autonomy taken from 1997 onwards led (as in Northern Europe) to the empowerment of individual school unities and to larger margins of tolerance for local teaching programming and less coercive central curricula. The constitutional reforms of 2001 and 2005 involved a push towards a new state structure that gave Italy’s regions—within the framework of a state school—the right to build-up separate language, history and culture courses. These innovations coincide with an evolution in the structure of teaching curricula, which became less binding and detailed than in the past. Incidentally, they resulted in a persistent conflict of competencies between state and regions in education: a conflict partly mitigated in 2005 with some elements of re-centralisation (Troisi 2020). As elsewhere in Europe, the compilation of minority-specific curricula seems to depend on two enabling conditions—political recognition of autonomous or federated entities and/or the weakening of central mechanisms of content control, which makes deviations from the canon easier, in multilingual border regions in particular. In contexts already structured in a federal or multinational sense, the decade marked a further accentuation of devolution measures. In Spain, the reforms resulting from the PSOEs (Partido Socialista Obrero Español, Spanish Socialist Workers’ Part) arrival in government in 1982 announced new steps in extending the existing framework for language autonomy within autonomous communities to the educational sphere, within a more general framework of expanding the importance of public education and decentralising decision-making and control powers (Lozada and Máiz 2005). In some autonomous communities in particular, under the 16  https://www.riksdagen.se/sv/dokument-lagar/dokument/svensk-forfattningssamling/lag-2009724-om-nationella-minoriteter-och_sfs-2009-724. 17  Law no. 59 of 15 March 1997.

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pressure of local nationalist parties (Basque Country, Catalonia, Galicia) the identity and regionalist element of history teaching was strongly intensified. In Britain, the political push for sub-national self-­determination was a defining feature of the 1990s—and a clear driver of the ideological reorientations of history teaching, making it a tool in the rediscovery of a conculcated local patriotism. The reaffirmation of political identity and the autonomisation of curricula go hand in hand in this case; however, paradoxically, the first example of a “national” curriculum was adopted in 1991 by English schools. More than 250 years after its dissolution, the Parliament of Scotland was re-convened in 1999. During this process, the evolution of history curricula moved simultaneously in two directions: autonomisation and codification—with the express purpose of setting limits to local variations and interpretations. As J. Smith points out, the new Scottish curriculum produced in the early 2000s cultivated a vision of national identity that is both more directive and uncritical than the  earlier one dating back to 1993 (Smith 2020). After a long season of local educational freedom, Wales and Northern Ireland seemed to follow the same trend, and subsequently adopted separate, self-praising history “canons” (Phillips 1996; Smart 2009). The 1990s thus represent the time when, in general terms, educational systems opened the doors to a larger range of exceptions and variations from a standard, nation-centred canon. But in what forms did this development affect history teaching? Did the authority and antiquity of a national canon work as a restraining force or as the trigger that accelerated the centripetal forces? The answer, once again, is far from unambiguous. The trends that stand out are scattered—with realities (such as France) where the solidity of assimilatory narratives seems unassailable by centrifugal drive and others (such as Germany and to some extent Scandinavia) where the decentralisation of decision-making powers on the content of the subject matter is not perceived by the majority as provocative and does not achieve any fragmenting effect. As regards the creation of sub-national forms of history canons, different models stand side by side in Europe. The local history curriculum can take the form of a legislative initiative of local powers, as in Catalonia or South Tyrol; of arrangements made in single school districts as part of a widely decentralised management of educational content, as in the border regions of Germany and Denmark, or again in regions of Italy not endowed

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with autonomous powers as extensive as South  Tyrol or Friuli-Venezia Giulia (on the borders with Slovenia). Another case is the Sami school (sameskola) in Sweden, whose minority curricula—like those in Romania or Poland but unlike Tyrol or Scotland—enjoy central validation by state authorities. In some cases, the claim to a local canon can present itself as an educational complement focusing on the cultural and historical heritage of the area: courses in  local “Language and Culture” (Langues et cultures régionales), including references to regional history, have been introduced in Alsace since the early 1980s in association with measures to promote the local dialect—and as a result of a reform introduced centrally in the years 1982–1983.18 Since 1995, in France, a focus on regional culture has become a requirement for general teaching, a considerable shift from the previous dominant approach: Every teacher, whenever the activities of the class lend themselves to it, will help their pupils to discover the richness of their cultural and linguistic heritage, and will encourage them to see regional traits as components of the national culture rather than as rival local characteristics.19

The combination of instruction on local history with use of the minority language in school is quite common. Thus, since 1995, Romania has introduced courses for 18 different minorities, taught in their own languages, which do not replace but complement the national history curriculum (which can also be taught in the language of the minority since 2005). Access to these courses is decided on individual applications (and when there are a sufficient number of applicants) (Murgescu and Avram 2023). In other, rarer cases, federated entities independently organise all or part of the history curricula—with measures to accommodate the entire local population or all individuals recognised as members of the minority. This is the case in Spain, although a re-centralisation we will refer to later has emerged since the early 2000s. What we have stated so far concerns only the formal dimension of canon autonomy—the possibility for local or regional authorities to independently set up a curriculum or part of it. But this condition by no means exhausts the theoretical scope of comparative verification, which also revolves around other questions: what narrative model do the new canons  Circulars of 21 June 1982 (BO n°26 of 1 July 1982) and of 30 December 1983.  Circular 95-086 of 7 April 1995.

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refer to? Do they possess a level of formalisation and stability comparable to old canons—and what relationship (competition, controversy, integration, etc.) do they establish with them? To what extent do they take as their reference a specific subject, the history of an alternative “nation”? Empirical evidence suggests that the answer to each of these questions is far from self-evident. While it is true that separatist pressures often lead to devolution reforms in education, it is not always the case that the latter encourage identitarian development in history curricula, pitting one cultural group against another. In the most radical case of division of competences, involving Flanders and Wallonia in 1989, common elements survived in a process of choice by elimination and were also dictated by a certain political prudence: privileging a supranational (Euro-federalist and Western) dimension over national and macroregional levels (De Paepe et al. 2023). Once this was achieved, their educational autonomy did not prompt the Flemish side to “invent” a new tale of origins. Where there is no strong tradition of national history from which to distance itself, detachment is also generally characterised by softer tones. This does not prevent the place of the “other” (the majority group, or in the case of Belgium the national layer) from being essentially erased (as in Flanders) or from being constructed in negative terms, as a central reality but a limitation to self-determination: this is the case for Spain in Catalonia or for England in Scotland. In these two countries—where the investment in a new national canon seems to have been endowed with the greatest political added value—the absence of a scholastic narrative tradition, and a network of academic training to help define it, affects the difficulty of determining “which” local content is really relevant. As for the desirability of a brand-new foundational canon—in those nations where cultural autonomy is a diriment political issue—there seems to be no doubt. The production of such a canon rests on the reinvention of a self-celebratory history, where resentment plays an important role. In other cases (Southern Jylland in Denmark, Schleswig in Germany and the case of the Swedish-speaking minority of Finland), differences are fabricated at the edges of the educational system, in  local contexts, without becoming polemic junctures: they are the result of the initiatives of small ethnic minorities who identify, culturally, with the neighbouring country (Gullberg 2015). The lack of controversies around these deviations from a standard canon has several factors: on the one hand, they stem from an international convention, signed by the two neighbouring countries, and under which Germany funds and supports German schools in Denmark,

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and vice versa. On the other hand, they appear to be a natural consequence of the flexibility of national curricula that have not been built around a cognitive canon: for these reasons, local exceptions (while putting forward an alternative identity) do not seem to undermine the primacy of the national canon. The case of the Italian South Tyrol, as we have seen, contains a sharp deviation from national “guidelines” (indicazioni nazionali20). Here again, the identity-building underpinned by minority curricula looks more to the future than to the past: it refers back to the self-representation of a region that in part recognises a common historical identity with the Austrian Tyrol, while marketising its peculiarity as a “model” in itself, a prototype of an autonomist “success story”. In this case too, central state authorities did not react with alarm to the creation of a national counter-­ nation—which incidentally concerns a province with a population of just over 500,000. Attempts to follow the same path elsewhere are characterised by the fact that minority identification is often essentially negative. In the case of Northern Europe, autonomous narratives coincide with the evocation of discrimination suffered; they are reduced, often, to tales of racism suffered, of assimilation programmes, of racial biology. The rhetorical rejection of these discriminations indirectly helps to bolster a newly- built shared identity that is forward-looking and reassuring.

The 2000s: The Ambiguities of the “Renationalisation” of History Teaching In conclusion, it is hard to identify a common, Europe-wide trajectory: regional and minority histories undermine, to varying degrees, a canon that is being delegitimised for multiple reasons: from the dynamics of European integration to the discourse on human rights, migration flows and the ideological thrust of multiculturalism and the right to difference. The histories thrive within a Europe that from 1989 onwards has put identity issues back at the heart of policy agendas—starting from disputed political spaces (from the former Yugoslavia to the Caucasus) where the identification between nation and territory is anything but clear-cut. It is in this multifocal perspective that one must ultimately consider the intertwining of recognition of local identity and the general trend towards  https://www.miur.gov.it/.

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“re-centralisation” of historical canons, which occupied the following decades up to the present day. It is a trend that must be considered separately, since it stems from a slow wave, traversed by a desire, oblique to the region/nation axis, to counteract cultural factors accused of weakening the sense of historical continuity and belonging among the population. As early as 1983/1984 in France and England, a nostalgic form of homogeneous narratives had garnered political support at the highest level, with public statements from the highest offices of state calling for the restoration of national symbols and canons. These were behind the return to a chronological approach to the curriculum in the case of France and the approval, for the first time in history, of a compulsory English history curriculum. Let us bear in mind that this kind of reaction does not occur in opposition to the drives of regionalism but to the iconoclasm of the “new history”: at any sign of tarnishing of the European cultural hegemony and self-assurance, politics tends to hark back to cherished memories and collective mythologies. The timing differs in Spain, where regionalisation coincided with political democratisation: still in the 1980s, the linguistic diversity of the canons deepened and impacted on history teaching, with perhaps more profound effects than elsewhere—despite the presence of strong inter-­regional variations, in the actuation of standards on educational autonomy (Falaize et al. 2013). At the same time, this led to a rather drastic backlash (a “defederalisation” in education), with history teaching again becoming a focal point. Aznar’s government made systematic attempts to re-instore a unitary canon, centred on the traditional landmarks of the monarchical and Catholic heritage (Lozada and Máiz 2005). These disparate trends seem to reflect a persistent tension at European level against the backdrop of a growing topicality of the theme of history and heritages and memory in local and national politics, within the vacuum created by the crisis of supranational meta-ideologies. It was only in the 2000s that the tendency reverted. The triggers were new anxieties and bugbears, penetrating the social debate in Western countries: ghetto-isation and violence, idiosyncrasies between cultural groups feeding the ghost of civilisation wars. The public debate (and the general elections) called multiculturalism into question in Britain, Holland and France. The fight against Islamism became, cross-culturally, a key topic in the critique of the de-nationalisation and disarmament of history. In the Netherlands, the murder of Pim Fortuyn in 2002 led the government to revive the idea of a “canon” of national history and culture built

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around a few identifiable events: pills of historical knowledge that would form minimal affective-cognitive baggage for citizens. A committee was installed for this purpose by the Dutch Ministry of Education in 2006—a political intrusion “unprecedented in the history of the Netherlands”, according to some analysts, bringing into Europe echoes of the USA’s “culture wars” of the late twentieth century (Grever and Stuurman 2007). Approximately at the same time, similar claims sprang up in other European countries: from Denmark, where the project (carried out with the revision of the 2009 curriculum) was included in the programme of the conservative liberal government in power since 2005, to France where President Sarkozy’s (2007–2012) repeated interventions in the teaching of history aligned perfectly with his project of ​a state-steered policy of national identity (Wieworka 2012). Undeniably, this approach had a powerful appeal across several countries. In Belgium, with the reforms initiated in the Netherlands as a model, a specific canon for Flanders was integrated into the autonomous community’s government programme in 2017–2018. The most recent example is Sweden, where a demand for a state-sanctioned, school literary canon has followed the right-wing victory in the 2022 elections. Some authors—referring to the tendency to restore patriotism to the core of both school canons and the public use of reference to history— have put forward the concept of “renationalisation” (Kończal and Moses 2022; Haas 2018; Trošt and David 2022). With this definition, they attempt to grasp a general trend line that combines centralised governance, the setting up of a history canon and a strong identitarian connotation of the goals. Would then the exhaustion of the pluralisation of national canons be the end of the story we have mapped out—and the new unifying factor in the European culture of history teaching? Nothing is more certain: the restless diversity that emerges from this book is enough to prove it. Nationalising claims do not affect all countries, nor do they go unchallenged. Incidentally, their geographic distribution would merit further study. On the one hand, the nostalgia they voice is concentrated in contexts (such as Northern Europe) where the urge for an emancipatory, child-centred, non-­chronological history has been more successful. On the other hand, it thrives in countries where the political use of linear continuity, in the history of the nation-state, has the greatest legitimacy (France, Britain). In contrast, the theme of the “national canon” does not break through either in Italy or Germany, although in both cases a form of

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unease over the dissolution of a foundational, state-centred historical memory is present in the culture and discourse on educational reform. The true common elements would probably shift the focus towards other directions, capable of calling attention to more implicit and discreet ideological uses of the revival of regional identities. Such inquiries would reveal, for example, the invasiveness of a utilitarian and individualist discourse, which spring up in many reform contexts as a subtext of de-­ nationalised history canons.21 Another trend relates solely to the strength of the identity theme—the exaltation of “my” history as opposed to that of others—which now inhabits both the rhetorics of the local and the perceived lability of identities in a world without tangible cultural borders. The theme of ownership of the past in the name of a non-institutional, self-assigned heritage, the driving force behind what Nora rightly called the “age of commemoration” (Nora 1984–1992), fuels the quest of any past whatsoever—even a reinvented and purely virtual national legacy that the neo-Bourbon movement in Southern Italy tried to legitimise and resuscitate against the familiar school mythology of the Risorgimento, with some political backing from the Five Star populist party (Cajani 2020). A virtual, ready-to-consume past, where the opposition between state and region, between dialects and official language, perhaps, has lost the relevance that rendered it for two centuries both a fetish and (too frequently) a non-conventional tool of war.

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Phillips, Robert. 1996. History Teaching, Cultural Restorationism and National Identity in England and Wales. Curriculum studies 4 (3): 385–399. Seixas, Peter. 2018. History in Schools. In The Palgrave Handbook of State-­ Sponsored History after 1945, ed. Berber Bevernage and Wouters Nico, 273–288. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Skolöverstyrelsen. 1980. Läroplan för grundskolan. Stockholm: Liber. Smart, Dean. 2009. The History Curriculum in England and Wales. In Teaching History and Social Studies for Multicultural Europe, ed. Aktekin Semih et al. Ankara: Harf Eğitim Yayıncılığı. www.harfegitim.com.tr. Smith, Joseph. 2020. The Scottish Context: Making History in an “Understated Nation”. In The Palgrave Handbook of History and Social Studies Education, ed. Christopher W.  Berg and Theodore M.  Christou, 415–438. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Stradling, Robert. 2003. Multiperspectivity in History Teaching: A Guide for Teachers. Strasbourg: Council of Europe. Symcox, Linda, and Arie Wilschut, eds. 2009. National History Standards: The Problem of the Canon and the Future of History Teaching. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Tingsten, Herbert. 1969. Gud och fosterlandet: studier i hundra års skolpropaganda. Stockholm: Norstedt. Troisi, Michele. 2020. L’istruzione, una materia contesa tra Stato e regioni. Italian Papers on Federalism 3: 1–34. Trošt, Tamara P., and Lea David. 2022. Renationalizing Memory in the PostYugoslav Region. Journal of Genocide Research 24 (2): 228–240. Tutiaux-Guillon, Nicole. 2018. Enseigner l’histoire en contexte de pluralité identitaire. La Revue française d’éducation comparée, 17. Van Nieuwenhuyse, Karel. 2020. From Knowing the National Past to Doing History: History (Teacher) Education in Flanders Since 1918. In The Palgrave Handbook of History and Social Studies Education, ed. Christopher W. Berg and Theodore M. Christou, 355–386. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Wieworka, Annette. 2012. L’enseignement de l’histoire en question. Etudes 11: 475–483. Wils, Kaat. 2009. The Evaporated Canon and the Overvalued Source: History Education in Belgium. In National History Standards: The Problem of the Canon and the Future of History Teaching, ed. Linda Symcox and Arie Wilschut, 15–31. Charlotte, NC: Information Age publishing. Wood, Sidney, and Fran Payne. 1999. The Scottish School History Curriculum and Issues of National Identity. The Curriculum Journal 1: 107–121. Youenn, Michel. 2014. Des « petites patries » aux « patrimoines culturels » : un siècle de discours scolaires sur les identités régionales en France (1880–1980). Carrefours de l’éducation 38: 15–31.

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Websites https://www.miur.gov.it/ [consulted on 26.11.2022]. h t t p s : / / w w w. r i k s d a g e n . s e / s v / d o k u m e n t -­l a g a r / d o k u m e n t / s v e n s k -­ for fattningssamling/lag-­2 009724-­o m-­n ationella-­m inoriteter-­o ch_ sfs-­2009-­724 [consulted on 26.11.2022]. https://www.skolverket.se/undervisning/grundskolan/aktuella-­forandringar-­ pa-­g rundskoleniva/andrade-­l aroplaner-­o ch-­k ursplaner-­h osten-­2 022/ nationella-­minoriteter-­i-­kursplanerna [consulted on 26.11.2022].

The Teaching of History in Schools in South Tyrol, from 1945 to the Present Day: From Promoting Identity to Building a Common History Andrea Di Michele

List of Abbreviations b busta fasc fascicolo (folder) sf sottofascicolo

From Austria to Italy The Alto Adige region (Südtirol, as it is known in German, or the Autonomous Province of Bolzano) is a mountain region with just over half a million inhabitants. It is the most northern province of Italy, bordering with Austria in the north and east and with Switzerland in the west, and is

A. Di Michele (*) Faculty of Education, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bressanone, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. S. Colla, A. Di Michele (eds.), History Education at the Edge of the Nation, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27246-2_3

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inhabited by various linguistic communities. It forms part of the lands annexed by the Kingdom of Italy at the end of the Great War. Previously, it belonged to the County of Tyrol, an estate of the House of Hasburg and thus part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Tyrol region was situated on two sides of the Alps, on both sides of the watershed that is cut through by the Brenner Pass. Following its victory in the Great War, Italy was awarded this much-coveted watershed, desirable above all for military strategy purposes. This meant annexing the entire southern Tyrol region, composed of two areas with very different ethnical and linguistic characters. The Trentino area (the lands furthest south) was inhabited almost exclusively by Italian-speaking communities; meanwhile, the area north of Trentino and south of the Brenner Pass (an area almost immediately renamed as Alto Adige and the subject of this book) was home principally to German-speaking individuals. Thus, in that moment, Italy acquired a region inhabited mainly by German speakers at the same time that it acquired another region (Venezia Giulia) with a large population of Slovenian and Croatian speakers (Fig. 1). According to an Austrian census in 1910, South Tyrol had a total population of 251,451 people comprising 223,913 (89%) Germans, 9429 (3.8%) Ladins and just 7339 (2.9%) Italians (source: Istituto provinciale di statistica Bolzano 2020: 11). As with the figures stated in later Italian census documents, these numbers should be treated cautiously and have been hotly debated by historians, demographers and politicians. The intensification of national conflict well before the Great War and the desire to present an image of a solid German region in fact raise the suspicion that the Austrian authorities underestimated the presence of Italians, just as happily as the Italian authorities would later do regarding the German-­ speaking population. Yet there is no doubt that the presence of Italian speakers was in fact very limited and concentrated mainly in the city of Bolzano and the southern part of the Adige valley. Ethnic distribution changed drastically with the period of strong immigration created by the Fascist regime, which continued in the 1950s and 1960s. At the time of the 2011 census, 62.3% of the region’s population was German-speaking, 23.4% spoke Italian, 4% Ladin (a Rhaeto-Romance subgroup language spoken in two Dolomite valleys), while around 10% were foreign (Istituto provinciale di statistica Bolzano 2020: 11). After four years of provisional rule by increasingly weak liberal governments (1918–1922), the arrival of the Fascist era marked a turning point in Italianisation of the border regions which had been annexed after the

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Fig. 1  Language distribution in South Tyrol and Trentino. Source: wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Language_distribution_in_South_ Tyrol_and_Trentino.png

war. The education system was certainly one of the key tools used by the regime to strengthen Italian-ness in the northern border lands. Already during the Hasburg Empire, schools had been used to entrench concepts of the national struggle (Gatterer 1972: 91–104; Antonelli 2013: 300–313). It was through education that the linguistic and national identity was defined and created, directing young people towards one nationality as opposed to another. Fascism radicalised this model. The elimination of the German language took place in all social contexts, first of all in schools, which were almost entirely Italianised not only in language but also in teaching content. Regarding the teaching of history, for example, Fascism became the focal point of Italian history—from ancient Rome to the Risorgimento, right up to the most recent ‘victory’ of the First World War (instead classed by the German-speaking population as a “defeat”, from their own perspective).

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Birth of the Italian Republic, German-Speaking Schools and the Teaching of History After the collapse of the Fascist regime and the armistice of September 1943, the Province of Bolzano was occupied by Nazi troops, resulting in the subsequent introduction of an education system for German-speaking residents alongside the Italian system. At the end of the war, the U.S. military government and the Italian authorities suggested the creation of a bilingual education system, but the Südtiroler Volkspartei (SVP)—the party representing the German-speaking population—strongly objected to this proposal. The party’s fear was that a “mixed” school system could become a tool of Italianisation, as had occurred in the Italian school system during the Fascism period. The party strongly opposed the original model adopted by schools in the Ladin valleys, where half the subjects were taught in Italian and half in German, along with Ladin language lessons. This model—today quite popular as it guarantees effective learning of the region’s three languages—was strongly attacked by the “Dolomiten” (the main daily newspaper in German that was linked to the Südtiroler Volkspartei), which scornfully defined it as a “mongrel school”, as well as being feared by the South Tyrol politicians, who were convinced that such a solution could not guarantee preservation of the local population’s ethnic and cultural identity (Seberich 2001: 139–140; Verra 2008). The German-speaking minority was thus guaranteed the continued survival of a separate education system (primary and secondary schools) by some laws issued between 1945 and 1946 and re-affirmed with the approval of a special Statute of Autonomy for Trentino Alto Adige in 1948. This last decree was the direct consequence of a bilateral treaty between Italy and Austria, signed in Paris on 5 September 1946 and named after the two Ministers of Foreign Affairs involved—Alcide De Gasperi and Karl Gruber (Obwexer and Pfanzelter 2020). The Statute of Autonomy gave the Provinces of Bolzano and Trento primary powers for post-primary education and professional training and secondary powers for nursery schools and primary, middle and secondary schools. However, the latter powers were not put into practice as the decrees on education were never issued (Vidoni 2013: 47–51). The most important measures taken for the rebirth of German schools were, however, taken before the Statute of Autonomy and established (among other things) the introduction of a specific department for education in German language, entrusted to assistant Superintendent Josef Ferrari, a young clergyman

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totally detached from the world of schooling—precisely for this reason, he was not involved in the reconstructed education system by the Nazi authorities in preceding years (Südtiroler Kulturinstitut 1983). Italy had much to gain from showing itself favourable to the German-speaking population’s requests, as this approach would weaken any appeal to international authorities for the right to self-government and thus deflect a return to Austria. However, immediate tension arose regarding the figures to be put in charge of any German-speaking education system, its level of autonomy as compared with the Italian system, and how more “sensitive” subjects should be taught (history, first and foremost). In the native language schools, the German language was awarded high identity-making value. As mentioned before, any proposal involving bilingual education was strongly rejected and scornfully dismissed as “mongrel-­ schools” (1948. Gefahr in Verzug). Yet it was not just a question of language; content was also an issue. As Hans Mayr (SVP councillor of the Province of Bolzano) warned: “Preservation of a minority’s rights begins at school […]. However, school can be an effective way to preserve national identity only if this does not regard language alone, but also content and teaching methods, which must be left in the hands of the minority” (1955. Der Schutz der Volksminderheit; Falk 2001: 13). This was precisely what concerned the Italian authorities, who reproached the German minority community for using the school as a “tool for strengthening and defending their own national identity”.1 In such a context, teachers were given a specific role in preserving ethnic identity, a true battle to fight, strongly proclaimed and comparable to the efforts made in the past by the heroes of the small Tyrolean state. In one article, the “Dolomiten” newspaper described teachers as a spiritual elite nominated to save the “Tiroler Volkstum” and German culture, ready to make sacrifices for their cause and reminiscent of the “Freiheitskämpfer” of 1809 and the teachers of the so-called Katakombenschulen clandestine schools (Brezinka 1959; Falk 2001: 13–14). German teachers were therefore compared with the “freedom fighters” of 1809, of those who were led by Andreas Hofer in the fight against the Napoleonic army in the name of the Austrian Tyrol region and on behalf of political conservativeness, opposition to modernity (including the

1  AGPCM, UZC, Sezione III, b. 7, vol. I, fasc. 6.6 Scuole tedesche in Alto Adige e loro funzionamento, the prefect of Bolzano to the Minister of Education, 4 March 1947.

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introduction of the smallpox vaccine), lighting reforms and any limits applied to the Roman Catholic Church’s power. Even more explicit was the reference to the so-called Katakombenschulen, the clandestine schools set up during the Fascist regime to teach German to children. Thus, history (even before the school subject represented a source of contention between Rome and Bolzano) acted as a rhetorical tool offering supposedly inspirational figures and moments presented in terms of a “life or death” struggle for their own national identity. Andreas Hofer and the catacomb schools were (and remain) some of the most memorable historic points of reference for the South Tyrol population, representing the combative spirit, courage and closeness of the local community fighting against the invading enemy. In the post-war period, the history curriculum taught in schools was immediately a sensitive issue and the focus of strong conflict. For all subjects and education levels, it was decided to use the national education programmes with necessary adjustments. These adjustments were made without any particular problem for all other school subjects in 1946 but history immediately presented some issues (Seberich 2000: 261–265). The German section of the Bolzano Public Education Department, aided by Josef Ferrari, prepared a programme for primary schools which focused on the study of Heimat, their local history and environment.2 In the third year, the school programme started with family history of their own ancestors and the name of the family homestead, before moving on to the history of the school and nearby areas, from the church and other public buildings to the life and work of the local community, “local stories” and “heroic Germanic stories”. In the following school years, the curriculum included study of the history of the local Heimat (homeland), from ancient times up to the period following the “liberation” of Tyrol after 1815 and anti-Napoleonic conflicts, with explicit reference to the mission of “reawakening comprehension of defence of the homeland”. It was a programme that explicitly called itself “local”, undoubtedly with a more modern approach in that it focused on the actual experience of the child and the need to begin with his/her knowledge of the surrounding environment, but rarely straying from the Tyrol context. This could not sit well with the Italian education authorities, who hurriedly 2  This programme, the result of a meeting between headteachers held on 3.12.1946, can be found in APB, DS, fasc. 1325 Anordnungen zu den einzelnen Unterrichtsfächern, sf. 553/5 Erdkunde und Geschichte.

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drafted a list of topics to add to the programme, all referring to Italian national history—from the Etruscans to the expansion by the Ligurians up to the Alpine border, from the marine republics to the “famous Italian universities”, from Italian States after the Congress of Vienna to Garibaldi and Mazzini.3 This involved a true intervention to restore national balance to a programme that was entirely centred upon the Tyrol region. The result was a fairly eclectic programme where the history of Italy and that of the region itself both seemed well covered.4 It was, however, still a provisional curriculum, drafted in local offices and awaiting approval by the Ministry; this official approval arrived in 1948, with a much plainer and concise list of topics which, nonetheless, still covered national and regional content.5 Despite the mediation work carried out on the programmes, the dissatisfaction expressed by the province’s education department on how history was taught in the German schools was clear. In a letter to his assistant, the supervisor of German-speaking schools, Erminio Mattedi, complained that for certain teachers “history is reduced merely to the battle for a free Tyrol, as if beyond this region there be no other populations or events”. He perceived the same local predilection in teachers who neglected to teach the national geography to which, he specified, “the province of Bolzano belongs”.6 Thus, immediately following the end of the war, the birth of an education system in German language led (in a form that was not always formalised or official) to a gradual gap between form and content in teaching at both national and regional levels. This was particularly the case for a subject like history, to which German-speaking authorities assigned a particular identity-making value. This was declared by the assistant Schools Superintendent himself, the head of the German schools, Josef Ferrari, who on more than one occasion spoke about the fundamental role of 3  APB, DS, fasc. 1325 Anordnungen zu den einzelnen Unterrichtsfächern, sf. 553/5 Erdkunde und Geschichte, “Aggiunte al programma di storia per le scuole elementari in lingua tedesca”, attachment to a letter from the Schools Superintendent of Bolzano to the German Section of the Education Department, 22 February 1947. 4  Ibid., “Lehrplan für Geschichte”, 6 March 1947. 5  Ibid., “Programma di storia e geografia per le scuole elementari in lingua tedesca”, attachment to a letter from the Schools Superintendent of Bolzano to the German Section of the Education Department, 1 March 1948. 6  Ibid., copy of a letter from the Schools Superintendent of Bolzano to the German Section of the Education Department, 1 March 1948.

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history teaching in preserving the national identity of young generations from the southern Tyrol: For the South Tyrol, this means that its own history must come first for young people. The aim of history teaching is not simply to pass on information about what has happened in the past; the knowledge must increase respect for the past and a sense of responsibility for the future of his/her own people. (Ferrari 1958: 238)

From his point of view “Together with the educational power of religion, history is one of the most important teaching tools for educating young people” (Ferrari 1958: 223). The reference to the importance of religious education is not surprising given the fact that Ferrari was a priest, as was his successor Fritz Ebner; from 1945 to 1968, the German-speaking schools were managed without interruption by clergymen, which indicates a strongly conservative approach by the local community and, as a result, by the education system. To allow the German schools in Alto Adige to shift significantly away from the national history programme, there were a number of partial adjustments to their programmes in the Province of Bolzano, in addition to the wide margins for educational autonomy that the Italian education system already guaranteed teachers. Regarding the national programmes (which were never excessively prescriptive), the German school teachers were allowed relative freedom. However, the official general programme remained the national version and the German schools continued to be under the control of the Ministry of Education, answerable to its demands and instructions. This situation, hybrid in certain aspects, created dissatisfaction on both sides. The South Tyrol contingent continued to lament the lack of a “German school” and the introduction of a mere “school translated from Italian to German”, as Anton Zelger, the Province Councillor for Education in German language complained (Zelger 1965: 550). The Italian contingent, meanwhile, accused the South Tyrol community of introducing a parallel (if not actually opposing) education system to the Italian model and of using history education in particular as a tool to reinforce the most rooted and conservative beliefs and legends of the Tyrol region. The accusation was that of knowingly excluding any content that lacked reference to the local context, of focusing teaching on a list of topics,

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events and characters from German-centred history and thus practically substituting the national programme (which, in the opinion of South Tyrol politicians and authorities, still loomed too large in German schools with its insistent references to events such as the Risorgimento and Italian irredentism) “with the glorification of their ‘political’ martyrs” (Ferrari 1958: 238). The German-speaking schools were regularly accused explicitly of ignoring national Italian history, if not actually scorning it, in order to concentrate on characters and periods of Tyrolean history or, more generally, the German-speaking world. Such accusations were made both outside and inside national political and education institutions and occasionally in newspapers, both local and national. In May 1957, for example, the Government Commissioner of the Trentino Alto Adige Region sent a long report to Rome about the oppressive anti-national atmosphere present in some schools in Alto Adige. In the school (which trained young people to teach in kindergartens and infant schools in German language), teachers worked hard to instil in pupils “clearly South Tyrol sentiments and ideals”: In particular, they teach how to know and remember the South Tyrol hero Andreas Hofer, exalting all the heritage of the German, and more generally Austrian, population. On the other hand, there is practically no reference made to Italian moral, historic and traditional values.7

Two years later, the behaviour of two primary school teachers came to the attention of the central authorities, as they were accused of “partisan anti-Italian propaganda in German-speaking classes”8 in an Alto Adige town. The Italian Government’s Commissioner cited the specific case as grounds to request reinforced inspections in German-speaking schools, regarding not only the teaching programmes but also teachers’ political orientations. On the basis of a real investigation carried out by the local Carabinieri force, the Commissioner claimed that the two teachers based their teaching activity on “criteria of extremist racism and anti-Italian 7  ACS, MI, GAB, 1957–1960, b. 281, fasc. 15826/3 Alto-Adige. Scuole, sf. Alto Adige. Questioni scolastiche fra gruppi etnici, the Government Commissioner to the Prime Minister’s office, 24 May 1957. 8  AGPCM, UZC, Sezione III, b. 6, fasc. 6.1 Questioni scolastiche in Alto Adige, the chief of the governmental Department for Regional Affairs to the Ministry of Public Education, 21 December 1959.

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propaganda”, complaining about the Schools Superintendent’s decision to let them keep their jobs.9 The Carabinieri report is extraordinary in that it shows the extent to which (apart from teaching content) the issue revolved around the question of true historic and symbolic figures with identity-making power. The teachers were reproached for the fact that their classrooms had “nothing Italian”; on the contrary, there was an effigy of the canonical Michael Gamper, key player in the Katakombenschulen during Fascism, and the actual double-headed black eagle emblem that had adorned the Hasburg imperial coat of arms, accompanied by the white and red colours of the historic Tyrol flag.10 In this case, the problem emerged well before the modification of teaching programmes but involved key figures and symbols of the national German-Tyrol pantheon, placed in direct contrast with those of Italy. Another “sacred image” exhibited in a classroom came under the lens of the satirical, and clearly right-wing, weekly publication “Candido”. This time, the item in question was the portrait of Andreas Hofer, which the magazine (semi-jokingly) reported as being used to systematically replace the portrait of the head of state, Giovanni Gronchi (Torelli 1960). The usual investigation followed, which revealed that various German-­ speaking primary schools did indeed display the portrait of the Tyrol hero but not to replace Gronchi’s photograph, as this latter portrait had never even been delivered to the German schools.11 Between February 1959 and February 1960, the 150th anniversary celebrations of the Hofer rebellion were held throughout northern and southern Tyrol, inevitably taking on political undertones (Heiss 2007). The commemoration of Hofer was an opportunity to emphasise the need for new resistance against a new occupying power, in a deep schism between the party supported by German-speaking citizens and its Italian allies at a regional level and, at the same time, highlight an Austrian diplomatic initiative that presented the Alto Adige question to the United Nations Assembly (Steininger 1997). The reference to the past and the 9  Ibid., the Government Commissioner in the Trentino Alto Adige Region to the Prime Minister’s office, 3 December 1959. 10  Ibid., the Carabinieri of Bolzano to the assistant Government Commissioner for the Trentino Alto Adige Region, 2 June 1959. 11  ACS, MI, GAB, 1957–1960, b. 281, fasc. 15826/3 Alto-Adige. Scuole, sf. Alto Adige. Scuole. Varie, the Government Commissioner in the Trentino Alto Adige Region to the Prime Minister’s office, 5 February 1960.

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local hero appeared in perfect harmony with the political needs of the present. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the national press used the occasion to focus regularly on the unruly border region, regarding also the issue of schools and history teaching. The finest example comes with an extended report by Giorgio Bocca, destined to become one of the best-known and brilliant Italian journalists. This report came out in two episodes in the weekly current affairs publication “L’Europeo”, with the blatantly clear title “Come stiamo perdendo l’Alto Adige” (How we are losing Alto Adige) (Bocca 1959a, 1959b; Seberich 2000: 286–287). In his investigation, Bocca traced out a dramatic image of a province where the presence of the state was now imperceptible, where Italy and Italians were literally packing their bags to leave and delivering the region to the German-speaking community along with its political representative party, Südtiroler Volkspartei. He openly lamented the fact that at the end of the war, Italy had not acted like Poland or Czechoslovakia, which had resolved a similar problem by “giving their Germanic guests twenty-four hours to move out” (Bocca 1959a: 6). In his opinion, the inferior status of Italy and Italians emerged most clearly when looking at the education system, where the number of German-speaking pupils and schools was (especially in mountain regions) much greater than their Italian counterparts. This was in fact a general truth, as the German-speaking community was much larger than the Italian-speaking society. Yet the author of the report was most worried about the teaching content, particularly about the inclusion of any new topic that was “absent from official programmes, and diligently taught with allusions and omissions: scorn for Italy” (Bocca 1959a: 8). In his view, this happened primarily through the teaching of history, ignoring national Italian history and offering a distorted perspective concentrated on the study of Tyrol’s past. Here Bocca moved on to anecdotes and hyperbole, talking about teachers who attributed the discovery of America to Germanic populations rather than Christopher Columbus, of others who taught the entire history curriculum without ever mentioning Italy, and about the textbooks used in German primary schools which stated “The Romans were so depraved and corrupt that the Germanic people had to intervene to restore order to the world” (Bocca 1959a: 8). The space dedicated in this and other articles in “L’Europeo” to the situation in Alto Adige and, above all, the tone and topics addressed certainly reflect a moment when tension between Rome and Bolzano was particularly high, along with a common intolerance nationwide of requests

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from a linguistic minority which, given its size in the region, its political stability and the support of the Austrian government, actually had the power to make its voice heard. A deeply rooted central and Italian nationalist faction, in the institutions as well as the world of culture, struggled to accept that a province inhabited mainly by German speakers should attempt to preserve their own language and culture over time while complaining about the lack of other wider powers of autonomy. The fact that this community did so effectively, with a clear ethnic and nationalist approach, was even more worrying. As usual, the education system became a battlefield with opposing nationalist views, with history featuring on the frontline along with its wealth of symbolic and identity-making symbols—from the Ancient Romans to those who opposed the Enlightenment church reforms in Tyrol in 1809. Notwithstanding the exasperated tone of the Italian press, it was clear that fairly soon, also in the legal provisions established by the Statute of Autonomy of 1948 whereby the education system would leave little space to self-government by the local authorities, a German-speaking school system would emerge that attempted to exploit every occasion to follow its own path, which was far removed from the national programme. In this process, the teaching of history took a central role, becoming a tool whereby the German minority tried to assert its “otherness” and provoking an angry and worried reaction from Italian authorities.

A Battle over Books Textbooks were the key that allowed the fledgling German-speaking schools to follow a route that veered slightly from the Italian model. This caused immediate conflict between Bolzano and Rome. The creation of a German-speaking school system within the general Italian-speaking system required a considerable effort to provide German textbooks that responded to the teaching needs of the national programme. For obvious reasons, the textbooks used in Alto Adige created by the Nazi authorities were no longer possible to use and, in fact, were no longer even available, locally or nationally. The American authorities established that the only German language textbooks that were politically safe were the Swiss volumes, and so in summer 1945 contact was initiated with the Swiss authorities, leading to an agreement regarding the import of textbooks from the Berne canton, which the Bolzano education authorities would repay

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privately with a supply of apples and powdered garlic (Seberich 2000: 271–273). However, immediately, the Apostolic Nunciature commented on how it would be undesirable to send textbooks written for a Protestant canton to the Catholic South Tyrol. Once reassurance was received that the books were absent of any religious tendency and had been approved by the assistant Schools Superintendent of Bolzano, Don Ferrari, the argument was set aside and the books were sent to Alto Adige.12 In the following decades, varying solutions were found for books for the different education levels: firstly, the purchase of books published in German-speaking countries, but also the local publication of reading books, the recovery of books written immediately after the annexing to Italy but before the arrival of Fascism, and the adaptation of books published in Germany or Italy with the addition of sections dedicated to Alto Adige (Falk 2001; Seberich 2000). These were all, however, measures of a controversial nature, particularly regarding history topics. In 1948, the issue of textbooks for the German-speaking schools in Alto Adige created a diplomatic crisis between Italy and Austria. The Austrian federal minister for public education directly contacted the prefecture of Bolzano, stating that he had sent a box of textbooks to the prefect and asking which and how many books the province intended to acquire for the German-speaking schools. This greatly irritated not only the prefect but also the political authorities in Rome, who considered this Austrian action “a new, and equally inopportune, interference in the Alto Adige question”.13 The box of books was blocked by the customs office and resent to sender, while the Foreign Affairs minister, prompted by the undersecretary of the Italian Cabinet Giulio Andreotti, called for “the most serious attention from the Austrian Legation to this inopportune step by the Austrian Ministry of Education”.14 The episode offered an opportunity to consider the problem of school books for German-speaking schools. According to the prefect, while there was an obvious need to translate the content and make necessary adjustments, the general rule should be to use the same textbooks in use in every 12  See ASDMAE, AP, b. 97, fasc. 4 Ordinamento scolastico in Alto Adige, a letter sent by the Minister of Public Education to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1 October 1945, and other documents included in the same file. 13  AGPCM, UZC, Sezione III, b. 59, fasc. 405 Libri di testo nelle scuole di lingua tedesca nella provincia di Bolzano, chief of the Office for Border Areas to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 26 August 1948. 14  Ibid., the Minister of Foreign Affairs to the Office for Border Areas, 15 September 1948.

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other school of the Republic. Where this were not possible, it would be necessary at least to examine books from foreign countries.15 In reality, however, as the measures of the Statute of Autonomy pertaining to schools had not actually been formally approved, there was never any official approval of a selection process for books in German language, a task delegated by the Ministry of Education to the Public Education Department of Bolzano but that no-one (according to the Government Commission) ever carried out.16 Aware of this situation, of the “obvious lacks, both in technical-­teaching terms, and in political-educational terms”17 to be found in foreign books, as well as the enormous “possibility of propaganda contrary to our interests”,18 the Italian authorities undertook (relatively late) to support an initiative for the translation into German of three volumes of a primary school textbook published in Florence by Vallecchi. The translation work and adaptation of texts were carried out by a group of German and Italian teachers linked to the teachers’ trade union, which acted without approval from the local German-speaking school authorities. Well before its end, the project was attacked in the “Lehrer Zeitung” (the teachers’ journal), according to which a book for children down in the valley and in the city could not be suitable for children from the mountains and small villages, while what was really needed was a truly “local” primary school book (1953. Ein neues Realienbuch; Seberich 2000: 276–280). But the real attack came when the primary school textbook was published, this time in an article in the daily newspaper “Dolomiten”, with the unequivocal title “An impossible school book” (1953. Ein unmögliches Schulbuch). According to the writer, all the content in the three volumes of the textbook was wrong and completely detached from local tradition and tastes, beginning with the illustrations which were “too reminiscent of Italian newspapers for children, with colour illustrations and not suited to our tastes”. Basically, it was an Italian book (actually Tuscan) which was  Ibid., the prefect of Bolzano to the Office for Border Areas, 19 August 1948.  Ibid., the minister of Public Education to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 6 October 1948, and the Government Commissioner for the Trentino Alto Adige Region to the Office for Border Areas 22 June 1953. 17  Ibid., the Government Commissioner for the Trentino Alto Adige Region to the Office for Border Areas, 27 April 1953. 18  Ibid., the Government Commissioner for the Trentino Alto Adige Region to the Office for Border Areas, 22 June 1953. 15 16

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too far removed from the local context in its entire structure and cultural references. How could you tell mountain-born children raised on milk, bread and potatoes that the three most important food products were wine, bread and oil? However, predictably, it was the issue of history content that raised the most fervent and specific criticism. In attacks that ranged from serious to comical, it was claimed that the Italian education system clearly continued to consider South Tyrol children as “children of the wolf” (inspired by the name of the Fascist organisation for children up to the age of eight), as they were already requested in the third year of elementary school to know the “history of the Romans, the Seven Kings of Rome, the Etruscans, Menenio Agrippa, Caio Duilio, Scipio Africanus, the Gracchi etc.” There was too much Ancient Roman history, therefore, but also too much of Garibaldi and Mazzini, while there was “too little of the Tyrol region and its Greats”. A list followed of presumed historical errors regarding Tyrol history, and the book was defined as substantially “foreign” and unacceptable. The translators of the book received economic compensation from the government19 but they were denied the fees previously promised by the province authorities.20 Public and private attacks on the textbook creators and the result of their work led to limited use of the book by teachers in the German-language schools. More than ten years later, the political authorities seemed to rediscover the long-standing problem of the textbooks, but this time with reference to high schools. A ministerial inspection of a German-speaking lyceum in Brunico recalled attention to the problem of foreign textbooks (particularly for history and Italian) which were not aligned with the national programmes and did not supply pupils with “a sufficient awareness of Italian life and culture”. After all, it was unlikely that a national publisher could commit to a costly translation work of Italian textbooks, given the relatively limited market of solely German-speaking schools in the province of Bolzano. Furthermore, it was noted how the initiative of ten years earlier for the translation of the elementary school book had not been successful, with

19  Ibid., telegram from the undersecretary to the Prime Minister, Giulio Andreotti, to the Government Commissioner of Trento, 21 October 1953. 20  Ibid., undated memo by one of the book translators.

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the book having been hardly ever used.21 From Bolzano, the government Commissioner confirmed the problem and offered his support to an alternative project already introduced by the local Association of German-­ speaking middle school teachers, which involved the adaptation of German language books in line with ministerial regulations. This would be the simplest and cheapest solution, which could still guarantee “the exclusion of such books that are anti-Italian in character and content”.22 However, despite government support, even two years after this the problem remained; no agreement had been made with the Association of German-­ speaking middle school teachers and vague proposals were floating around regarding the future publication of textbooks for German schools.23 All this occurred while the Association actually continued with the adaptation and integration of German textbooks, supported however by the provincial school authorities (Seberich 2000: 296). The problem of foreign textbooks, of the need to adapt and select them without any specific regulations on this procedure, within an education system like the Italian one where teachers were offered the utmost freedom in choosing which textbooks to use, represented a thorny issue for many decades after the establishment of German-speaking schools. This particularly concerned history books, which were subjected to a true and systematic analysis between 1959 and 1960, after the journalist Lucien Duquenne (editor of the French publication “Combat”) pointed out that some books used in German schools included mangled or controversial accounts of the Italian Risorgimento. The investigation did not identify the presence of “passages deserving of negative criticism”24 but faced with the news that secondary school teachers were integrating the textbook information with their own notes and comments, the assistant Government Commissioner of Bolzano explicitly called for inspection of the content

21  ACS, MI, GAB, 1967–1970, b. 403, fasc. 15926/3 Alto Adige. Scuole, sf. 3 Alto Adige. Scuole. Affari vari, the head of the Cabinet at the Ministry of Public Education to the governmental Department for Regional Affairs, 11 September 1965. 22  Ibid., the assistant Government Commissioner to the governmental Department for Regional Affairs, 5 January 1966. 23  Ibid., the Minister of Public Education to the governmental Department for Regional Affairs, 8 March 1968. 24  AGPCM, UZC, Section III, b. 59, fasc. 405 Libri di testo nelle scuole di lingua tedesca nella provincia di Bolzano, the Minister of Public Education to the governmental Department for Regional Affairs, 11 March 1960.

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and integrated notes.25 This was an inadmissible proposal and not even taken into consideration, but it shows how some Italian officials viewed their role in the control of educational tools used in history teaching.

The Second Statute of Autonomy and Re-establishment of Local Identity As we have seen, in the province of Bolzano the German-speaking school system was established immediately after the end of the Second World War, with its principal characteristics defined with the Statute of Autonomy of 1948. This autonomous control was conceded not only to the German-­ speaking province of Bolzano but to the entire Trentino Alto Adige region, where the population of German language speakers was the minority. Soon, this solution hit a crisis point, creating a schism between Trento and Bolzano, with the accusation made by Austria to the United Nations of Italy failing in its responsibilities towards the South Tyrol population, the beginning of difficult treaties between Italy and Austria and a dramatic period of secessionist terrorism. The solution was to offer new and wider powers of autonomy, separately awarded to the two provinces of Bolzano and Trento (Steininger 1999; D’Amelio et al. 2015). The introduction in 1972 of the Second Statute of Autonomy led to a consistent increase in powers shifted from the state to the two provinces, including the fields of education and culture, laying down the framework still in use today and defined over the following decades by numerous legislative and administrative measures. In short, in the education field, the autonomous province of Bolzano was given complete responsibility for infant schools and professional training and education (as well as scholastic assistance and buildings) and co-management of elementary and secondary school teaching that is, remaining consistent with the general principles established by Italian law (Adami Gallo 2017: 61–64). In general, the education system of the autonomous province opted for a clear separation of the three school types (German, Italian and Ladin), each of which was managed by its own school board (Vidoni 2013: 61). By instilling their own educational and cultural activity, the German-­ speaking schools (larger in number) moved increasingly towards the German-speaking world. This led among other things to further emphasis 25   Ibid., the assistant Government Commissioner of Bolzano to the governmental Department for Regional Affairs, 5 March 1960.

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on distinctly separate approaches to history teaching in the German- and Italian-speaking schools. The first sign of this can again be seen in the textbooks that still today come mainly from Germany and partially from Austria, thus being in no way representative of an Italian perspective of historical events. In the school year 2006–2007, an empirical study was carried out into the content of history teaching in 111 final year classes belonging to 27 of the 29 German-speaking high schools in Alto Adige. Despite not being based on a representative sample and resorting to data that is not always comparable, the results of the study supply some significant points of interest (Parschalk 2010: 57–69). Based on the list of topics studied by each class (as listed in the end of year report), the research revealed how the main macro-themes studied were from German history, followed by the history of South Tyrol, world history, European, Italian and then Austrian. The focus on German history can be linked to the fact that 22 of the 29 German-speaking high schools use textbooks from Germany. The growing orientation towards Germany and Austria emerges not only in the choice of textbooks but also in participation in educational initiatives launched and organised in those countries, such as those belonging to the so-called politische Bildung, which often put twentieth-century events and issues at the heart of history: from dictatorships to the Shoah, from wars to various forms of discrimination. Since 2008, also the German-speaking schools in the South Tyrol have participated in the Aktionstage Politische Bildung/Education for democratic citizenship initiatives, founded in Germany in 2005,26 as well as the annual contest Schülerwettbewerb zur politischen Bildung,27 along with schools from Germany, Austria, Luxembourg and the German-speaking region of Belgium. Formal participation in similar initiatives also contributes to reshaping history teaching according to German-speaking cultural and educational perspectives (of Germany itself in prime place), with inevitable detachment from the system in Italy. While on the one hand—through books, teaching tools, educational initiatives and engagement of the children—history teaching in 26  See here for Austrian website: https://www.politik-lernen.at/aktionstage; South Tyrol website: https://secure.provinz.bz.it/politische-bildung/aktionstage.asp and German website: https://www.bpb.de/veranstaltungen/netzwerke/aktionstage/. In Germany this initiative was implemented until 2015. 27  https://www.bpb.de/lernen/projekte/schuelerwettbewerb/.

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German-speaking schools seems to look increasingly north, on the other hand there is also increased focus on local history. The significant devolution of power in the educational and cultural contexts has led to a clear shift from the earlier approach. The party supported by the South Tyrol population, which has long continued to attract the majority of votes in the province of Bolzano, has used its new powers to reinforce a South Tyrol identity which was still perceived as fragile and at risk. The telling of history within and outside the classroom became an important element in identity-making self-knowledge. From the end of the 1970s, there was a significant increase in the number of German-­ speaking books published, generally didactic and dedicated to local history (particularly modern history). In their interpretative nature, they represented coherent and persistent criteria, which in many cases we still find today, focusing on the description of a united and idealised Tyrol, the Italian and Fascist oppression and the heroic struggle of the South Tyrol people for survival during and after the regime. This was all independent of any wider reconstruction of the general historic context, able to highlight the topic of opposing nationalisms from the nineteenth century onwards as well as the penetration of national-socialist ideology of the local region, anti-Semitism, and local responsibility for the extermination of the Jews (Heiss 2011; Romeo 2015; Di Michele 2022). In these reconstructions (among other things) the events of the Italian-speaking population were practically absent, as was any knowledge or acknowledgement of historiography in Italian language.28 The cultural and identity-making importance assigned to local history was obviously reflected in the education system. In the aforementioned empirical study, the history of the South Tyrol ranked second in the list of key topics taught in the last year of German-speaking high school. This focus on local history is evident throughout the entire range of school curricula and was formally approved after the Second Statute of Autonomy gave Bolzano the power to modify content in the school programme. In Italian schools, as of the early 2000s, teaching programmes (in the sense of a rigid and prescriptive list of topics to tackle) were substituted by National Guidelines, which established more general goals for each subject and relative objectives for the development of knowledge and skills to be acquired in each type of school. 28  For a recent example of this, see Mazohl and Steininger (2020) and the review made by Heiss (2020).

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The province of Bolzano, using its own legislative-making power in the education field, approved the guidelines of its own province for the various levels of schools, each separately for German-, Italian- and Ladin-­ speaking populations. The provincial guidelines for the first cycle of education in Italian-speaking schools in the province of Bolzano are practically identical to the national guidelines, while the German-speaking schools are significantly different. Particularly, the German guidelines include a strong and persistent emphasis on the importance of local history. Among the goals for the end of primary school are “exploring the life and actions of figures, art works and cultural heritage particularly selected from our homeland and discuss these” (Deutsches Schulamt 2009: 84), where “homeland” (Heimat in the original text) is intended as the South Tyrol. Among the goals to achieve by the end of middle school, meanwhile, we find reference to the historic evolution in general and global sense and then the ability to “describe important events in the history of our country, Austria and Italy, and their consequences” (Deutsches Schulamt 2009: 86). In general, much time is dedicated to exploring local history, much more than suggested in the national guidelines or practised by Italian-­ speaking schools in Alto Adige. This seems to match the approach of the early decades after the Second World War, characterised by the legislative framework of the first Statute of Autonomy with the difference that (thanks to the powers guaranteed by the Second Statute of Autonomy) from the 1970s onwards this occurred in a more systematic and institutional manner. An even clearer example of the focus on local history in German-­ speaking schools can be found in the issue of the history essay included as part of the secondary school final diploma, the so-called esame di maturità. Following the various treaties between Rome and Bolzano designed to extend the powers of provincial autonomous control of education, in 1992 an agreement was drafted which assigned the Schulamt of Bolzano the task of writing the question for the history essay for secondary school leavers in the German-speaking schools. The equivalent school board in Italian language-speaking schools continued to set the question as prepared by the Ministry of Public Education for the whole of Italy. Thus, a long-term demand was satisfied, born from the observation that the German-language schools did not tackle Italian history in sufficient detail, thereby putting students at a disadvantage at the school-­ leaving exam regarding their preparation as compared with students from

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Italian schools (1992. Erstmals Thema mit Südtirolbezug). The request emerged therefore from observation of a clear gap between history teaching in German schools and the rest of Italy, as well as with the Italian schools of Alto Adige. In effect, a glance at the list of history essay titles assigned from 1979 to 1991 reveals how candidates were asked to study topics almost exclusively focused on Italian history and mostly regarding the time period between national unification and the First World War. By concentrating on the glory of the Risorgimento and the Great War, it was possible to avoid more problematic and potentially controversial topics from a political point of view, like Fascism and the recent events of the Republic of Italy. After 1992, with the transfer of power from Rome to Bolzano, the South Tyrol schools were assigned an improvised and complete substitution of Italian history as the main topic, with South Tyrol history. From 1992 to 2007, we find (apart from one case) only topics of local history: the splitting of Tyrol after the First World War; Fascism in Alto Adige; Alto Adige during the Second World War; the 1946 Treaty of Paris between De Gasperi and Gruber; the Second Statute of Autonomy; preservation of minority languages with the South Tyrol as a case study; the development of tourism and the economy in South Tyrol and so on (Parschalk 2010: 119–125). The subsequent titles over a 15-year period cover only and exclusively modern history of the South Tyrol in the twentieth century, beginning with its annexing to Italy and excluding anything which does not form part of the local history narrative.

From “Autonomous Patriotism” to a “Shared History”? These same titles, studied more analytically, seem however to mark an evolution: the progressive shift of focus from history of the ‘martyrdom’ of South Tyrol to its ultimate ‘victory’. From essay titles that underline the suffering undergone by the South Tyrol population with the ripping of Land Tirol in 1919 and Fascism, there is a shift to questions that deal with its success in landing the Second Statute of Autonomy in 1972, the broad range of know-how and skills managed locally, the gradually decreasing importance of the national framework and the strong economic growth that today places the province of Bolzano among the richest areas nationwide and beyond.

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This seems aligned with a more general phenomenon that has characterised recent decades, that is, the development of an identity-making sentiment regarding only South Tyrol, increasingly less connected to the historic Tyrol and Austrian world. The self-government of the German-­ speaking population seems to be changing gradually in direction. While before there reigned supreme the image of a community perpetually in danger, always struggling to protect its own identity, as part of a recent and wider victim and self-absolvent narrative, it has moved gradually towards a success story, that of a minority group which fought and won, conquering greater independence and extraordinary economic and social growth. The transfer of a wide range of powers at provincial level allowed the national minority (actually the majority as regards this province, which remains generally loyal to the ethnic catch-all party) to manage power and resources, substituting the Italian State in many fields. This gradually promoted the development of a South Tyrol identity that is clearly distinct from the Italian identity, but also increasingly removed from its Austrian “motherland” while never totally breaking that traditional historic and cultural link. A whole century of history different from that of northern Tyrol and Austria, self-complacency for the successes achieved and the knowledge of living in a context totally different from that of north of the Brenner, have all contributed to the evolution of a type of South Tyrol nation-building process (Nick and Pallaver 1998: 21–38; Heiss 2002). Replicating two famous government models, history has become an important tool in South Tyrol for the creation of a new sub-national identity related to the small local context, by increasingly emphasising modern history and, above all, the events that led up to the current autonomous system. The new value-related importance assigned to provincial autonomy can be seen in different forms. In the provincial guidelines for German-­ speaking high schools, it states that the learning to be acquired before the end of the fifth and final class must include the ability to “recognise the importance of democracy for society and the value of autonomy for the co-existence of linguistic communities in Alto Adige” (Deutsches Schulamt 2011: 77). It is rather curious to find such a specific reference to a feature of recent local history in a section dedicated to general history knowledge that young people need to acquire by the end of their schooling. But autonomy has also become part of the provincial civil calendar; since 2014, the Day of Autonomy has been celebrated on 5 September to commemorate the Treaty of Paris between De Gasperi and Gruber. In

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2021, this anniversary was marked with the inauguration of an exhibition dedicated to the history and figures of provincial autonomy, in an event attended by the former Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi and the former Austrian President of the Republic Heinz Fischer.29 The Governor of South Tyrol, Arno Kompatscher, who was elected in 2014, strongly supports forms of public recognition of Alto Adige’s self-­ government and its values. His nomination marked a clear political and generational change, with greater dialogue and contact between the different linguistic communities. On various occasions, Kompatscher has spoken about the importance of promoting Autonomiepatriotismus (autonomy patriotism) and its ability to increase approval by all the linguistic communities of the solution selected to overcome the ethnic tension of previous decades, in the name of peaceful cohabitation.30 The goal is the transformation of autonomy—still seen by some as the unsatisfactory runner-up prize to independence and by others as an unjustified concession by the Italian government—into a point of convergence wherein different linguistic communities can come together, recognising and forming their own individual identity. To do so, it is necessary to transform the concept of an autonomy that is purely a form of compensation for the German-speaking population to that of an independent region which can involve everyone (including Italians). For this reason, in recent years a change of approach has been evident also in policies of historic memory, more concerned with promoting dialogue and bringing together linguistic groups than focusing on identity-making claims. This was made possible also by the development (particularly in the 1980s and 1990s) of a more modern historiography, no longer deployed as in the past along rigid ethnic lines but instead able to abandon the use of history as a tool of self-acquittal on its own side and of accusations from the opposing side (Hartung von Hartungen 1996). In the sphere of education, this new trend led to an important initiative: the creation of a local history book published in three volumes in German and Italian between 2010 and 2013, designed for the schools of all linguistic communities in Alto Adige. The initiative was promoted by the provincial Council, in response to a provincial Council decision of January 2006 (Mezzalira 2015; Delivré 2015). The result was the work Shifts and perspectives/Übergänge und Perspektiven, published by local  https://www.provincia.bz.it/giornata-autonomia/default.asp.   See, for example, the interview issued by Arno Kompatscher in Steinegger and Gobbato (2019). 29 30

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historians and teachers, which integrated with (rather than substituting) the general history textbooks. The initiative marked an important turning point in trying to find a way to present history, considering the histories of the different linguistic communities and proposing a moment of comparison and sharing rather than (as in the past) contrast and opposition. Significantly, in the same years, the province of Bolzano slightly reduced its emphasis on local topics when setting the essay questions for the high-­ school diploma exam. As of 2008, the list of these questions suddenly broadened in perspective and the topics veered from local history to tackle a wider range of issues—from the Italian Constitution to the role of the UN and the process of European unification, from the results of the Russian Revolution to migration and so on.31 It is as if, after using and abusing the new educational power awarded to the province, a more mature and suitable approach has slowly developed, able to overcome the tension of previous years. It is difficult to say how much of this happened alongside the step forward with discussion and debate driven by the project of a shared textbook. It is interesting to see how the initiative of the bilingual textbook was explicitly inspired by projects for shared textbooks such as those in French-­ German or German-Polish32 and also recalled the experience of the bilateral history education boards. Just as in the narration of their recent success story, also in transforming the use of history from an identity-­ making element to a pacification tool, the small South Tyrol region seems to wish to replicate state-introduced models. In this specific case, however, the parties called to work together on a common history are not two bordering sovereign states but the different linguistic and cultural communities that co-exist in the same geographical region. In the difficult and obstacle-strewn journey from a history communicated both inside and outside schools as a tool for construction of an ethnic-national identity specific to the German-speaking population of Alto Adige, to a tool of pacification, there are two constants which are worthy of mention. The first lies in the persistent centrality of the local historic narrative to the detriment of others, primarily of the national Italian narrative. The 31  The following webpage lists all the essay questions set in the high-school diploma exam for the school year 2004/2005 to 2018/2019, also for the German-speaking schools of Alto Adige: https://www.istruzione.it/esame_di_stato/201819/Italiano.htm. 32  See the declarations of political promoters in the Introduction to Kustatscher and Romeo (2010: 7).

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second element of continuity, on the other hand, consists in the extra-­ curricular mission still awarded to the subject of history, which has always been assigned goals other than a purely cultural knowledge of the past. While the original task of history education in the region was to help reinforce identity-building among the German-speaking contingent, it is now expected to respond to situations of rapprochement and understanding between the linguistic groups. The general concept remains rooted in identity-building but now is based on promotion of shared identity of Italians and Germans within the framework of provincial autonomy.

Archival Sources Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Roma (ACS) –– Ministero dell’Interno, Gabinetto—Archivio Generale (MI, GAB) Archivio generale della Roma (AGPCM)

Presidenza

del

Consiglio

dei

ministri,

–– Ufficio per le zone di confine (UZC) Archivio Storico Diplomatico del Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Roma (ASDMAE) –– Affari politici 1946–1950, Italia, Conferenza della Pace—Frontiera settentrionale (AP) Archivio provinciale di Bolzano, Bolzano (APB) –– Deutsches Schulamt (DS)

References Secondary Literature Adami Gallo, Margit, ed. 2017. Manuale dell’Alto Adige 2017. Bolzano: Giunta provinciale di Bolzano. Antonelli, Quinto. 2013. Storia della scuola trentina: Dall’umanesimo al fascismo. Trento: Il margine.

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Bocca, Giorgio. 1959a. Come stiamo perdendo l’Alto Adige: Le valigie alla porta. L’Europeo, February 15: 6–11. ———. 1959b. Come stiamo perdendo l’Alto Adige: Andrea Hofer va in fabbrica. L’Europeo, February 22: 18–23. Brezinka, Wolfgang. 1959. Die kulturellen Aufgaben des Lehrers in Südtirol. Dolomiten, April 16: 3–4. D’Amelio, Diego, Andrea Di Michele, and Giorgio Mezzalira, eds. 2015. La difesa dell’italianità: L’Ufficio per le zone di confine a Bolzano, Trento e Trieste 1945-1954. Bologna: il Mulino. Delivré, Émilie. 2015. Bâtir une histoire régionale, un pari inédit: L’enseignement de l’histoire dans la région du Trentin-Haut-Adige. Revue internationale d’éducation de Sèvres 69: 115–121. 1955. Der Schutz der Volksminderheit beginnt bei der Schule. Dolomiten, April 8: 4. Di Michele, Andrea. 2022. Antagonismo, riconciliazione, indifferenza? Un’introduzione al confronto storiografico italo-austriaco dal dopoguerra a oggi. In La difficile riappacificazione. Italia, Austria e Alto Adige nel ventesimo secolo, ed. Andrea Di Michele, Andreas Gottsmann, Luciano Monzali, and Karlo Ruzicic-Kessler, 11–23. Roma: Viella. 1953. Ein neues Realienbuch. Lehrer Zeitung, n. 11 1953. Ein unmögliches Schulbuch. Dolomiten, December 3: 7. 1992. Erstmals Thema mit Südtirolbezug. Dolomiten, June 23: 11. Falk, Irmgard. 2001. Zwischen Garibaldi und Andreas Hofer: Geschichtsunterricht an deutschsprachigen Südtiroler Mittelschulen in den 1950er und 1960er Jahren. Diplomarbeit: Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck, Institut für Geschichte. Ferrari, Josef. 1958. Das Schulwesen in Südtirol. In Südtirol: Versprechen und Wirklichkeit, ed. Wolfgang Pfaundler, 220–243. Wien: Wilhelm Frick Verlag & Co. Gatterer, Claus. 1972. Erbfeindschaft: Italien–Österreich. Wien: Europaverlag. 1948. Gefahr in Verzug. Dolomiten, October 7: 1 Hartung von Hartungen, Christoph. 1996. Le ricerche di storia locale in Alto Adige/Südtirol-Tirolo: Dalle origini ai giorni nostri. In Ricerca e didattica della storia locale in Alto Adige, ed. Giorgio Delle Donne, 29–93. Bolzano: Provincia autonoma di Bolzano. Heiss, Hans. 2002. Fortschritt und Grenzen des Regionalismus: Südtirol nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. In Die Nationalisierung von Grenzen: Zur Konstruktion nationaler Identität in sprachlich gemischten Grenzregionen, ed. Michael G. Müller and Rolf Petri, 199–229. Marburg: Verlag Herder-Institut. ———. 2007. Treibsätze der Geschichtspolitik: Die Gedenkfeiern der Tiroler Erhebung 1909–2009. Geschichte und Region / Storia e regione 16 (2): 118–146.

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———. 2011. Identität und Wissenschaft an der Grenze: Landes- und Regionalgeschichte in Tirol und Südtirol. Blätter für deutsche Landesgeschichte 147: 31–57. ———. 2020. Rezension: Brigitte Mazohl and Rolf Steininger. 2020. Geschichte Südtirols. München: C.H.  Beck. Geschichte und Region / Storia e regione 29 (2): 205–209. Istituto provinciale di statistica Bolzano. 2020. Statistisches Jahrbuch für Südtirol / Annuario statistico della Provincia di Bolzano. Bolzano: Provincia autonoma di Bolzano/Alto Adige – Istituto provinciale di statistica. Kulturinstitut, Südtiroler, ed. 1983. Josef Ferrari 1907–1958. Bozen: Athesia. Kustatscher, Erika, and Carlo Romeo. 2010. Passaggi e prospettive: Lineamenti di storia locale. Vol. 1: L’area tirolese dalla preistoria al tardo Medioevo. Bolzano: Athesia. Mazohl, Brigitte, and Rolf Steininger. 2020. Geschichte Südtirols. München: C.H. Beck. Mezzalira, Giorgio. 2015. Il progetto di un manuale scolastico per la storia locale dell’Alto Adige/Südtirol. In La storia attraversa i confini: Esperienze e prospettive didattiche, ed. Luigi Blanco and Chiara Tamanini, 155–165. Roma: Carocci. Nick, Rainer, and Günther Pallaver. 1998. Jenseits von Grenzen: Die Europaregion aus der Sicht der Bevölkerung. Innsbruck: Studia Universitätsverlag. Obwexer, Walter, and Eva Pfanzelter, eds. 2020. 70 anni Accordo di Parigi. Baden-Baden and Torino: Nomos / Giappichelli. Parschalk, Norbert. 2010. Geschichtsunterricht in einer europäischen Grenzregion: Blickpunkt Südtirol. Saarbrücken: Südwestdeutscher Verlag für Hochschulschriften. Romeo, Carlo. 2015. Alcuni aspetti dell’insegnamento della storia locale in Alto Adige/Südtirol. In La storia attraversa i confini: Esperienze e prospettive didattiche, ed. Luigi Blanco and Chiara Tamanini, 75–84. Roma: Carocci. Schulamt, Deutsches, ed. 2009. Rahmenrichtlinien für die Grund- und Mittelschule in Südtirol. Meran: Medus. ———, ed. 2011. Rahmenrichtlinien für die Gymnasien in Südtirol. Lana: Lanarepro. Seberich, Rainer. 2000. Südtiroler Schulgeschichte: Muttersprachlicher Unterricht unter fremdem Gesetz. Bozen: Raetia. ———. 2001. Alla ricerca di un’autonomia culturale: L’ordinamento scolastico in Alto Adige dal dopoguerra al primo Statuto d’autonomia. Archivio trentino 50 (2): 117–142. Steinegger, Guido, and Fabio Gobbato. 2019. Musterbeispiel für vereinte Vielfalt / La sfida di unirsi nella diversità. Land Südtirol / Provincia autonoma di Bolzano / Provinzia autonoma de Bulsan 3: 26–30.

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Steininger, Rolf. 1997. Südtirol im 20. Jahrhundert. Vom Leben und Überleben einer Minderheit. Innsbruck: StudienVerlag. ———. 1999. Südtirol zwischen Diplomatie und Terror: 1947-1969. Vol. vol 3. Bolzano: Athesia. Torelli, Giorgio. 1960. Sette giorni alla guerra delle Dolomiti. Candido, January 17: 4. Verra, Roland. 2008. Die Entwicklung der drei Schulmodelle in Südtirol seit 1945. Ladinia 32: 223–260. Vidoni, Claudio. 2013. La scuola dell’autonomia provinciale: Cenni storici e profili statutari, ordinamentali e legislativi della scuola nella Provincia autonoma di Bolzano. Roma: Armando. Zelger, Anton. 1965. Das deutsche Schulwesen in Südtirol seit 1945. In Südtirol: Eine Frage des europäischen Gewissens, ed. Franz Huter, 537–559. Wien: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik.

Websites https://secure.provinz.bz.it/politische-bildung/aktionstage.asp [consulted 26.05.2023]. https://www.bpb.de/lernen/projekte/schuelerwettbewerb/ [consulted 26.05.2023]. https://www.bpb.de/veranstaltungen/netzwerke/aktionstage/ [consulted 26.01.2023]. https://www.istruzione.it/esame_di_stato/201819/Italiano.htm [consulted 26.05.2023]. https://www.politik-lernen.at/aktionstage [consulted on 26.05.2023]. https://www.provincia.bz.it/giornata-autonomia/default.asp [consulted 26.05.2023].

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History Education in Luxembourg’s Secondary Schools in the 1950s–1970s: Ideas and Experiments Machteld Venken

Luxembourg is one of the smallest countries in Europe. Its territory has been referred to as an ‘intermediate space’; the ‘intermediate’, as Philipp Ther explained‚ ‘is not only to be understood in a geographical sense as a location between core areas, i.e., on the edge of nations and states […] The regions are linguistic, cultural and ethnic transition areas in which different influences cross and often mix’ (Ther 2003: XI). A specific characteristic of Luxembourg lies in the fact that the country has come to understand itself as a nation-state, yet without ever relinquishing its rootedness in the culture of its neighbours. Approaching its status through the concept of a ‘nationalised intermediate space’ enables researchers to offer analyses reaching beyond dichotomic juxtapositions such as periphery/ centre or majority/minority (Spirinelli 2020: 75). Luxembourg can be

M. Venken (*) Centre for Contemporary and Digital History, University of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. S. Colla, A. Di Michele (eds.), History Education at the Edge of the Nation, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27246-2_4

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seen as both a nationalised and an intermediate space, in which nationbuilding initiatives have been deeply embedded in cultural influences from neighbouring countries, and tensions between multiple identifications have been inherent. This chapter brings the reader as close as possible to an understanding of how history was taught in history classrooms in the intermediate nationalised space of Luxembourg in the years following the Second World War. Given the absence of a research infrastructure in Luxembourg (Meyer 2009), as well as a lack of descriptions of how teachers performed in history classrooms in the Luxembourgian teachers’ journal,1 the analytical lens here focuses on the pedagogical theses submitted by trainee history teachers in order to receive a Luxembourg teaching accreditation after they had obtained a university qualification abroad and completed a two-­ year internship in a Luxembourg school.2 The 21 theses written between the 1950s and 1970s that are preserved in the Luxembourg National Archives shed new light on how history teaching in Luxembourg was researched and discussed by students.3 These theses offer the only historical insight into how history was taught, as well as showing how newcomers to the profession thought and experimented with how it should be taught. The theses demonstrate that trainee teachers formulated innovative ideas and experimental approaches when it came to history teaching in Luxembourg. This is a new observation that runs counter to the silence on history methodology that prevailed in the country’s leading teachers’ journal at the time, a silence that prompted Thill to characterise the years after the Second World War as a time bereft of innovation (followed by a period of crisis after the history curriculum was downsized as a result of a law voted in 1968) (1994: 119). Rohstock and Lenz, on the other hand, called these years an ‘incubation period’ for a more courageous educational policy which arrived at the beginning of the 1970s (2012: 126), as the Ministry of Education invested its efforts in adapting international influences in mathematics education ‘to a national framework of  Journal des Professeurs (Association des Professeurs).  This system is still in place: Règlement grand-ducal du 7 juin 2015 concernant la formation théorique et pratique ainsi que la période probatoire des enseignants de l’enseignement postprimaire (https://legilux.public.lu/eli/etat/leg/rgd/2015/06/07/n9/jo). 3  Before 1969, trainee teachers also had to write an academic thesis and defend it in front of an examination board in Luxembourg. Afterwards, the theses that trainee teachers had already written and defended at universities abroad were accepted in Luxembourg. 1 2

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justification that invoked tradition, in the interests of political legitimacy’ (2012: 109). This article is the first to demonstrate how these international influences also had an impact on the way in which trainee teachers thought about history teaching. Although their attempts to internationalise history education in Luxembourg did not result in short-term policy changes in the 1950s and 1960s, some of their ideas and experiments had a major impact on the way in which the history curriculum was restructured in the 1970s.

Introduction In many European countries, the nineteenth-century process of nation-­ building was accompanied by a desire for cultural homogeneity through the promotion of one standardised language and the invention of an imagined community based on a long-shared history (Barbour and Carmichael 2007: 44–82). In the small Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, however, bilingualism was firmly rooted in the country’s constitution, and nationalism became defined as a unique mixed culture (Mischkultur) prompted by multifaceted historical contacts with neighbouring countries (Gardin et al. 2015: 541). As in many other countries, history education was used in Luxembourg as a means to create and legitimise the nation and its assumed identity. At the same time, the practical organisation of history education in Luxembourg was highly dependent on foreign infrastructures. Until the late twentieth century, most history textbooks in use had been published in neighbouring countries, and before the establishment of the University of Luxembourg in 2003, these countries were also where history teachers received their university training. Moreover, there was a general consensus concerning the place of Luxembourgish history and the Luxembourgish language in secondary school education. Although opinions on the extent to which Luxembourgish history should be included in the school curriculum continue to vary, there has never been an attempt to grant it more than a fraction of the teaching hours within the history curriculum. In addition, the increased use of the Luxembourg vernacular in history education after the Second World War was never meant to undermine the aim of secondary schools to educate pupils to be perfectly bilingual in German and French (Spirinelli 2020: 467). The first law regulating education in Luxembourg already prescribed both German and French as mandatory languages (Trausch 2003: 215). Nevertheless, historically rooted norms of language use in social

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interactions among inhabitants informed the composition of the secondary school curriculum. Whereas French was traditionally understood as the lingua franca among the adult elite, Luxembourgish, ‘a West Central German dialect of Moselle Franconian origin’, was the tongue in which ordinary people and children interacted with each other (Gardin et  al. 2015: 540). Motivated by the country’s occupation by Germany during the Second World War, teachers in the early post-war period started to express themselves in Luxembourgish instead of German, although the language did not have a standardised orthography and was not recognised as an official language in the Constitution (Schreiber 2015: 166).4 At the end of 1948, the Minister of Education issued a circular in which he stressed that ‘German remains the only language that every Luxembourger can read fluently and manages to write fairly correctly’.5 Spirinelli recently noted that ‘for all the scepticism and aversion professed against German, the cultural and political elites did not want to abandon the bilingual status of the country’ (2020: 472). It remained clear to the Minister of Education that Luxembourgish was not in a position to supplant German as ‘a great written cultural language’ and that it should only be used if of ‘pedagogical value for pupils’.6 To ensure that pupils of Luxembourg’s conventional humanities-based curriculum left secondary education with advanced German and French language skills, the seven-year curriculum was composed of three lower years of education mainly in German, followed by four years in French (Rohstock and Lenz 2012: 63). As a result, the history curriculum followed a two-cycle approach, in which for two or two and a half hours a week a chronological approach from ancient history to the present was adopted; instruction was in German in the lower years of secondary education and was repeated and consolidated in French in the higher years of secondary education (Thill 1994: 119). A variety of textbooks were in use. A difference was recognised between what was referred to as ‘universal’ history, traditionally taught on the basis of textbooks published in Germany, France or Belgium, and ‘national 4  In 1964, Luxembourgish was added to the curriculum. In 1984, Luxembourgish joined French and German as an official language in the Constitution. The ongoing constitutional reform elevated Luxembourgish to the level of ‘national language’, while still respecting the principle of multilingualism (Chambre des Députés Grand-Duché de Luxembourg 2022: 4). 5  Ministry of National Education (Luxembourg), ANLux, MEN-0003, Circulaire du 22 décembre 1948 au personnel enseignant sur l’emploi de l’allemand comme langue véhiculaire dans l’enseignement primaire par Pierre Frieden. 6  Ibid.

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history’, for which textbooks were produced in Luxembourg. However, as the German occupation with its national-socialist agenda for history teaching had undermined confidence in German textbooks, after the Second World War, a textbook for ‘universal’ history was also produced in German in Luxembourg (Probst 1946; Koch and Meyers 1947; Meyers 1946; Franck 1950). These textbooks were accompanied by a textbook in German about Luxembourgish history for the lower years of the curriculum (Meyers 1939). For the higher years, foreign textbooks were combined with a locally published textbook in French (Herchen 1947).7 Arthur Herchen’s book, initially published in 1918, remained the most influential textbook for Luxembourgish history until it was replaced by a new set of textbooks in 1972.8 In the aftermath of the First World War, royalist Arthur Herchen published his ‘Manuel d’histoire nationale’. He aimed to spread the message that Luxembourgers would no longer have to submit to foreign powers and that the sovereignty of the people was securely guaranteed by the monarchy. During the First World War, the Luxembourg national authorities had decided to steer a neutral course, but in practice the country was occupied by German troops. After the Armistice, following accusations of collaborationism with the German occupier from both the country’s neighbours and a significant minority of Luxembourg people, Grand Duchess Marie-Adelaide ceded the throne to her sister Charlotte. The continued existence of monarchic rule and national independence was acknowledged in a referendum in 1919 (Pauly 2011: 82–85). The upheavals led Grand Duchess Charlotte and her entourage to stress their connection with Luxembourg history more explicitly than before (Péporté et al. 2010: 91). Charlotte belonged to the House of Nassau, which had ruled the Grand Duchy since the establishment of a personal union following the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, but her ancestors no longer held any lasting connection with the territory. The personal union ceased to exist after the death of William III in 1890, when the thrones of the Netherlands and Luxembourg passed to different branches of the royal family. Although revisions of Herchen’s book occurred over time, the overall structure of the text in four main parts did not change. ‘Ancient times’ covered historical events before what was presented as the establishment  For an English translation, see Herchen et al. (1950).  Meyers’ handbook published in German supported Herchen’s national narrative of the Luxembourgish past (Schoentgen 2007: 540). 7 8

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of Luxembourg. A second part focused on Count Siegfried, who built a castle in 963—which later provided the country with its name—and launched a glorious period for the region. Herchen’s third period is referred to as ‘foreign dominations’, starting in 1443 with the rule of the Burgundians, who were later followed by the Spanish, French and Austrians. The most contemporary period in Herchen’s book starts in 1815, after the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte, when, as the narrative goes, Luxembourg rose up again. It received the status of a Grand Duchy and was united in a personal union with the Netherlands under the monarchic rule of William I. In 1839, the splitting of Luxembourg into an eastern part (today’s Grand Duchy of Luxembourg) and a western part (now the Belgian province of Luxembourg) was portrayed as a ‘dismemberment’ of the Grand Duchy (Herchen 1947: 175–176). We know little about how history textbooks were used in the classroom. The only existing report in which the Ministry of Education spoke about methodology reads: ‘the solid acquisition of facts, dates and names must be instrumental knowledge through which young people must acquire the skills of reflection, reasoning and judgment’, but offers no specific instructions.9 Through an analysis of 21 pedagogical theses written by trainee history teachers during the 1950s and 1970s, this chapter investigates what could metaphorically be referred to as a methodological laboratory of ideas and experiments involving trainee and established teachers as well as school pupils. Having introduced the Luxembourg school system as well as the use of languages and textbooks in history education, this chapter will now discuss three aspects: the ideas formulated by trainee teachers in the 1950s on how to teach what was juxtaposed as ‘universal’ and ‘national’ history together, while using textbooks printed in different countries; pupils’ and teachers’ evaluations of (and proposals for changing) history teaching expressed in the 1960s; and trainee teachers’ experiments combining history teaching with civic education as developed in the 1970s. An interesting group of figures, encompassing the period from the 1950s to the 1970s can be identified: among the first trainee teachers writing their critical theses in the post-war period were Paul Margue (1923–2019) and Gilbert Trausch (1931–2018), historians who played a leading role in the writing of new history textbooks in the early 1970s. Absent from both the 9  Ministry of National Education. Horaires et Programmes (1953/1954), Luxembourg, 1953, unpaged (mentioned in Thill 1994: 122).

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corpus of theses and the new textbooks is an analysis of diversity among pupils in Luxembourg schools. The fact that the proportion of foreigners in Luxembourg rose from 10% in 1947 to 30% in 1993, the majority being blue-collar workers, seems to have gone unnoticed by the authors under study (Scuto 2010: 14).10 Only later studies revealed that children’s performance at school is linked to the educational background of their parents (Chauvel and Schiele 2022: 171).

Ideas of Trainee Teachers in the 1950s In Luxembourg, the topic of ‘national history’ always received less attention in the school curriculum than in its neighbouring countries. Non-­ German history was usually only included in the content of German textbooks if it related to historical events that had taken place on German territory (Dierkes 2005: 84). Although representatives of the Annales school were able to include their long-term ‘history of civilisations’ approach in the French history curriculum, that curriculum remained embedded in a ‘traditional political and national history fostered by successive French governments in order to revive national consciousness amid national crisis after the Second World War’ (Otto 2019: 234). The situation perhaps most comparable to that of Luxembourg can be identified in Belgium. It offered a history teaching curriculum that, although ‘mainly characterised by imparting patriotism’, never dedicated more than one-­ third of teaching time to the study of the Belgian past (Van Nieuwenhuyse 2018: 5). Before the Second World War, the teaching of what was called ‘national history’ in Luxembourg was limited to part of the history curriculum in the fourth year of secondary education. A debate on the importance of ‘national history’ in the Luxembourg curriculum emerged in the late 1930s, with history teachers proposing that ‘universal history should be seen through the perspective of Luxembourg’ (Biermann 1937) and that ‘national history’ should be taught in tandem with ‘universal history’ (Koch 1938). After the end of the Second World War, ‘national history’ was introduced in the three lower years of secondary education, but it remained in the shadow of ‘universal history’ (Engel 1952: 21). A ministerial guideline from 1950 also introduced ‘national history’ in the higher 10  The proportion of foreigners in Luxembourg increased to 43% in 2010, or a total of 217,000 people (Scuto 2010: 14).

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years and intended for it to be included in the curriculum of ‘universal history’; in the end, it made up approximately a quarter of the hours of the history curriculum (Thill 1954: 17). The Ministry of Education offered no methodological recommendations on how to teach history (Trausch 1958: 6).11 The lack of ministerial guidelines prompted trainee teachers to research for themselves how ‘universal’ and ‘national history’ could be included in history teaching. They were interested in the recommendations put forward by a UNESCO committee that had researched the content of history textbooks in 43 countries and revealed that national history had received the lion’s share of attention (UNESCO 1951). As a founding member of UNESCO in 1945, Luxembourg had set up a standing National Commission for Cooperation in 1949 and became especially active in UNESCO’s effort to revise the content of mathematics and geography textbooks in the 1960s (Rohstock and Lenz 2018: 112–114).12 In their theses, all the trainee teachers were critical of history teaching in Luxembourg. They considered three UNESCO guidelines useful for improving the situation. One guideline the trainee teachers addressed was the study of history with national content within a wider spatial framework (UNESCO 1951: 123). The most relevant question for students was indeed how to compose what they referred to as a ‘national history curriculum’ within the existing curriculum of ‘universal history’ (Vesque 1952: 4). The main answer put forward was that it should be done through integration; one of those who held this view was Gilbert Trausch, who would become the most well-known historian of his generation (Thill 1954: 16; Leytem 1952; Beck-Mathekowitsch 1952). Trausch weighed up two options: ‘Separated from major historical events, Luxembourgish history appears as a regional history with limited interest, although almost the entire development of Europe is reflected in it’ (1958: 55). On the other hand, he noticed: ‘The desire to put it on the same level as the national history of France or Germany and to give it the same treatment would in practice be an absolute exaggeration of a local history’ (1958: 4). ‘Its actual meaning’, Trausch concluded, ‘is only gained from the perspective of European 11  Ministerial Guideline of 23.02.1950 mentioned in: Ministry of National Education. ‘Horaires et Programmes’ (1953/1954), Luxembourg, 1953, unpaged. 12  ‘Arrêté Grand-Ducal du 3.5.1949 portant constitution d’une Commission Nationale pour la Coopération avec l’Organisation des Nations-Unies pour l’Education, la Science et la Culture’, Mémorial du Grand-Duché de Luxembourg no. 22 (27 May 1949): 519–520.

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history’ (1958: 55). Another trainee teacher proposed ‘leading pupils to the history of their people’ by encouraging them to ‘look around at their immediate surroundings from the platform acquired through the study of universal history’ (Vesque 1952: 39). Two other recommendations, to ‘emphasise the interdependence that exists between the world’s nations through culture’ and ‘the orientation of school curricula towards international understanding’ (UNESCO 1951: 124), also met with approval among trainee teachers (Thill 1954: 11; Leytem 1952: 38; Beck-Mathekowitsch 1952: 40). Only Paul Margue warned of the ‘danger of modern dictatorship’ and stressed that ‘history cannot be steered towards any goal other than its own, otherwise it ceases to be history’ (Margue 1951: 53). In order to compensate for the predominance of political history, some students suggested shifting the focus to ‘economic, social and cultural development’ (Engel 1952: 46; Hoffmann 1956). Emphasising the mutual contacts between nations and people in order to foster tolerance and peace was to be achieved by presenting Luxembourg as ‘a crossroads where races and civilisations were intertwined. Imbued by this idea, the pupil will be warned against the excesses of egocentric nationalism’ (Thill 1954: 20). Trainee teacher Thill found inspiration in a French textbook in which, inspired by the Annales school tradition to focus on a history of civilisations and to criticise a predominantly political depiction of historical events, the depiction of the French-German war of 1870 and the First World War included testimonies from both sides in order to enhance objectivity through comparison (Thill 50; Alba and Isaac 1930: 272, 678, 747; Otto 2019: 234). Vesque, in turn, defended a more complex depiction of what he still called ‘feudal times’ by asking pupils to compare Spanish and French periods of rule instead of military encounters and to pay attention to the multiple consequences for the local population, who received more privileges ‘under Spanish rule’ than ‘under French authoritarianism’, but economically enjoyed more prosperity ‘under’ the French (Vesque 1952: 40–44).

Pupil and Teacher Ideas in the 1960s Political interest in education was lacking in the 1950s and thus the ideas of trainee teachers did not generate immediate changes in the history curriculum. A decade later, however, Luxembourg witnessed the same ‘widespread demand for radical social and cultural reform in schools inspired by a democratisation paradigm’ as its neighbouring countries (Van

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Nieuwenhuyse 2018: 5). Intense debates about schooling led to a rise in government spending with the aim of improving Luxembourg’s position near the bottom of UNESCO’s ranking of school systems and promised changes to the curriculum through scientification and individualisation to meet the demands of the modern era.13 Since the new law governing secondary education was only adopted in 1968, these debates had no influence on teaching in the history classroom throughout most of the 1960s (Rohstock and Lenz 2012: 117). Trainee teachers, however, saw themselves as meaningful contributors to the debate as they researched the concerns and experiences of pupils and teachers. In their theses, trainee teachers either tried to adopt the perspective of pupils or teachers or asked them about their experiences. The Luxembourg curriculum offering history education in French in the higher years meant that pupils needed to learn ‘universal history’ from French textbooks, which in the 1960s had started to include more contemporary history in their content but continued to teach events and conflicts taking place specifically within France and considered relevant for French pupils (Otto 2019: 234). Zimmer described how difficult it was for pupils to learn about the early years of Belgian independence from Aimond’s French textbook, which made absolutely no reference to Luxembourg, and explained how the pupils had to return to the period 1830–1839 in their ‘national history’ class a few months later in order to understand how Luxembourg was partitioned and partly granted to Belgium in 1839 (Zimmer 1963: 69–70; Aimond 1939). Fonck strongly criticised the overall aim of the Luxembourg school system to train perfectly bilingual pupils, which prevented history teachers from putting the acquisition of historical knowledge first (1968: 35). Emile Haag, who would later become an important Luxembourgish historian, compared the recommendations of a Belgian school inspector advocating for pedagogical innovation—a phenomenon that existed but was not widespread in Belgium at the time—with the practice of history teaching in Luxembourg (Van Santbergen 1968; Van Nieuwenhuyse 2018: 5). If pupils were to attain analytical skills, critical thinking and the ability to contextualise historical events, teachers had to

13  Luxembourg Parliament, Projet de loi concernant le budget des recettes et des dépenses de l’Etat pour l’exercice 1962, No. 885. Adoption des sections 47 à 52 à l’exception des articles 694 et 721. Discussion du chapitre de l’éducation nationale, 48me séance (12 April 1962): 1791–1856.

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encourage them to abandon ‘their old habits of passive listening’ and to ‘participate actively in the course’, Haag concluded (1968: 30). The questionnaire was a new research method introduced in five trainee teacher theses. Hansen offered pupils a list of important events and people from the last 30 years and observed to his own astonishment that the six best-known facts belonged to ‘universal history’—most pupils knew who Adolf Hitler was—and that the date of the country’s liberation (10 September 1944, excluding the Ardennes Offensive which later hit the country) was a lesser-known fact (1962: 19). As his research also revealed that pupils received their historical knowledge only partly from textbooks (Illustration 1), he advised teachers: ‘it would not be illogical to enquire about the sources of young people’s historical knowledge and to partially adapt to them’ (1962: 35). Wolff-Wegener discovered that history ranked sixth or lower in the list of favourite subjects of girls attending the lower years of secondary school because they failed to identify with the content; they wanted to hear about the fortress in Luxembourg rather than the French Revolution (Wolff-Wegener 1963: 21).14 Schmit’s thesis was written out of a conviction that history teaching needed to explain the contemporary world. She discovered that girls expected to know more about humanitarian topics such as ‘the negro (sic) problem in the USA, the position of women in India’, instead of ‘abstract’ and ‘dry’ politics or economics (Schmit 1966: 34).15 When talking to pupils and teachers about ‘national’ history, Goedert found that most of the 158 pupils he researched had the feeling they ‘had to be interested’, instead of being intrinsically motivated, and most of the 24 history teachers he spoke to considered that Herchen’s textbook was chauvinistic and ‘unduly promote(d) national sentiments’ (1965: 17). Goedert concluded that a more nuanced depiction was needed in order to overcome pupils’ ‘instinctive defensive attitude’ (1965: 51). Only seven teachers considered Herchen’s textbook suitable, and ‘when asked about the advantages, the seventeen naysayers sometimes made ironic remarks, such as: “good sheets of paper”’ (Goedert 1965: 46). Teachers criticised the glorification of the House of Nassau, for example, and suggested that not enough attention was paid to the intense debates between the grand ducal family and the Luxembourg parliament in the years preceding the 14  The former fortifications of Luxembourg City were gradually built over nine centuries and dismantled in 1867. 15  See also Schreiber (2018).

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Illustration 1  ‘The indicated sources’ is a graph depicting the answers given by pupils from the four lower years of secondary education (the seventh to the fourth grade) to the question of where they received their historical knowledge. In 1962, eyewitnesses were a more important source of information than history textbooks. Other contributors were movies, newspaper/magazine articles, novels and stamps (Hansen 1962: 23)

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year 1867 (a period that has been referred to as ‘the Luxembourg crisis’). Later, when the German Confederation (to which Luxembourg belonged) was abolished, the independence of the Grand Duchy was recognised at the London Conference (Goedert 1965: 48). Continuing the research tradition, Weber investigated the knowledge of history of pupils in their final year of school, as well as the pedagogical value of the French textbook recommended by the Ministry of Education in 1974 (Bonifacio 1966). Acknowledging a mismatch between the limited knowledge of pupils and the detailed explanations in the book, he advised teachers to begin by making a list of central figures and topics discussed in the book, such as ‘Charlemagne’ and the ‘Industrial Revolution’, and to dedicate a lesson to each of these. Pupils could then deepen their knowledge by reading history textbooks intended for lower years. Instead of recommending the German-language textbooks published in Luxembourg that were currently in use, he advised a German textbook because of its thematic approach (Kunze and Wolff 1966). German textbooks (more than those published in France, Belgium or Luxembourg) had started to offer teaching content in the form of thematic entities in an attempt to move away from a predominant display of political national history (Dierkes 2005: 82). Only afterwards, Weber was convinced, would pupils benefit from a ‘meaningful discussion’ about contemporary history on the basis of their textbook published in France (Weber 1974: 55). A former pupil recalled having never encountered a dialogic approach; the main focus of history education was on learning historical facts by heart.16

Experiments by Trainee Teachers in the 1970s The late 1960s and the first half of the 1970s were characterised by two major developments in history teaching in Luxembourg. Following the law on secondary education of 1968, which offered pupils the opportunity to specialise their schooling in the higher years, the time spent on history teaching was reduced: the half-hour of ‘national history’ on offer in the final year of school was discontinued and history was removed from the curriculum of scientific sections in the higher years (Muller 1989).17 On the other hand, civic education was now offered earlier in the curriculum  Conversation with Renée Wagener on 12 April 2022.  ‘Loi du 10.5.1968 portant réforme de l’enseignement’ Mémorial du Grand-Duché de Luxembourg series A no. 23 (25 May 1968): 435–438. 16 17

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(in the fourth instead of the final year) and was changed from an elementary introduction to law to a course aimed at preparing pupils for their lives as politically active citizens (Schoentgen 2007: 542; Engel-Heftrich 1972: 4). Another development was the publication of a set of new textbooks for teaching Luxembourg history, no longer focused on dynasties and reigns but using socio-economic changes and intellectual developments as building blocks for the narration (Thill 1973; Margue 1974; Trausch 1975; Trausch 1977). Two important authors, Paul Margue and Gilbert Trausch, who had pleaded for an internationalisation of Luxembourgish history in their trainee teacher theses in the 1950s, now played a major role in setting the standard for interpreting the country’s past. The books were applauded for their more scientific approach at the time, but researchers later considered the narrative of the Luxembourg past included in the textbooks as ‘a “facelift” rather than a revolution’ (Péporté et al. 2010: 120). In any case, trainee history teachers stopped complaining about the quality of Luxembourgish history textbooks in their theses and turned their attention to experimenting with student-­ centred participatory learning and interdisciplinarity. The context was similar to that in Belgium, for example, where civic education was ‘expected to provide a better understanding of contemporary society’ than history teaching (Lobbes and Wils 2019: 103). Already in 1967, Loersch proposed linking history teaching to civic education in order to remain relevant (1967: 40). Engel-Heftrich responded to the constitutional reform lowering the voting age from 21 to 18 and a debate in parliament criticising the insufficient role schools had played in shaping responsible citizens in January 1972 with a project-based pedagogical experiment (Engel-Heftrich 1972: 2).18 Her approach shows a pupil-­ centred teaching method that includes group work, classroom debates and enquiry learning designed to prepare pupils to become engaged citizens of the world (Arthur et al. 2001). Engel-Heftrich encouraged fourth-­ year pupils to prepare oral presentations about the struggle for civil rights in Northern Ireland and Bloody Sunday and connected these events to the historical development of human rights, incorporating compulsory teaching about the American Wars of Independence and the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.19 This was followed by a detailed analysis of the relevant items in the Luxembourg Constitution:  Luxemburger Wort 14.01.1972 p. 1. Verfassungsreform.  On the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement and Bloody Sunday see Walsh (2000).

18 19

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‘For example, can one speak of equality for all if a woman is considered a minor as soon as she marries?’ (Engel-Heftrich 1972: 12). In order to encourage critical thinking among future citizens, Theves started his experimental interdisciplinary course with an explanation of ancient democracy on the basis of translated sources (Theves 1973: 8). Felten saw a solution in the development of a pupils’ parliament (Felten 1971: 45). Another experiment taught pupils about different forms of statehood using historical or contemporary examples, such as ‘absolutism (France), the establishment of parliamentarism (England), the birth of the modern state (USA) and parliamentary democracy (Luxembourg)’, in order to convince pupils of the relevance of studying history (Diederich 1979: 25). These experiments did not enjoy widespread approval among more established history teachers (Thill 1989: 13), who generally felt that the history curriculum had lost its autonomy and been transformed into what their Belgian colleagues also considered as a ‘presentist, sometimes even anachronistic approach of history, in which moral judgment prevailed over historical understanding’ (Van Nieuwenhuyse 2018: 5). In 1980, a ‘Pedagogical innovation and research service’ (Service d’innovation et de recherche pédagogiques—SIRP) was established, one of its tasks being to develop a new history curriculum, but it soon became merely a passive body that failed to take any real action (Thill 1989: 249). The late 1980s saw a new focus on the development of science and culture in Luxembourg and resulted in the establishment of a coordination service for pedagogical and technological research and innovation (Service de coordination de la recherche et de l’innovation pédagogiques et technologiques) in the Ministry of Education in 1993 (Meyer 2009), as well as the establishment of the University of Luxembourg in 2003 (Pit-Ten Cate et al. 2021). Today, as a result of the democratisation of education and increasing immigration, more pupils are following the secondary school curriculum. They receive a set of history textbooks published and regularly updated by the Ministry of Education throughout their schooling. These books foster an analytical understanding of social, political, economic and cultural history and include information about Luxembourg’s history, including the latest research findings (Ministère de l’éducation nationale 2002). For example, they refute the idea that Siegfried was the founding father of Luxembourg, pointing to the lesser relevance of his castle and questioning the accuracy of the date 963 and the fact that most of those who were deemed foreign rulers were at the time ‘legitimate princely heirs’ (Péporté

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et  al. 2010: 5, 122). The question of how intensively teachers use the contemporary handbooks in order to instruct Luxembourgish history remains to be answered.

Conclusion This chapter demonstrated that trainee teachers understood the role of history teaching in giving meaning to the intermediate nationalised space of Luxembourg. In the 1950s–1970s, trainee teachers turned Luxembourg’s history classrooms into a metaphorical laboratory, generating new ideas and experiments on how to teach the history of their nation. They considered the nation-building narrative included in Herchen’s manual (the main textbook for Luxembourgish history at the time) to be unsuitable for the linguistic and cultural transition area they inhabited. They agreed that both the historical events to be taught and the way they needed to be taught were deeply embedded in historical and cultural influences from neighbouring countries. As Fanny Beck-Mathekowitsch explained in the thesis she wrote in 1952 to receive her history teaching qualification (1952: 12): ‘We don’t like over-emphasised patriotism; our national experience is simply more reserved than that of our larger neighbours. Since we do not see ourselves as playing a significant part in big developments, unlike France and Germany, for example, we are forced from the outset to assume a certain modesty’. In the 1950s, trainee teachers embraced UNESCO’s supranational pacifist understanding of history as a replacement for Herchen’s dominant national narrative of the past. In the 1960s, they borrowed research methodologies from neighbouring countries to analyse daily practices in the history classroom, where a combination of history textbooks published in Luxembourg and abroad, in German and French, were used. Trainee teachers hoped to contribute to the political debate on modernising the history curriculum, but it was not until the 1970s that some of the trainee teachers of the 1950s became authors themselves, adapting, rather than rewriting, the dominant understanding of Luxembourg’s past. In the 1970s, a new cohort of trainee teachers were satisfied with the content of this new set of history textbooks and switched their attention to experiments linking history teaching with civic education in order to educate politically active citizens. These experiments were considered by the members of an innovation and research commission set up in the 1980s, but they did not have a lasting impact in the history classroom, and the innovative theses of the 21 trainee teachers were soon forgotten.

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Acknowledgements  The author thanks Renée Wagener, Piero S. Colla and Andrea Di Michele for their comments on the draft version of this chapter. Research ­assistance was provided by Johanna Jaschik and Benjamin Juchem. Sarah Cooper proofread the text.

References Student Theses (National Archives

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Beck-Mathekowitsch, Fanny. 1952. Die Nationalgeschichte im Geschichtsunterricht der drei unteren Klassen des Mädchenlyzeums. Diederich, Francois. 1979. Geschichte und Sozialkunde  – Eine Kooperation im Dienste der Emanzipation des Schülers. Engel, Roger. 1952. Die Nationalgeschichte im Unterricht der Mittleren Lehranstalten Luxemburgs. Engel-Heftrich, Sylvie. 1972. Staatsbürgerliche Erziehung in unserem Sekundarunterricht. Felten, Carlo. 1971. Reflexions sur le cours d’instruction civique. Fonck, Maria. 1968. Zur Reform des Geschichtsunterrichts in Luxemburg. Goedert, Nicolas. 1965. Eine Untersuchung über die Stellung der Nationalgeschichte im Geschichtsunterricht. Haag, Emile. 1968. L’enseignement de l’histoire en Première dans l’enseignement secondaire. Hansen, Guy. 1962. Die Letzen dreissig Jahre im Bewusstsein der unteren Klassen. Herchen, Arthur; Prichard, Arthur Henry Cooper. 1950. History of the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg. Luxembourg: P. Linden, Imprimeur de la Cour. Hoffmann, Théo. 1956. Die Bedeutung der Wirtschaftsgeschichte im Geschichtsunterricht unserer Mittelschulen. Leytem, Eugène. 1952. Der Geschichtsunterricht und die Internationale Verständigung. Loersch, Georgette. 1967. Das Problem einer Staatsbürgerlichen Erziehung in unseren Lyzeen. Margue, Paul. 1951. Der von der UNESCO befürwortete Geschichtsunterrichts. Schmit, Sylvie. 1966. Vorschläge Zur Behandlung des Gegenwärtigen Weltgeschehens im Rahmen des Geschichtsunterrichts. Theves, Pierre. 1973. Staatskunde und Staatsbuergerliche Erziehung im Sekundarunterricht sowie in Gewerbe- und Mittelschulen. Thill, Camille. 1954. Les buts de l’UNESCO et l’enseignement de l’histoire dans les classes supérieures et moyennes de nos lycées. Trausch, Gilbert. 1958. Das Verhältnis von Nationalgeschichte und Universalgeschichte in unserm Geschichtsunterricht.

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Vesque, Constant. 1952. Unsere Nationalgeschichte im Lichte des UNESCO-Programms. Weber, Paul. 1974. Enquête sur les connaissances historiques en classe de première et remarques sur la valeur pédagogique du manuel en usage. Wolff-Wegener, Milly. 1963. Le cours d’histoire dans les classes inférieure du Lycée de jeunes filles à Luxembourg. Zimmer, Joseph. 1963. Hat in dieser Zeit der Wirtschaftlichen und Politischen Integrationsbestrebungen Europas das Studium der Nationalgeschichte für uns Luxemburger noch einen Sinn?

Laws and Decrees Chambre des Députés Grand-Duché de Luxembourg. 2022. Revisioune Vun Der Constitutioun. Luxembourg Parliament. 1962. Projet de loi concernant le budget des recettes et des dépenses de l’Etat pour l’exercise 1962, No. 885. Adoption des sections 47 à 52 à l’exception des articles 694 et 721. Discussion du chapitre de l’éducation nationale. 48me séance. Mémorial du Grand-Duché de Luxembourg no. 22. 1949. Arrêté Grand-Ducal du 3.5.1949 portant constitution d’une Commission Nationale pour la coopération avec l’Organisation des Nations-Unies pour l’Education, La Science et La Culture. ——— series A no. 23. 1968. Loi du 10.5.1968 portant réforme de l’enseignement. Ministère de l’éducation nationale, ed. 1948. ANLux, MEN-0003, Circulaire du 22 décembre 1948 au personnel enseignant sur l’emploi de l’allemand comme langue véhiculaire dans l’enseignement primaire par Pierre Frieden. ———, ed. 1953. Horaires et Programmes. ———, ed. 2002. Die Zeitmaschine: Lëtzebuerger Geschichtsbuch. Luxembourg: MENFPS. ———. ed. 2015. Règlement grand-ducal du 7 juin 2015 concernant la formation théorique et pratique ainsi que la période probatoire des enseignants de l’enseignement postprimaire. https://legilux.public.lu/eli/etat/leg/ rgd/2015/06/07/n9/jo. Accessed 29 April 2022.

Handbooks Aimond, Charles Eugène. 1939. Histoire Contemporaine depuis le milieu du XIXe Siècle. Paris: De Gigord. Alba, André, and Jules Isaac. 1930. Histoire Contemporaine depuis le milieu du 19e Siècle. Paris: Hachette. Bonifacio, Antoine. 1966. Histoire: Le Monde Contemporain. Paris: Classiques Hachette.

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Franck, Jean-Pierre. 1950. Die Neueste Zeit. Esch-Sur-Alzette: Ney-Eicher. Herchen, Arthur. 1947. Manuel d’histoire national. 4th ed. Luxembourg: P. Linden, Imprimeur de la Cour. Koch, Henri, and Joseph Meyers. 1947. Mittelalter 2. Teil, und Neuzeit. Luxemburg: Sankt Paulus-Dr. Kunze, Karl, and Karl Wolff. 1966. Das Historische Grundwissen. Stuttgart: Klett. Margue, Paul. 1974. Luxemburg in Mittelalter und Neuzeit (10. bis 18. Jahrhundert). Luxembourg: Bourg-Bourger. Meyers, Joseph. 1939. Einführung in die Luxemburger Geschichte. Luxemburg: JMeyers. ———. 1946. Neuzeit. Luxemburg: Sankt Paulus-Dr. Probst, Eduard. 1946. Altertum. Luxemburg: Sankt Paulus-Dr. Thill, Gérard. 1973. Vor- und Frühgeschichte Luxemburgs. Luxembourg: Bourg-Bourger. Trausch, Gilbert. 1975. Le Luxembourg à l’époque contemporaine (du partage de 1839 à nos jours). Luxembourg: Bourg-Bourger. ———. 1977. Le Luxembourg sous l’Ancien Régime. Luxembourg: Bourg-Bourger.

Secondary Literature Arthur, James, et  al. 2001. Citizenship Through Secondary History. London and New York: Routledge. Barbour, Stephen, and Cathie Carmichael. 2007. Language and Nationalism in Europe. New York: Oxford University Press. Biermann, P. 1937. Der Luxemburger Gymnasiast und das Nationale Erleben. Journal de l’association des Professeurs de l’enseignement superieur et moyen. Chauvel, Louis, and Maximilian Schiele. 2022. Inégalites socio-économiques de performance scolaire: le cas des enfants issues de l’immigration au Luxembourg. Luxembourg: Rapport national sur l’éducation. Dierkes, Julian. 2005. The Decline and Rise of the Nation in History Education. In The Nation, Europe, and the World: Textbooks and Curricula in Transition, ed. Hanna Schissler and Yasemin Nuhoğlu Soysal, 82–114. New  York: Berghahn Books. Gardin, Matias, Ragnhild Barbu, and Barbara Rothmüller. 2015. Educating Future Citizens in Between Mischkultur, Nationalism and Authorities: Traces from Teachers’ Journals. History of Education 44 (5): 537–552. https://doi.org/10.1080/0046760X.2015.1040082. Koch, Henri. 1938. Universalgeschichte und Nationalgeschichte. Journal de l’association des Professeurs de l’enseignement superieur et moyen. Lobbes, Tessa, and Kaat Wils. 2019. Belgium. In The Palgrave Handbook of Conflict and History Education in the Post-Cold War Era, ed. Luigi Cajani, Simone Lässig, and Maria Repouse, 101–111. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Meyer, Morgan. 2009. Creativity and Its Contexts: The Emergence, Institutionalisation and Professionalisation of Science and Culture in Luxembourg. European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire 16 (4): 453–476. https://doi.org/10.1080/13507480903063605. Muller, Georges. 1989. L’histoire dans l’enseignement secondaire (1939-1970). Re-Creations 5 Enseignement secondarie’39 - ’89 5: 238–244. Otto, Marcus. 2019. France. In The Palgrave Handbook of Conflict and History Education in the Post-Cold War Era, ed. Luigi Cajani, Simone Lässig, and Repouse, 233–244. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Pauly, Michel. 2011. Geschichte Luxemburgs. Munich: Beck. Péporté, Pit, Sonja Kmec, Benoît Majerus, and Michel Margue. 2010. Inventing Luxembourg: Representations of the Past, Space and Language from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century. Leiden: Brill. Pit-ten Cate, Ineke M., Salvador Rivas, and Gilbert Busana. 2021. Increasing the Diversity of the Teacher Workforce: Socio-Political Challenges to Reducing Inequalities in Access to Teacher Education Programs. Frontiers in Education 6: 1–10. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2021.685113. Rohstock, Anne, and Thomas Lenz. 2012. A National Path to Internationalization: Educational Reforms in Luxembourg 1945–70. In History of Schooling: Politics and Local Practice, ed. Carla Aubry and Johannes Westberg, 108–126. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. ———. 2018. Ein Nationaler Weg zur Internationalisierung: Bildungsreformen in Luxemburg, 1945–1970. In Die Schule Der Nation. Bildungsgeschichte Und Identität in Luxemburg, ed. Thomas Lenz and Matias Gardin, 173–191. Weinheim Basel: Beltz Juventa. Schoentgen, Marc. 2007. Staatsbürgerliche Erziehung und Geschichtsunterricht in Luxemburg. Hémecht: Zeitschrift für Luxemburger Geschichte = revue d’histoire luxembourgeoise 58 (4): 525–548. Schreiber, Catherina. 2015. Language Structures in a Multilingual and Multidisciplinary World: The Adaptations of Luxembourgian Language Education Within a Cold War Culture. In Trajectories in the Development of Modern School Systems. Between the National and the Global, ed. Daniel Tröhler and Thomas Lenz, 157–173. New York and London: Routledge. ———. 2018. Die Erziehung Luxemburger Staatsbürgerinnen: Eine Sozialhistorische Analyse der Curricula im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. In Die Schule der Nation. Bildungsgeschichte und Identität in Luxemburg, ed. Matias Gardin and Thomas Lenz, 95–116. Weinheim Basel: Beltz Juventa. Scuto, Denis. 2010. Histoire Des Immigrations Au Luxembourg (XIXe-XXIe Siècles). In 25 Ans d’action Pour l’immigration, 1985-2010, 12–38. OGBL 25e anniversaire du Département des Immigrés. Luxembourg: OGBL.

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Spirinelli, Fabio. 2020. Staging the Nation in an Intermediate Space: Cultural Policy in Luxembourg and the State Museums (1918–1974). Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Luxembourg. Ther, Philipp. 2003. Einleitung: Sprachliche, Kulturelle Und Ethnische “Zwischenräume” als Zugang zu einer Transnationalen Geschichte Europas. In Regionale Bewegungen und Regionalismen in Europäischen Zwischenräumen seit der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts, Tagungen zur Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung 18, ed. Philipp Ther and Holm Sundhaussen, IX–XXIX.  Marburg: Herder-Institut. Thill, Armand. 1989. L’enseignement de l’histoire dans les années 70 et 80: une difficile recherche d’identité. In Re-Création 5: Enseignement secondaire 1939-1989, 245–250. Luxembourg: Imprimérie Centrale S.A. ———. 1994. L’enseignement de l’histoire au Luxembourg depuis 1945. In Schule und Identitätsbildung in der Region Saar-Lor-Lux/Enseignement Scolaire et Formation d’identités collectives dans l’Espace Sar-Lor-Lux, ed. Rolf Wittenbrock, Gérard Michaux, and Oaul Dostert, 119–133. Saarbrucken: Ottweiler Druckerei & Verlag. Trausch, Gilbert. 2003. Histoire Du Luxembourg. Le Destin Européen d’un ‘Petit’. Toulouse: Editions Privat. UNESCO, ed. 1951. Étude comparative des programmes d’histoire, de géographie et d’éducation sociale. Paris: Organisation des Nations Unies pour l’Education, La Science et la Culture. Van Nieuwenhuyse, Karel. 2018. Torn Between Patriotic, Civic and Disciplinary Aspirations. Evolving Faces of Belgian and Flemish History Education, from 1830 to the Future. Sprawy Narodowos ć iowe 50: 1–16. https://doi. org/10.11649/sn.1634. Van Santbergen, René. 1968. L’histoire en procès dans l’enseignement secondaire. Cahiers de Clio 15: 87–101. Walsh, Dermot P.J. 2000. Bloody Sunday and the Rule of Law in Northern Ireland. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Other Conversation with Renée Wagener on 12 April 2022.

Challenges of Teaching History for the Bosniak Ethnic Community/National Minority in the Republic of Serbia Within the Post-Conflict Setting Marko Šuica and Ana Radakovic´

Introduction History as a compulsory school subject within the educational system in Serbia is seen as crucial, not only for the development of a student’s critical thinking skills but also for nurturing and supporting the collective national identity (Службени гласник 2018).1 For this reason, History has been publicly clustered within the unofficial group of “school subjects of national importance” together with the native language and literature, 1  This position is spelled out within the perspective of history teaching as part of official history education.

M. Šuica (*) • A. Radaković University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. S. Colla, A. Di Michele (eds.), History Education at the Edge of the Nation, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27246-2_5

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geography, music, and arts (Government of the Republic of Serbia—citizen service platform 2021).2 If this notion and standpoint, proclaimed by the official state representatives headed by the Ministry of Education, is applied to Serbian students as the ethnic majority, should it be with the same criteria that is applied to all partakers in the educational system, including all national minorities living in Serbia as well? The intention of the legislator was to foster not all nationalities but only the majority nation, the Serbians. Therefore, strengthening the national identity by using history teaching within post-conflict, multicultural, and multiethnic societies appears to be a double-edged sword for the policy-makers. Having said that, it is important to identify to what extent, and how, national minorities in Serbia (in this case, the members of the Bosniak nation) are using the constitutionally guaranteed national minority rights concerning education, and their responsiveness to the possibility of learning their own history as part of their right to educational and cultural, but not political, autonomy (Articles 75 and 79 of Constitution of Republic of Serbia 2006). The possibility of implementing this legal clause is not necessarily exercised. Furthermore, the formal right to this education does not outline the structure, content, or even perception of history as a school subject in societal, cultural, or political frameworks, either among national minorities or within the Serbian ethnic majority. Another important focal point is the interpretation of history from different perspectives, which then needs to be transformed into content suitable for history education. In this respect, it is stressed that history education in all its stages (alongside other external agents) could shape and foster the identity of the

2  (Joint textbooks for national subjects of Serbia and Republika Srpska) https://www. srbija.gov.rs/vest/535344/zajednicki-udzbenici-za-nacionalne-predmete-srbije-i-rs.php. The Serbian government set up a project with the government of Republika Srpska (Serbian entity within Bosnia and Herzegovina), creating joint teaching materials and concept of school subjects of national importance with the political goal to create a comprehensive educational framework that would strengthen ties between Serbs living in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. This attempt follows the definition by Anthony D. Smith that a nation is “a named population sharing a historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties for its members” with a tendency to create and foster national awareness. Anthony D.  Smith. 1991. National identity. London: Penguin.

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nation.3 Hence, it is important to address these issues as vital for s­ uccessfully steering history teaching (which is compulsory for all students in Serbia, regardless of ethnicity) towards a specific aim: “that by studying historical events, phenomena, processes, and personalities, the student acquires the basic historical knowledge and competencies necessary for understanding the modern world, developing critical thinking skills and a responsible attitude towards him/herself, own and national identity, cultural and historical heritage, society and the country in which he/she lives” (Службени гласник 2018, 158).

The Status of National Minorities According to the Legal System of the Republic of Serbia While Serbs form the ethnic majority in the Republic of Serbia which is, according to the constitution adopted in 2006 (Article 1), “a state of the Serbian people and all citizens living in it, based on the rule of law and social justice, the principles of civil democracy, human and minority rights and freedoms and belonging to European principles and values”, Bosniaks are considered to be the ethnic majority and constituent nation in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (together with Serbs and Croats), with a very complex and fragile constitutional organisation established by the Dayton-Paris peace agreement (1995 General Assembly of United Nations Security Council). Members of the Bosniak nation, living in several countries still coping with the tragic consequences of the wars, are facing different challenges regarding the framing of national identity. Bosniaks living in the Republic of Serbia and Republic of Montenegro have the legal status of national minorities. According to the census of 2011, Bosniaks are the third largest national minority living in the Republic 3  Eric Hobsbawm stated that, besides the standardisation of administration and law, state education is what transforms people into citizens of a specific country (Eric Hobsbawm 1983. Introduction: Inventing traditions. In The Invention of Tradition, eds. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, 13–14. Cambridge: CUP). Along the same lines, Ernest Gellner also focuses on the connections between national identity and educational systems while analysing nationalism and modernisation (Ernest Gellner 1964. Nationalism. Thought and Change: 158–169. London: Weinfeld and Nicholson). Institutionalised education has always been instrumentalised by the ruling elites and dominant political and ideological systems. For that reason, history teaching plays a pivotal role in multicultural societies, especially in those that experienced conflict in the recent past (Recommendations for history teaching laid down by the Council of Europe in 2001, 2009, and 2011).

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of Serbia (after Hungarians and Roma) with 145,278 citizens listed among the entire population of 7,186,862 (Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia 2017). In three major urban areas concentrated in the southwest part of Serbia, Bosniaks are a significant ethnic majority (Novi Pazar, 81.21%, Tutin, 93.5%, Sjenica, 78.55%) (Džudžo 2018, 236). The geographically homogeneous concentration of the Bosniak population living in Serbia allows them to shape a firm national conscience and better coordinate their needs and initiatives for exercising minority rights in the fields of culture, formal and non-formal education, which are vital for maintaining their own identity. Today, the rights of national minorities to be educated in their mother tongue and other school subjects “of particular national interest” are largely part of a top-down process. After the democratic changes in 2000, the Serbian state defined the roadmap of accession to the EU, which included the regulation of minority status and rights according to EU standards. Consequently, after the splitting up of the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro (itself the successor to Yugoslavia), when Serbia established itself as a sovereign republic (2006), the status and rights of national minorities were legalised by the new Constitution within several articles (Article 14, Protection of national minorities; Article 43, Freedom of thought, conscience, confession, and especially paragraph 3, Rights of national minorities; Articles 75–81, especially 79, The right to preserve own identity). The next step was the introduction of various laws that regulated the status and rights of national minorities, such as the Law on National Minority Councils (Службени гласник Републике Србије 2009, Article 2), the Law on Education (Службени гласник Републике Србије 2017, Article 67: “The program of primary and secondary education for members of national minorities on the proposal of the National Minority Council and the opinion of the National Education Council, is adopted by the Minister”) and the Law on the Protection of the Rights and Freedoms of National Minorities (2002, Article 13). This article regulates the teaching of one’s own history for national minorities: “The curriculum for the needs of education referred to in paragraph 1 of this Article, in the section related to national content, will significantly contain topics related to the history, art and culture of the national minority” (Службени гласник Републике Србије 2002). Last but not least, the Serbian National Assembly adopted the Law on Textbooks, stating that national minorities should have textbooks in their mother tongue (Fig. 1) (Службени гласник Републике Србије 2018, Article 5, Article 11, Article 12). A major step

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Fig. 1  Front cover of the History textbook for the 7th grade in Bosnian language. Publisher: Klett

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forward in the exercise of rights was taken in 2009 by adopting the aforementioned Law on National Minority Councils, which enabled Bosniaks to manage their cultural autonomy, like other national minorities in Serbia, through their representatives at local level. History teaching in Serbia is regulated, like other compulsory school subjects, by the national Education Law at a general level, but more specifically through the structured history curricula (including the goals of history education), subject competences, and history educational standards (for primary and secondary education) as operational educational concepts and substructures (Завод за вредновање квалитета образовања и васпитања 2010, 2015). History education for minorities in Serbia follows the main guidelines proclaimed by the Framework Convention on National Minorities of the Council of Europe (Council of Europe 1995, Article 6 paragraph 1, Article 12 paragraph 1, Article 13 paragraph 1) as well as some other specific recommendations on history teaching, created and adopted by the same institution in 2001, 2009, and 2011 (Council of Europe 2001, 2009, 2011). Today, Bosniaks (as a national minority in the Republic of Serbia) belong to the group of eight national minorities which avail themselves of the opportunity to organise the whole education curriculum in their mother tongue, including history teaching. However, despite the use of native language, Bosniak teachers and students still face different challenges in the process of teaching and learning “national” history, that is, the history of their ethnic group.

A Nation Forged in Times of War—Contents and Controversies for History Teaching In Socialist Yugoslavia, the Bosniak ethnic community was recognised as a nation but under a name linked to the Islamic religious identity—Muslims. However, some members of the “Muslim nation” were followers of the communist party, atheists in principle, and therefore non-practising in the Islamic religion. Changing the denomination of the ethnic/national entity from “Muslims” into “Bosniaks” was part of the transformation process which determined their identity, gravitating to the former Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In his latest study “Islam and Nationhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina: surviving empires” French author Xavier Bougarel depicts a dynamic process of the Bosnia and Herzegovina Muslims’ search for an empire, national identity, and citizenship, from the

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late nineteenth to early twenty-first century. He offers a complex but well-­ documented chronology of the Muslims/Bosniaks’ transformation from a non-sovereign religious minority to a sovereign political nation (Bougarel 2020). Without delving too deeply into this matter, it is important to stress that due to historical circumstances the long-lasting formation of the Bosniak nation was closely related to the religious background at one point and social status at another. In the period from 1961 to 1974, further confederalisation of the state and modernisation of society led to recognition of the Muslim population as the sixth constituent people of Yugoslavia. From that moment on, the term “Muslim” (with a capital M)4 was used to represent a member of the national entity (as opposed to the religious community). However, the first multi-party elections in 1990 brought to the surface new challenges due to the wish to detach from communist ideology, creating an amalgam of nationalism and revival of confessional societal influence. This phenomenon did not bypass Muslims living in Yugoslavia, either. They founded the Party of Democratic Action (Stranka Demokratske Akcije) which was part of the pan-Islamist circle. This political party also took part in Serbian parliamentary elections prior to the war. With the escalation of the war, the transition and national affirmation of Muslims from Yugoslavia was enhanced and formalised on 27 September 1993 when the Bosniak nation was officially formed (Bougarel 2020, 363–369). During the war, the Serbian regime led a campaign against Bosniak people not only on Bosnian territory but also in Serbia itself, which was at that time free from combat. According to the Helsinki report, Serbian authorities intimidated the Bosniak population living in Serbia on the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro with constant repression. Bosniaks were exposed to harassment by police authorities, who carried out searches of their homes, organised politically motivated trials, and fostered a feeling of discrimination and permanent insecurity. This kind of repression against Bosniaks in Serbia influenced the mass emigration of its population to European countries (Germany, Scandinavian countries, and Turkey). About 70,000 people fled before the terror (Helsinki Committee for Human Rights 2021, 180). In the aftermath of the Dayton Agreement, one of the crucial events that marked the memory 4  In Serbo-Croatian language orthography (the official name of the language in Yugoslavia), the initial letter of the nation name was written in upper case, while the name of the religion began with a lower case initial.

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politics and culture of remembrance among Bosniaks was the siege of Sarajevo by the Bosnian Serb forces (1992–1995), which resulted in the killing of 10,000 citizens and defenders of the city. The Srebrenica genocide,5 as it is defined by the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, as UN court of law), occurred in the summer of 1995 when approximately 8000 Bosniaks were killed by units under the command of General Ratko Mladić and was the most significant and atrocious episode. Although not directly involved in the war, Bosniak residents of Serbia and Montenegro were not spared either. Kidnappings and murders of citizens from the Serbian town of Sjeverin on the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina in October 1992 (16 civilians killed) and train station Štrpci on the route from the capital of Yugoslavia Belgrade to the maritime port Bar in Montenegro in February 1993 (19 civilians were kidnapped from the train and murdered), committed by the Serbian paramilitary unit, left deep scars on the Bosniak community in Serbia. Some of the indicted war criminals were found guilty of the commission of crimes against humanity and violation of customs of war against Bosniaks from Serbia, and separately for genocide committed in Srebrenica by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. These tragic events are still dismissed by the Serbian public, and the most disturbing issue is the attitude of the Serbian justice system towards these events that have been documented by different organisations for human rights (Humanitarian Law Centre 2022). Since the regime never completely and resolutely abandoned the policy that caused deep trauma of the Bosniak community and its insecurity, as Ms. Semiha Kačar (President of the Sandžak Committee for the Protection of Human Rights and Freedoms) emphasises, the distrust of institutions hinders the integration of the community who fear that the traumatic experience may be repeated (Helsinki Committee for Human Rights 2021, 180). The listed tragic events and phenomena from the war in the 1990s represent the most difficult and important experiences embedded into the collective recollection of the Bosniak nation. They are therefore, with good reason, singled out by Bosniak experts and members of the National 5  The official term for the crimes committed in Srebrenica brings more problems and divisions. While the official Bosniak representatives refer to it as “genocide” (as also defined by the ICTY), Serbians deny that the event was genocide and adopt instead the terms “massacre” or “war crime”. Each term presents a certain perspective towards the war itself, with no possibility of considering the other story, which in itself aggravates any peace-building process. It is also reflected in the approach to this topic in history teaching.

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Minority Council in Serbia as content that should be included in history curricula, textbooks, and teaching. Nevertheless, the structure of the new curricula (even if it does not directly prescribe the exact teaching units) contains first-order concepts that are too vague, while some significant events and topics may be (due to their political sensitivity and existing disputes) avoided in history teaching.

Present-Day Situation: Narratives Outside the Classroom Although regulated like other national minorities by the special Law on National Minority Councils, the Council of Bosniak is in fact the successor to the body constituted at the beginning of the armed conflict during dissolution of the joint state. Bosniaks from Serbia formed their national council in 1991 under the name “Muslim National Council of Sandžak”.6 As stated in the premise for its establishment, at that unsafe time it was a necessary reaction to the ethnic threat and “terror perpetrated by the Slobodan Milosevic regime against the Bosniak people in the Sandzak area and beyond” (Bosniak National Council). In the meantime, the Council changed its name to the Bosniak National Council of Sandzak, until 2003 when it was rechristened with the current name of Bosniak National Council. In 2012, the Bosniak National Council passed a Resolution on the position and exercise of the rights of the Bosniak nation in Serbia and the Proclamation to the Bosniak people and Citizens of Sandzak to put additional pressure on the state of Serbia to fully recognise the national identity of citizens belonging to the Bosniak ethnic community, highlighting the need to improve the implementation of minority rights already granted in 2009. Accordingly, although regulated by a wide legislative framework, education (especially in history) of the Bosniak minority in Serbia is faced with different challenges involving contentious historical content merged with contemporary political connotations. Inevitably, this problematic 6  Sandžak/Sanjak as the administrative entity has a historical dimension as part of the larger province Vilajet/Wilayah from the time of the Ottoman empire (one of many historical sanjaks within the Ottoman Empire was Sanjak of Novi Pazar). This geo-historical region, predominantly inhabited by Bosniaks, geographically includes territories today belonging to the states Serbia and Montenegro, on the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bosniaks living in the Republic of Serbia, therefore, have very clear links with the members of their nation living in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro.

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historical legacy leads to certain divergent interpretations of history, sometimes strongly related to national self-determinism, understanding, and praising of their own identity (Smit 1998, 65–71). According to Bulgarian philosopher Stanimir Panayotov, the concept of “petit-colonialism” became a common ground for all the populations living in the Balkans. The background of this phenomenon is the ideological position of a group that once held a position of supremacy over another group and cannot accept the loss of this dominion so recreates its power in the way it frames past history (Hadjievska 2021, 4). This viewpoint is, in our case, delicate and sensitive, particularly due to frequently opposing interpretations of the past which are overloaded with controversies or academic contestations that might become part of official master narratives used in history teaching at schools.7 In the case of Bosniaks, this approach refers to disputed topics more related to the distant past, that is, origins of the nation, historical continuity, inheritance of Ottoman historical and cultural legacy, social and political subjugation to other nations, empires, or states who determined themselves as “superior” (Bougarel 2020, 337–341). A Medievalist historian, Professor Emir Filipović from the University of Sarajevo, writes that in recent times some historians have been creating clumsy interpretations of genetic and etymological research, trying to prove the non-Slavic or pre-Slavic ethnic heritage of the Bosnian Muslims and thereby further differentiating them from the Serbs and Croats, thus placing the roots of Bosniaks even further back in history. Such theses are ubiquitous and usually advocated as alternative theories by amateur historians, but in Bosnia, according to Filipović, they are championed even by those considered serious scholars (Filipović n.d., 10–11).8 Some 7  For instance, there is a book “Drevna Bosna” (Ancient Bosnia) written by recently deceased mufti Muamer Zukorlić, one of the most prominent Bosniak politicians and intellectuals in Serbia (Moamer Zukorlić. 2017. Drevna Bosna. Matica bošnjačka). On the other hand, there are articles and sermons (lectures entitled this way by Professor Ković himself) about the so-called “Kosovo’s vow” and Serbian national identity by Miloš Ković, professor at the History Department at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade (Miloš Ković. 2018. Kosovski zavet i nacionalni identitet Srba. Stanje stvari, February 12. https://www.scribd. com/document/495940255/Milo%C5%A1-Kovi%C4%87-Kosovski-Zaveti-i-NacionalniIdentitet-Srba accessed on June 26). Both are influential intellectuals who proclaim exclusive historical standpoints and perception on the joint past. 8  We would like to thank Professor Emir O. Filipović who kindly allowed us to use the text of his article “Modern Bosnian Nations and the Medieval History of Bosnia” (awaiting publication).

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reflections of these, or similar ideas, can be traced within the modern discourse present in the public space as well as among historians, including representatives of Bosniak historiography.

History Teaching for the Bosniak National Minority in the Republic of Serbia—State of Play To investigate the current condition and nature of history teaching, the authors organised a written interview (in compliance with COVID-19 pandemic restrictions) with Professor Sead Šemsović, who lectures at the Department of Literature of the Peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Sarajevo, and is also the President of the Bosniak Education Council at the Bosniak National Council in Serbia.9 Professor Šemsović is in charge of the process of designing and implementing education in the Bosnian language as the permanent associate of the State University of Novi Pazar in Serbia. His expert role in the work of the Bosniak National Council in Serbia regarding education is decisive.10 The model of minority education in Serbia implies independent teaching and learning programmes for native language with literature subjects (e.g., Bosnian language and literature), to the extent of 30% participation, inserted within the existing programme of national interest subjects—history, art, and music culture.11 Textbooks (including history textbooks) are not created specifically for each national minority but translated from Serbian textbooks (for all students in the state), which are licensed by the Ministry of Education. Professor Šemsović emphasises that materials for the additional 30% teaching content could be offered in the form of supplements related to the history of a specific national minority. In the case  The main reason for allocating more space to “one political voice”, as opposed to the usual methodological approach, was the difficulty in finding other relevant sources related to this sensitive topic. Controversies and different aspects of conflict regarding history teaching for the Bosniak minority in Serbia are not sufficiently transparent from available official sources. The intention to include Bosniak teachers and practitioners in this research did not meet with positive feedback. The narrow possibilities led us to lean on the interviewed political stakeholder in charge of education as an important source, since this comes from the educational milieu and vocalises the legal stance of the ethnic community. 10  We would also like to thank Professor Sead Šemsović for taking time to fill out the questionnaire that provided crucial information on the education of the Bosniak national minority in Serbia. 11  The exact percentage of autonomous content for national minorities in relation to the official programme was provided by Professor Šemsović. We were not able to corroborate this data in official legal documents and bylaws. 9

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of the Bosniak minority, the additional materials for history are almost continuously contested due to disputes related to diverse interpretations of the history of populations living in the Balkans, as well as the understanding and recognition of the identity roots of Bosniak people dating back to the Middle Ages. The main controversy regarding the historical continuum of ethnic identities is associated with flawed understanding of medieval identities that were formed and shaped according to the zeitgeist, so different from the contemporary national awareness and self-­ determination distinctive in the formation of nations in the nineteenth century. Professor Filipović points out that the “nations”, in the modern sense of the word, did not exist in Bosnia during the Middle Ages, and therefore, tendencies to project the origins of modern nations into the medieval period have more links with the contemporary political context than historical veracity (Filipović n.d., 5–6). However, recognising the multifaceted identity of the Bosniak nation concerning other historical narratives is one of the main challenges in structuring history teaching in Serbia. Leaving aside the medieval historical perspective where ethnic principles or geographic identities criss-cross with different modern connotations of the nation and state, the main problem that encumbers the status and content of history teaching of Bosniaks in Serbia is ambiguous use and interpretation of the name/toponym “Sandžak”. Professor Šemsović, who is strongly involved in the explanation of this unavoidable problem in education says that “at the moment, we have reached the red line with the term Sandžak, which Bosniaks perceive in a geographical, and not in a political or administrative sense… State (Serbian) educational institutions do not accept this argument even in the face of geographical maps printed in Serbia until the 1990s in which this term (Sandžak) appears in a semicircular form written in Cyrillic letters, as well as a list of works by Serbian authors in whose titles this term occurs in the mentioned sense”.12 Another major issue is the way history is taught and learned at schools in Serbia. Professor Šemsović stresses that the narrowing of ethnic and national distancing between the Serbian majority and Bosniaks living in Serbia is static, inter alia, due to non-use of advanced learning strategies and modern didactical concepts in history teaching. He emphasises that the use of a (currently lacking) multi-perspective approach could lead to deconstruction of ethnic/confessional stereotypes and reconsideration of  Interview with Professor S. Šemsović.

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the existing antagonistic image of the “other” by the ethnic majority, that is, Serbian population. From the point of view of the Bosniak national minority, the perception of juxtaposed histories or cultural traditions (including literature) as exclusive national belongings, and denying their multicultural and common affiliation, all serves to deepen the ethnic distance, dividing and stratifying mutual cultural and historical heritage. Additionally, Professor Šemsović identifies strong ethnic and religious stereotypes in Serbian history textbooks. Some of them are related to ignorance and oversimplification of Bosniak identity, but predominantly result from biased presentation of Ottomans, the Ottoman Empire, Islam and Muslims, and the Orient in general, as part of Bosniak cultural and historical identity. Interpretations of history related to the Ottomans, including visual images in the previous generation of history textbooks (implementation of a reform process started in 2019), often included strong stereotypes and intrusive content that could influence negative perceptions and attitudes towards the Bosniak national minority in Serbia (Šuica 2010, 292–297). Evidence of this may be found within a recent analysis of how different minorities are presented or overlooked in the school textbooks in Serbia, with distinct attitudes towards specific national identities from the “other side” during the armed conflict in the 1990s (Šuica 2018). Bosniaks belong to this group of nations, due mostly to their religious, Islamic identity and historical traditions related to the Ottoman heritage in the Balkans. As stated in a recent report on the status of national minorities in Serbia, carried out by the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, the position of the Sandžak region/Raška district and its Bosniak inhabitants cannot be understood without considering the broader context of the attitude towards members of the Islamic community in the Balkans (Helsinki Committee for Human Rights 2021, 177), which has strong cultural roots in the Ottoman legacy. The closer we approach the recent past, the more controversial are the topics and challenges that emerge in teaching and learning history. This phenomenon exists, according to Professor Šemsović, as the consequence of “conflicting narratives about what happened and how it happened during the Yugoslav civil war in the nineties”.13 The local history and experiences of members of the Bosniak national minority living in Serbia, who were oppressed and persecuted during the war, represent an important 13  Our attempt to gain feedback from Bosniak teachers working in schools in Serbia and include them in the analysis on the topic was unsuccessful.

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and very sensitive historical topic. Among the most traumatic episodes from the past (and their representation in the main discourse in Serbian society regarding the troubled relations with Bosniaks during the war) to afflict history teaching are “non-recognition of international verdicts on the genocide in Srebrenica and the involvement of the Republic of Serbia in the aggression against Bosnia and Herzegovina, the occupation of Sarajevo, the conduct of wars in the surrounding states”.14 External pressures, coloured in nationalistic tones arriving from the political sphere via tabloid media, have recently influenced history education in Serbia more openly. Political oppression is evident in articles published by the state-controlled tabloid media, which defame history teachers and teachers’ associations (Euroclio) that introduce multi-perspectivity in learning about the war in Yugoslavia of the 1990s. It is visible in the state-­ regulated selection of historical content (events, persons, phenomena) to be implemented in the educational process, especially regarding the 1990s war.15 According to Esad Džudžo, the founder and director of the Centre for Bosniak Studies and former president of the Bosniak National Council (2018/2019), topics crucial to the Bosniak national minority in Serbia that should be taken into consideration in history education now cover a wider chronological scope. The issue starts with the period of Serbian uprisings against the Ottomans at the beginning of the nineteenth century and continues with the historical processes of the Balkans before the Congress of Berlin in 1878, the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908, and the consequences of the Balkan Wars of 1912/1913. A focus on this period is important for the Bosniak minority, since it reflects the epoch when, as Džudžo emphasises, “Bosniaks were deprived of national designation/naming including own national body or language they speak… the time when they were persecuted and exposed to the processes of permanent assimilation from all sides” (Džudžo 2018, 238). It is not surprising that representatives of the Bosniak minority in Serbia advocate this position. As the most noticeable intermediaries of Balkan Ottoman cultural heritage, Bosniaks (and Yugoslav Muslims not long before that) have been perceived as people who differ from the rest.  Interview with Professor S. Šemsović.  One of the titles in the daily newspapers was “SCANDAL: the Hague and its lobby are putting their lies in history textbooks. (Solicitor Toma) Fila: This will not be accepted by decent history teachers” https://www.kurir.rs/vesti/politika/3755835/skandal-hag-ihaski-lobi-guraju-svoje-lazi-u-udzbenike. Text published 28 August 2021, accessed 6 June 2022. 14 15

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In that respect, they were treated as the “Other”, embodying the historical legacy of the aggressor: the conquering Ottoman Empire and the “Turks” as archenemies of the Balkan Orthodox Christian inhabitants (including Serbs) who preceded the Ottoman invasion of the Balkans in the fourteenth century (Šuica 2010, 293–295). This cultural anachronism and abuse of history transferred to the modern context was openly proclaimed after Serbian military forces entered Srebrenica in 1995, when General Ratko Мladić declared that the time had come to take revenge on Turks in the region of Srebrenica (Šuica 2010, 286–287). Returning to the challenges of history teaching for the Bosniak minority, it is important to stress that the recent reform of the history curricula in Serbia intended to shift the emphasis on learner-orientated concepts, leaving aside content and prescriptive narratives. Therefore, the comments made by Esad Džudžo are today even more applicable to the use of modern teaching strategies in the classroom or the adequate construction of teaching units and textbook content. However, it is necessary to accept the criticism of Bosniak authorities and their experts about an understated, and partially omitted, representation of the most tragic events of the Yugoslav Wars in history teaching in Serbia. This position could be documented by the fact that even reformed history curricula in Serbia (2018–2019) do not specifically include key issues from the conflict which are significant for the Bosniak national minority living in Serbia (e.g., the Srebrenica genocide, abduction and execution of members of Bosniak national minority on the territory of Republic of Serbia during the war, etc.) (Службени гласник Републике Србије 2019). Although appearing in a wider context within history textbooks, these events and phenomena are presented mostly in a reduced and rudimentary manner that is “totally unacceptable for the Bosniaks” (Džudžo 2018, 238). Just recently, on 3 June 2022, daily newspapers published an article under the title Srebrenica to be learned for the whole semester: the reform of history teaching has divided historians. This article highlighted (in a biased manner) the topicality of the matter, fostering the pejorative and belittling attitude of certain academic and societal circles towards sensitive topics like the Srebrenica massacre. The text criticises the pre-existing history curricula that encourage exploring such issues more thoroughly in Serbian schools. In this article, one of the Serbian historians disapproving the reformed history curricula misled the public by stating that “the intention (of curricula authors, Ed.) was to leave the entire second semester in the fourth grade (in secondary schools, Ed.) for the events

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from the 1990s and the 2000s. They (curricula designers, Ed.) want to dedicate the whole semester, for example, to Srebrenica” (Lj. 2022).16 However, the situation in practice differs somewhat. Several focus groups with history teachers from the former Yugoslavia region were held at the end of 2021 as a part of the research report for continuation of the EuroClio project “Learning history that is not yet history”. There were discussions about contemporary challenges and obstacles in teaching the recent past, including the Yugoslav Wars. Within the focus group from Serbia, there was one Bosniak teacher from Novi Pazar. She compared two primary schools where she was working at that time. The village school consists of 99% Bosniak pupils, whereas the ethnic ratio of pupils at the school from Novi Pazar is approximately 50–50. As for teaching the 1990s’ history, she agreed with the other participants that the main issue until recently (all of them are expecting the reformed curricula to be adopted this school year) was the lack of time dedicated to these lessons. According to teaching programmes, this content is supposed to be covered at the end of the last year in elementary school when everybody is thinking about the final examinations and proms. The second, but no less important, problem is the influence of families and television on this topic, and Bosniak children are no exception. It is presumed that even among the Bosniak national minority, the issue of the Yugoslav Wars is practically omitted from history lessons, leaving it to the public sphere to impose the official discourse.17 These general findings are somehow corroborated by other research conducted in several Balkan countries by Euroclio, which indicates that teachers are very reluctant to deal with complex topics, especially those that tackle recent conflicts and their consequences (Epact, Teachers on Teaching 2016, 31–33). As not one Serbian post-conflict government has distanced itself from the politics and crimes committed against Bosniak nationals living in the Sandžak/Raška district during the 1990s, socio-political tensions have not disappeared. All issues relating to the existence of Bosniaks and the territory of the Republic of Serbia (where they have their biggest community 16  “Srebrenica to be learned for the whole semester: the reform of history teaching has divided historians” https://www.novosti.rs/drustvo/vesti/1122614/srebrenicu-uce-celopolugodiste-istoricare-podelila-reforma-nastave-istorije. Text published 3 June 2022, accessed 6 June 2022. 17  Ana Radaković. The research report on focus groups analysis on teaching the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Learning history that is not yet history II, EUROCLIO (to be published in July 2022).

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and represent the majority on a local scale in the Sandžak/Raška district) are still very much alive and impact their political, cultural, and educational affairs, including the teaching of their own history (Helsinki Committee for Human Rights 2021, 181–182). Despite the aforementioned difficulties, when it comes to cooperation regarding history education with Bosniaks from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Professor Šemsović believes that the situation is satisfying. The Bosniak National Council is successfully maintaining relations and receiving professional assistance from historians from Bosnia and Herzegovina, especially in “the preparation of supplements to the history textbooks, as well as in the preparation of manuals for teachers including in-service teacher training seminars”. Additionally, the Bosniak community in Serbia is involved in different intercultural educational projects on local and regional levels, with public panels and TV shows dedicated to the history of Bosniaks, as part of non-formal education. One of the significant cross-­ border projects has already been mentioned: Learning history that is not yet history, about teaching and learning about the war of the 1990s in ex-­ Yugoslav republics, organised by the EuroClio international association of history educators.18

Approval of Curricula and Textbooks/Additional Teaching Materials for the Bosniak Minority One of the main obstacles to the implementation of history teaching for the Bosniak national minority in its full capacity is the postponement and denial of approval of additional specific teaching-learning materials. The main argument for denying permission for Bosniak curricula and textbook supplements or materials, according to the government-appointed Institute for the Improvement of Education, has been that the proposals put forward by the Bosniak National Council in Serbia contained certain historical anachronisms that do not apply to the current state of affairs or distant past. The main criticism regards the use of the term sandžak (sanjak): “The proposal also contains methodological inaccuracies. Namely, the term ‘today’s Sandzak’ is mentioned in the contents (of the curricula, Ed.) and operational tasks. The term sandzak represents an administrative unit in the Ottoman Empire but the Sanjaks disappeared in the Balkans 18  https://udieuroclio.edu.rs/tag/learning-a-history-that-is-not-yet-history/page/2/ accessed 6 June 2022.

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(together with the Turkish government) in 1912 and do not exist today”.19 The contested interpretations of the meaning and use of the term “sanjak” (Sanjak) seem insurmountable. Requests by the Bosniak National Council sent at different times within the last ten years show ongoing objections, without significant change or convergence of positions. Secondly, there is the interpretation and understanding of the Bosniak identity within the ethnic, national, and historical context. The explanation offered by the Institute, contrary to the self-determination of Bosniaks, is that “until the end of the 20th century and the time of the dissolution of the Yugoslav state, it meant territorial and not national affiliation (e.g., residents of central Serbia, Dalmatia, Vojvodina, etc.). Therefore, it is anachronistic to talk about the ethnogenesis of Bosniaks in early feudalism, the cultural achievements of the Bosniak people in the Middle Ages, or the Bosniak struggle for religious and waqf-mearif autonomy during the Austro-Hungarian occupation, etc.”20 Another criticism levelled by the Institute refers to certain contested historical interpretations in teaching materials as judgemental and biased, for example, “The use of the term genocide within the topic of Bosnia and Herzegovina in World War II is also inadequate. Mass crimes committed against the Muslim population in occupied Yugoslavia are not to be called genocide because this term implies the existence of a state policy to destroy a certain people (Such a state policy was pursued during World War II by Nazi Germany and the Ustasha Independent State of Croatia)”.21 However, some curricular propositions by the Bosniak National Council 19  Мишљење о “Измењеном предлогу наставног плана и програма за додатне садржаје који изражавају посебност бошњачке националне мањине” 839/2014, 25. 7. 2014. Document issued on 25/7/2014 by the Institute for the Improvement of Education to the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia, entitled “The Opinion on the Amended Curriculum Proposal for Additional Content Expressing the Particularity of the Bosniak National Minority” as the advisory, non-mandatory decision to the National Educational Council and Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of Republic of Serbia. Over time, the Institute has issued several such documents explaining the denial of approval for certain curricula proposals or teaching materials for the Bosniak national minority. 20  Мишљење о измењеном предлогу наставних планова и програма основног и средњег образовања за садржаје који изражавају посебност бошњачке националне мањине. “The Opinion on the Amended Curriculum Proposal for primary and secondary education: Expressing the Particularity of the Bosniak National Minority” 2065/2013, 6. 2. 2014. 21  Мишљење о “Измењеном предлогу наставног плана и програма за додатне садржаје који изражавају посебност бошњачке националне мањине” 839/2014, 25.7.2014.

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were denied approval due to less substantial issues that could have been easily resolved. For instance, the proposed curricular alterations were rejected for more formal reasons, like lack of “appropriate structure”, or differently formulated topics and content (e.g., Ottoman Supremacy in the Balkans, Wars and Migrations, or The Status of the Conquered Population in the Ottoman State of the 18th and 19th Centuries) already existing in the official state curricula under a different title.22 To date, preparation and publication of Bosniak supplements for history have been approved only for the fifth grade, while all other submitted supplements for other grades have been rejected, mainly due to the use of the term “Sandžak” (and its potential political implications). From the perspective of Bosniak experts, this obstacle includes the issue of conflicting historical narratives and interpretations coming exclusively from the Serbian academic milieu. Professor Šemsović indicates that the 30% of “freedom” in educational content represents more of a declarative, than fundamental functional, space for introducing the history of Bosniaks or multiple interpretations of the past that also include the Bosniak perspectives. As a result, Bosniak teachers are following the official history curriculum (compulsory for all students in Serbia) but with a reduced possibility of fully implementing the content and topics related to Bosniak history, due particularly to the absence of approved additional teaching materials that would enhance a local approach to history teaching. To bridge this gap, Bosniak history teachers use whatever available educational materials they find appropriate, including scientific articles and books written by historians from Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as teaching manuals or handbooks that could help in presenting Bosniak history. The stance of Professor Šemsović regarding successful or unsuccessful outcomes in history teaching is that “only when we achieve the minimum use of guaranteed national minority rights may we talk about the shortcomings and look for possible improvements”. Therefore, he suggests that in seeking a solution to overcome the limitations of exercising minority rights in education while also creating more inclusive history teaching and education in general, “it is important to address the Serbian academic, intellectual elite to accept the existence of other nations and people in Serbia, and progress may be made only when these circles make clear

22  Мишљење о “измењеном предлогу наставног плана и програма за додатне садржаје који изражавају посебност бошњачке националне мањине” 316/2015, 21.4.2015.

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detachment from everything negative that has been done in the past in their name against Bosniaks, but other nations as well”.23 The report made by Council of Europe expert Claudine Brohy in 2019 confirms the aforementioned educational challenges for the Bosniak national minority in Serbia. Bosniak respondents to the research study singled out the need for initial teacher training in Bosniak issues at university and the opportunity to lecture in the Bosnian language. The greatest emphasis was put on the obstacles in receiving permission for the use of textbooks written by Bosniaks. The author of this report also stressed the controversy following the use of the toponym Sandzak as a crucial factor in the rejection of textbooks and teaching materials. Additionally, representatives of the Bosniak National Council stated that overcoming the major problems they are facing is closely related to the implementation of decisions already taken by the Government of the Republic of Serbia regarding the education of the Bosniak national minority (Brohy 2019, 15). * * * Having explained pluralism as the positive response to diversity, Will Kymlicka states that successful pluralism requires both “hardware” and “software”. The hardware is embodied in institutions such as constitutions, legislatures, courts, schools, and the media. In other words, it is every formal institution that defines the legal and political space within which members of society act. On the other hand, the software is defined as “cultural habits” or a “public mindset”, such as conceptions of national identity and historic narratives. These habits and mindsets shape one’s perceptions of who belongs and who contributes and influence how people interact on an everyday basis with others (Kymlicka 2017, 19). Consequently, if a solution were to be found in relation to the existing legal framework, the local capacity of the ethnic community, and challenges in the history teaching for the Bosniak minority in Serbia, it would have to be equally complex and yet still not be sufficiently comprehensive. All necessary preconditions for successful and fully exercised national minority rights, although formalised by the laws and bylaws, are not sufficient to create a safe, constructive educational environment for implementation of a teaching process free from external societal and political  Interview with Professor S. Šemsović.

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interference as well as internal professional challenges. What characterises history teaching for the Bosniak national minority in Serbia are the underlined historical controversies, different (indeed, often opposite) interpretations of the past from the Serbian majority, the inadequacy/lack of teaching materials due to the restrictions imposed by the state institutions, and, finally, the difficult present-day political setting in the region. If we expand the focus, and the imposition of public discourse and political influences shift from exclusively national minorities to the ethnic majority, we can conclude that most of the outlined challenges apply to the whole Serbian society. On the other hand, the bottom-up perspective shows that classroom practice, both in national minority and ethnic majority settings, slightly differs from the educational policies and designated trajectories envisaged by educational bodies. The Continuum of risk-taking, the model which classifies teachers according to their approach to difficult topics in the classroom—avoider, container, or risk-taker (Kitson and McCully 2005)—relates to all history teachers in Serbia, no matter what their status as majority or minority members according to national, cultural, or religious background. The research on how practitioners see their position and the current state of history education in the Western Balkans shows a certain reluctance in teaching sensitive and controversial topics, especially regarding the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the civil war of the 1990s (Teachers on teaching, Epact, 31–33). Putting together indisputable facts related to history teaching of the Bosniak national minority, with the general state of play in history education in Serbia, brings us to the assumption that some challenges identified at local level are shifting beyond the original domain and becoming a common issue throughout the Western Balkan region.

References Bosniak National Council. https://www.bnv.org.rs/onama.php. Accessed 5 May 2022. Bougarel, Xavier. 2020. Nadživjeti carstva. Islam, nacionalni identitet i politic ǩ a lojalnost u Bosni i Hercegovini. Sarajevo: Udurženje za modernu historiju UMHIS. Brohy, Claudine. 2019. Analiza postojec ́ih modela obrazovanja na jezicima manjina u Srbiji i drugim državama, uz preporuke za izmenu postojec ́ih modela obrazovanja na jezicima manjina. Strasbourg: Horizontal Facility for Western Balkans and Turkey. https://www.mpn.gov.rs/wp-­content/

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uploads/2020/12/21-­HF33-­Education-­model-­Brohy-­SRB.pdf. Accessed 6 June 2022. Constitution of the Republic of Serbia. 2006. http://www.parlament.gov.rs/ upload/documents/Ustav_Srbije_pdf.pdf. Accessed 18 May 2022. Council of Europe. 1995. Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities and Explanatory Report. Strasbourg. https://rm.coe. int/16800c10cf. Accessed 7 June 2022. ———. 2001. Recommendation on History Teaching in the Twenty-first Century (Rec. 15). Strasbourg. https://search.coe.int/cm/Pages/result_details.aspx? ObjectId=09000016805e2c31. Accessed 10 June 2022. ———. 2009. Recommendation on History Teaching in Conflict and Post-conflict Areas (Rec 1880). Strasbourg. http://assembly.coe.int/Documents/ AdoptedText/ta09/EREC1880.htm. Accessed 10 June 2022. ———. 2011. Recommendation on Intercultural Dialogue and the Image of the Other in History Teaching (Rec. 6). Strasbourg. https://search.coe.int/cm/ Pages/result_details.aspx?ObjectId=09000016805cc8e1. Accessed 10 June 2022. ̵ Džudžo, Esad. 2018. Uvodenje cjelokupne nastavu na bosanskom jeziku u Sandžaku. Bošnjac ǩ a rijec ̌ 40–43: 233–254. Filipović, Emir. n.d. Modern Bosnian Nations and the Medieval History of Bosnia (not published article). Gellner, Ernest. 1964. Nationalism. In Thought and Change, 158–169. London: Weinfeld and Nicholson. General Assembly Security Council UN. 1995. Dayton Peace Agreement. https:// peacemaker.un.org/sites/peacemaker.un.org/files/BA_951121_ DaytonAgreement.pdf. Accessed 2 June 2022. Government of the Republic of Serbia – Citizen Service Platform. 2021. Common Textbooks on National Subjects in Serbia and Republika Srpska. https://www. srbija.gov.rs/vest/535344/zajednicki-­udzbenici-­za-­nacionalne-­predmete-­ srbije-­i-­rs.php. Accessed 15 May 2022. Hadjievska, Ivana. 2021. The Trouble with National History: The Case of North Macedonia’s EU Accession. Analysis, Eastern Europe, Politics. Posted June 18, 2021. https://lossi36.com/2021/06/18/the-­trouble-­with-­national-­history-­ the-­case-­of-­north-­macedonias-­eu-­accession/. Accessed 1 June 2022. Helsinki Committee for Human Rights. 2021. Minorities: Permanent Obstruction of Social and Political Integration. Belgrade: Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia. Hobsbawm, Eric. 1983. Introduction: Inventing Traditions. In The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, 13–14. Cambridge: CUP. Humanitarian Law Center. 2022. Zona neodgovornosti. https://zonaneodgovornosti.net/digitalne-kolekcije/zlocini-u-sandzakudevedesetih-godina/. Accessed 2 June 2022.

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Kitson, A., and Alan Mccully. 2005. You Hear About it for Real in School’. Avoiding, Containing and Risk-Taking in the Classroom. Teaching History 120: 32–37. Kymlicka, Will. 2017. The Hardware and Software of Pluralism. Accounting for Change in Diverse Societies. Ottawa: Global Centre for Pluralism. Lj, B. 2022. Srebrenicu da uče celo polugodište: istoričare podelila reforma nastave istorije. Večernje novosti. June 3. https://www.novosti.rs/drustvo/ vesti/1122614/srebrenicu-uce-celo-polugodiste-istoricare-podelila-reformanastave-istorije. Accessed 6 June 2022. Smit, Antoni D. 1998. Nacionalni identitet. Belgrade: Biblioteka XX vek. Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia. 2017. https://data.stat.gov.rs/Home/ Result/3102010403?languageCode=en-­US. Accessed 17 May 2022. Šuica, Marko. 2010. Percepcija Osmanskog carstva u Srbiji. In Imaginarni Turc ǐ n, ed. B. Jezernik, 285–299. Belgrade. ———. 2018. Report on School Textbooks as far as the Information to be Provided about the National Minorities in the Republic of Serbia, Protection of National Minorities in Serbia as the Part of Horizontal Facility for Western Balkans and Turkey Program by Council of Europe and E.U. Belgrade. Завод за вредновање квалитета образовања и васпитања. 2010. Образовни стандарди за крај обавезног образовања за наставни предмет. Београд. https:// ceo.edu.rs/wp-­content/uploads/obrazovni_standardi/kraj_obaveznog_obrazovanja/Istorija.pdf. Accessed 5 June 2022. ———. 2015. Општи стандарди постигнућа за крај општег средњег и средњег стручног образовања и васпитања у делу општеобразовних предмета. Београд. https://ceo.edu.rs/wp-­c ontent/uploads/opsti_standardi/Istorija.pdf. Accessed 5 June 2022. Службени гласник Рeпублике Србије. 2018. Zakon o udžbenicima. https://www. paragraf.rs/propisi/zakon-­o-­udzbenicima.html. Accessed 21 May 2022. Службени гласник Републике Србије. 2002. Zakon o zaštiti prava i sloboda nacionanih manjina. https://www.paragraf.rs/propisi/zakon_o_zastiti_prava_i_ sloboda_nacionalnih_manjina.html. Accessed 19 May 2022. ———. 2017. Zakon o osnovama sistema obrazovanja i vaspitanja. https://www. paragraf.rs/propisi/zakon_o_osnovama_sistema_obrazovanja_i_vaspitanja. html. Accessed 19 May 2022. ———. 2018. Просветни гласник. Година LXVII, број 12. Belgrade. Published 5 July 2018. http://www.pravno-­informacioni-­sistem.rs/SlGlasnikPortal/viewd oc?uuid=9d443fdb-­264b-­4641-­bcb2-­03b224a6e0cc. Accessed 10 June 2022. ———. 2019. Просветни гласник. Година LXVIII, број 11. Published on 15 August 2022. http://www.pravno-­informacioni-­sistem.rs/SlGlasnikPortal/vie wdoc?uuid=7f60db16-­8760-­4e25-­bc8a-­f69fe1fb2e2c. Accessed 3 June 2022. Службни гласник Републике Србије. 2009. Zakon o nacionalnim savetima nacionalnih manjina. https://www.paragraf.rs/propisi/zakon_o_nacionalnim_ savetima_nacionalnih_manjina.html. Accessed 19 May 2022.

Swedish School Curricula and Sámi Self-­Identification: The Syllabus from 1960s to 2011 Charlotta Svonni and Lina Spjut

The Sámi people are Europe’s only recognised Indigenous people.1 A large part of the Sámi population lives in Sápmi, which means “the land of the Sámi”. Sápmi is divided between four countries: Finland, Norway, Russia (on the Kola Peninsula) and Sweden. From a nation-state perspective, Sápmi may seem peripheral in terms of geography, society and school (see also Norlin and Drugge 2023). In addition to the ordinary Swedish compulsory school system, there is also a specific schooling for Sámi 1  Indigenous written with a capital “I” defines these groups as peoples in the same way as, for example, Swedes, German or Italians, which all start with a capital letter.

C. Svonni (*) • L. Spjut Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. S. Colla, A. Di Michele (eds.), History Education at the Edge of the Nation, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27246-2_6

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children, called Sameskolan (Sámi school), where education is offered both in Sámi and Swedish languages. The education provided to Sámi in Sweden today is inextricably linked to the long history of Swedish majority educational policy for the Indigenous Sámi people. For over 400 years, Sámi have been educated under Swedish patronage, first by the Church and then, from the mid-twentieth century, by the Swedish state. The democratisation of the Nordic countries during the post-war period has resulted in greater respect for the rights of Indigenous peoples and increased opportunities for self-identification (Åhren 2016; Norlin and Sjögren 2016; Svonni 2021). Today Sámi school runs parallel to municipal primary school education from years 1 to 6. In Sweden, education is compulsory up to and including year 9. After year 6, Sámi pupils are entitled to Sámi language and cultural elements within the framework of municipal schooling (SFS 2010: 800). Seen through the theories of identification and imagined community theorists such as Benedict Anderson (1996) and Hylland Eriksen (2007), in this study we look at whether the existence of Sámi schools can be viewed as recognition of the Sámi community. In accordance with this theoretical point of view, can this school system also be viewed as a symbol of Sweden’s multicultural strategy for including different ethnicities and cultures? That said, the content of syllabi is formed and defined by the Swedish government through the Curriculum for Sámi School (Lsam11). The Swedish National Agency for Education is responsible for national curricula and syllabi. Curricula are circulated for comment to various interest groups and government agencies before being defined in legislation. In the case of Lsam11, the Sámi Education Board was one such evaluation body. Ultimately, however, responsibility for national curricula rests with the National Agency for Education, which designs them, and the Swedish parliament, which approves and adopts them. The Curriculum for Sámi School (Lsam11) includes Sámi themes in its fundamental values, overall goals and syllabi. Civics and history are subjects in which society’s view of itself and the world at large are central (Andolf 1972; Landahl 2015; Larsson 2011). These syllabi are therefore relevant when studying communities and self-identification (Spjut 2018). The Sámi language syllabus is also relevant as it contains a great deal of social science on Sámi themes. The purpose of this chapter is to analyse how the Sámi people and society are conveyed in Lsam11 and its syllabi for civics, history and Sámi language. We do so to better understand how Sámi themes are formulated

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and presented in a national curriculum written by a government agency in the context of an Indigenous people’s education, something that ultimately affects the group’s ability to self-identify. This analysis may identify any similarities and differences between the curriculum and the segregation and assimilation policies that once dominated the field of education in Sweden. The research questions are: How do the curriculum and syllabi for civics, history and the Sámi language present the values of Sámi society? How is content concerning Indigenous peoples and minorities presented in syllabi for civics, history and the Sámi language? These questions are addressed in relation to the period in which the curriculum and syllabi were published, and discussed in relation to earlier education systems for Sámi in Sweden. The empirical material mainly consists of the 2011 Curriculum for Sámi School (Lsam11) and syllabi for civics, history and Sámi language in years 1 to 9. All syllabi consist of three sections: Aim, Core content and Knowledge requirements (Lsam11). The syllabi for civics and history have been selected as these subjects help to identify a society’s view of itself and the world at large (Spjut 2018). The Sámi language syllabus is also studied as it is the only syllabus that differs from the Curriculum for Compulsory School. The curriculum and syllabi are placed in relation to the Swedish Education Act (SFS 2010: 800), National Minorities and Minority Languages Act (SFS 2009: 724), Language Act (SFS 2009: 600) and United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child Act (SFS 2018: 1197), as well as other significant international conventions ratified by Sweden, such as the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. One relevant convention that Sweden has not ratified is the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention (ILO 169), hence its exclusion from the study. The chosen research method is text analysis, with various sections of the curriculum read, structured and analysed according to the three domains of purpose stated in Biesta’s theory of education (Biesta 2011) and a theoretical conceptual apparatus on identification and imagined communities (Anderson 1996; Hylland Eriksen 2007; Brubaker 2006; Billig 1995).

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Segregational Education, Broken Down by the Ideal of Democratisation The formal education of the Sámi population in Sweden began in the seventeenth century with Christian missionary associations. It was not until the early twentieth century that the Swedish state took over responsibility for educating Sámi (Lindmark 2006; Lantto 2012: 151 ff; Lindmark 2016; Norlin and Sjögren 2016). For the majority population too, it was the Church that first provided schooling; the first Primary School Act was passed in 1842, passing responsibility for offering all children a basic education on to municipalities (Spjut 2018). While the vast majority of children went to municipal primary schools, the wealthy sent their offspring to grammar school. Meanwhile, for the Sámi, there was a separate system of schooling which was radically transformed during the 1910s, when a new form of education was created for reindeer-herding Sámi through the Nomad School Acts of 1913 and 1916 (Lantto 2000). The name nomad school reflected the nomadic way of life of the reindeer-herding Sámi, who followed their herds to various grazing grounds over the course of the year (Svonni 2021). This was a segregated form of schooling, with Sámi children between the ages of 7 and 12 sent to boarding schools where they were separated from their parents and relatives for long periods (Huuva and Blind 2016). This policy attracted criticism from the Sámi from the start, due to the unhygienic living conditions and substandard teaching offered by the nomad boarding schools, as well as the fact that the Sámi themselves had no say in the education system (SOU 1960: 41; Lantto 2003: 76 ff.). As in ordinary schools, the main language in the nomad schools was Swedish and, until as late as the 1960s, children could be punished for speaking any other language in school, whether in lessons or during breaks. As a result, many of the children quickly lost proficiency in their native tongue, as they were forbidden to speak it during the school term (Elenius 2001: 215–217). The Swedish education system underwent major reforms during the early 1960s; a new, democratic form of elementary education was to be created and the first national curriculum (Lgr62) was established (SFS 1962a: 319, 1962b: 439). While Sámi school was not included in this new elementary education system, the comprehensive process of school democratisation still affected views of Sámi education. Misgivings about the nomad schools increased as the ideology of equal educational opportunities for all children took root (Svonni 2017). Nomad schools were

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criticised both for being too expensive in relation to the low number of pupils and because they were considered obsolete. With so many reindeer-­ herding mountain Sámi now permanently settled, their children no longer required boarding schools. However, there remained a line of thought among both Sámi and Swedish political representatives that Sámi children still needed a specific Sámi education in order to preserve and develop their language and culture (SOU 1960: 41; Lantto 2000; Mörkenstam 1999: 166–172). Nomad schools therefore survived as a separate staterun form of education, although they were reformed to comply with guidelines for elementary education, with the difference that nomad school ended after year 6 or 7, depending on the school in question (SFS 1962a. Decision by the Swedish parliament, 1962). The greatest change was the repeal of the directive preventing the children of reindeer-herding Sámi from attending school on the same terms as the Swedish (majority) children, a measure introduced as part of the dismantling of state regulations relegating children of certain ethnicities to separate school systems (Sjögren 2010). Sámi parents were therefore able to choose for themselves whether to place their children in nomad school or elementary school. This change in policy was perceived as raising the status of nomad schools, which were now deemed equivalent to elementary schools. A more longterm consequence was that the number of pupils in nomad schools declined as prospective pupils opted for the public school system, perhaps as these schools were closer to home (Svonni 2017).

Confusing Curricula and Marginalised Sámi Content Make Teaching More Difficult While the first national curriculum for the compulsory school system, Lgr62, also applied to nomad schools, the special subjects of Nomad Studies, Sámi Language and Sámi Handicrafts were still taught according to the 1956 Curriculum for Nomad Schools. In 1969, Lgr62 was superseded by a new curriculum, Lgr69, which contained a new annex regulating the nomad schools’ special syllabi for civics with a focus on Sámi society, Sámi Handicrafts and Sámi Language (Svonni 2021). Lgr62 and Lgr69 were otherwise generally similar. One significant change was the introduction of native language lessons for children whose first language was not Swedish (Lgr62; Lgr69; Richardsson 2010: 219), a change

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prompted by the immigration policy of the period that encouraged migrant labourers to remain in Sweden (Dahlström 2007: 27–28, 39–42). The mother tongue language reform (Hemspråksreformen) of 1977 established the right of children to learn their native language at school as long as it was “a living language in the home” (SOU 2017: 91, 182–183). This proviso excluded many Sámi children from receiving language support, specifically those whose parents had lost their native language proficiency due to the authorities’ earlier prohibition of the Sámi language. During the 1950s and 1960s, Sámi Language education was limited to a maximum of two hours per week, although even this was by no means guaranteed (Svonni 2021) and, in practice, Sámi children could be left without any instruction in Sámi. The Sámi language was thus highly marginalised in comparison to Swedish language, which was taught for between eight and ten hours a week. The other specialist subjects taught in nomad schools were Nomad Studies and Sámi Handicrafts. The nomad school curriculum placed reindeer husbandry at the heart of Sámi culture. This included teaching Swedish and international reindeer husbandry legislation which regulated where and when different reindeer husbandry compounds ([sameby] Sámi economic and administrative associations) were permitted to graze their reindeer. The subject Sámi Handicrafts provided knowledge of local craft styles and highlighted the importance of using traditional methods and materials (Svonni 2021). The name “Nomad School” was replaced by Sámi School in 1977. The 1980 Compulsory School Curriculum (Lgr80) instructed Sámi Schools to continue teaching the specifically Sámi subjects which had been taught in nomad school, that is, civics with a focus on Sámi society, Sámi Handicrafts and Sámi Language (Svonni 2021). The new curriculum did, however, contain some changes to compulsory education which affected Sámi children attending state schools; mother tongue language instruction became a compulsory subject under Lgr80. In 1985, the right to learn the mother tongue was further restricted to children with one or both parents who used their native language for day-to-day communication with the child (SOU 2017: 91, 183), although this change made no difference to the children of Sámi parents who had already lost their L1 proficiency, who still did not qualify to learn Sámi language in school. It was not until 1997 that the caveat regarding Sámi language being spoken in the home was removed (SOU 2017: 91, 183). Under the 1985 Education Act, Sámi schools became part of the state school system, although notably they would continue to accept pupils from

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years 1 to 6 only, rather than the full nine years of compulsory education (Swedish Education Act [SFS] 1985: 1100, Chapter 1, Sections 1 and 3, and Chapter 4, Section 1). This meant that Sámi pupils were forced to complete the last three years of compulsory education in an ordinary state school. It was not until the 1994 Curriculum for Compulsory School (Lpo94) that Sámi perspectives were incorporated into many of the syllabi for the first time. One can speculate that this was due to a gradual development of Sámi rights and self-determination, from acceptance as Indigenous people in 1977 to the inauguration of the Sámi Parliament in 1993 (Lawrence and Mörkenstam 2012), as well as the municipalisation reform of 1991, after which municipalities paid for and ran schools while the state retained control of policy, including overall goals and guidelines. This created greater scope for the local adaption of education (Broady 2000). In 1999, Sweden recognised the five national minorities—Jews, Roma, Sámi, Sweden Finns and Tornedalers—by ratifying the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (SOU 2017: 91, 144). The convention lists the conditions necessary for persons belonging to national minorities to maintain and develop their culture and to preserve the essential elements of their identity, namely, their religion, language, traditions and cultural heritage. In Sweden, national minority status requires that the group has a long-standing historical presence in the country. Self-identification as a separate group was considered more important than the number of members in the group in question (Elenius and Ekengren 2002: 11, 26). Swedish ratification of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in 2000 meant that all pupils in the Swedish school system were to be taught about the five national minorities in school (SOU 2017: 91, 161), something that required amendments to school governance documents and the revision of syllabi in the 1994 Curriculum (Spjut 2021b). A new curriculum established in 2011, Lgr11, included teaching about the five national minorities. Along with Lgr11 came a new Curriculum for Sámi School, Lsam11, with its own syllabus for Sámi Language (Lgr11; Lsam11). That said, previous research has pointed out that only a half percent of the syllabi core content included Sámi and other national minority themes, which suggests that the national minorities remain marginalised even under Lgr11 (Svonni 2015), and that the curriculum guidelines for teaching about the Sámi and other national minorities are incoherent and difficult to interpret (Spjut 2021a). This in turn complicates the teaching of Sámi pupils and leads to teaching materials based on differing

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interpretations of the curriculum (Spjut 2020). According to Norlin and Drugge (2023), teachers also express the need for teaching materials with Sámi themes. Given that, in addition to national minority status, the Sámi have been recognised as an Indigenous people in the Swedish Constitution since 2010, Svonni (2015) contends that the content of Lgr11 fails to live up to the demands of international conventions concerning national minorities and Indigenous peoples and that, as a result, the Sámi continue to be assimilated into the mainstream majority cultures through education, despite the fact that legislation on minorities is expressly designed to prevent this. Another aspect of the marginalisation of syllabi content on Sámi people and Sámi social issues is that—because textbook authors work in compliance with syllabi knowledge requirements when creating teaching materials—the image of the Sámi people that emerges is relatively vague and stereotypical, a finding that is also backed up by earlier research (Spjut 2020). This is a direct consequence of the incoherence of various directives in Lgr11 (Spjut 2021a). Belancic and Lindgren have also studied the Sámi language syllabus. They show that, despite the stated aim that education should provide Sámi pupils with an opportunity to develop a functional bilingual competence, there is no support in the Sámi language syllabus for students to develop bilingualism in Sámi on equal terms with Swedish. This is despite the policy of bilingualism in Sámi schools. The authors also see structural discrimination in the fact that, while the teaching of the Sámi language is encouraged, it is limited in comparison to teaching of the Swedish language (Belancic and Lindgren 2000).

The Intentions of Sámi Education in Relation to Its Identity-Creating Message In analysing syllabi in Sámi schools, we have used concepts provided by Biesta’s three domains of education: qualification, socialisation and subjectification (Biesta 2011, 2020). For the purposes of the study, these analytical tools are used to sort the content of the curriculum and clarify the aims and ends of the educational programme (Biesta 2020). Qualification refers not only to the knowledge and skills required for a specific occupation or other task, but also to the necessary knowledge to understand societal structures. Socialisation refers to the many ways in which (through education) we become part of particular social, cultural and political “orders”. This may be implicit or explicit. According to Biesta, implicit

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socialisation can be linked to the hidden curriculum of unintentional lessons pupils learn in school, while explicit socialisation may involve learning norms and values in order to become part of particular cultural or religious traditions. Broadly speaking, subjectification can be understood as the opposite of the socialisation function. It is about individual freedom of choice, educational activities that disrupt and provide opportunities to reflect at the same time that the individual is supported in their personal development (Biesta 2011: 27–30, 2020). While domains of education allow us to analyse the various aspects of the Sámi curriculum’s general stipulations and the syllabi for Sámi language and civics, these domains should also be considered as interconnected and overlapping (Biesta 2011: 27). In the study of the core values of Sámi schools, analysis is based on imagined community and identification, both national and ethnic, with a main theoretical point of departure in the works of Benedict Anderson, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Rogers Brubaker and Michael Billig. Andersen defines a nation as an imagined community “because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members” (Anderson 1996: 21–22). Hylland Eriksen also describes imagined communities, this time based on identity. Hylland Erikson argues that community, or identity, may be based on both national and ethnic community, as both identities are defined in relation to one another. He also contends that, today, only the borders of modern nation-states differentiate between ethnic and national community and identification (Hylland Eriksen 2007: 125–127, 139). For Sámi, this would imply that they can identify with both an ethnic/linguistic/geographical community within Sápmi and a national community in the nation where they are citizens, for example, as Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish or Russian. By defining our own group, we also define other groups as a kind of “opposition”; by creating an inwardly positive identification, we also create a negative outward identification (Hylland Eriksen 2004: 53–56), meaning that one (often dominant) group will define another identity group. This may lead to ethnic homogenisation linked to specific interests and agendas (Brubaker 2006: 1–17) that, in combination with power imbalances between the groups in question, may result in stereotyping of the other (subordinate) group (Hylland Eriksen 2007: 105). Hylland Eriksen argues that we must distinguish between categorisation and identification; the former is external identification by someone else, while the

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latter is internal self-identification by the individual or group (Hylland Eriksen 2007: 14). How a state or nation defines itself is relevant to understanding its attitude to minorities and/or Indigenous peoples, including in curricula and syllabi. Here, the nation can be understood as a constructed entity conforming to the state, that is, a territorial and institutional organisation. Brubaker calls this a state-framed nation and it encompasses everyone living within a demarcated geographical area. When a nation’s national identity is instead expressed as the unifying factor, where the defined ethnic group determines what is included in the nation’s identity, a counter-­state nation arises instead. Counter-state nationalism excludes those that do not conform to the national identity (Brubaker 2006: 144–146). So, counterstate Swedish-ness refers to an ethnic group’s imagined culture, values and behaviour, which are held up and defined as the core of the nation. In this study, the distinction between state-framed and counter-state nationalism is relevant as the national curriculum specifies fundamental values and tasks of the school system. This may offer insight into how the curriculum and syllabi relate to national minorities. Hylland Eriksen highlights three approaches to the national populations: (1) segregation, which differentiates minorities in order to dominate, often leading to unequal power relations (Hylland Eriksen 2007: 153–154), as exemplified by attitudes to reindeer-herding mountain Sámi during the first half of the twentieth century (Lantto 2000); (2) assimilation, by which the minority group is forced to abandon its distinguishing traits, such as its language, in order to identify itself with the state, as was the case with the mountain-dwelling Sámi without reindeer during the twentieth century (Hylland Eriksen 2007; Lantto 2000), a situation which often leads to suffering and loss of dignity as it signals the worthlessness of the group’s own language, beliefs and traditions; and (iii) multiculturalism, which aims to transcend the ethnic nationalist ideology, granting full civil rights to all citizens regardless of any specific cultural identity (Hylland Eriksen 2007: 153–154). Depending on its attitude to minority groups, a state may be inclusive of all citizens within its territory regardless of ethnicity (a state-framed nation) or exclusionary, by making citizenship conditional on ethnicity and embracing counter-state nationalism (Brubaker 2006: 1–17). Even if a nation is not explicitly nationalistic, there is often a strain of banal nationalism at work, as certain unifying norms are deemed necessary to maintaining the national identity. Billig argues that small, everyday things remind us that we belong to a nation and that history and

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nationhood are linked to “our history” and “our culture”; by stereotyping the character, temperament and uniqueness of “our” people, we differentiate ourselves from minorities within the country, who thus become “the Other” (Billig 1995: 37–38, 44, 66, 70–71, 93–94, 174–175). There are ramifications for the group or minority designated as “the Other”; it also contributes to their self-identification (Hylland Eriksen 2007: 85). External identification that stereotypes a minority group or excludes it from the community may also create structural racism. Structural racism has been described as a process by which an institutional system of societal norms and organisation directly or indirectly discriminates against individuals or ethnic groups of different descent to the majority society (Kamali 2006). In this study, perspectives on hidden racism and expressions of structural racism are applied to deepen understanding of national and ethnic identities and norms in relation to Biesta’s domains of education (Biesta 2011 and 2020). The concept and the theories behind “the Other”, as well as counter-state and state-framed nationalism, are also relevant to this study in order to define the perspectives of the minority and majority in the curricula. With this as a point of departure, the content of the curriculum and syllabi can be analysed to determine whether there is any construction of Sámi ethnicity resulting from the aims and ends of the Curriculum for Sámi School and its syllabi for civics, history and Sámi language.

Tensions Regarding Identity Creation in Curriculum for Sámi Schools The first two sections of the Curriculum for Sámi School contain the fundamental values and tasks of the school with overall goals and guidelines. The guidelines state that the teacher should “clarify and discuss with the pupils the basic values of Swedish society and their consequences in terms of individual actions” (Lsam11: 12). The guidelines also state that “the school is responsible for ensuring that each pupil on completing compulsory school has obtained knowledge about and an insight into the Swedish, Nordic and Western cultural heritage, and also obtained basic knowledge of the Nordic languages” and “has obtained knowledge about the cultures, languages, religion and history of the national minorities (Jews, Roma, indigenous Sámis, Sweden Finns and Tornedalers)” (Lsam11: 14).

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The above guidelines define different population groups and differing goals: pupils are to obtain “knowledge about and an insight into the Swedish, Nordic and Western cultural heritage”, whereas knowledge is deemed sufficient when it comes to the cultures, languages, religion and history of the national minorities and Sweden’s Indigenous people; here, there is no mention of insight. By defining different populations, the implication is that they are different and have different cultural heritages and histories. At the same time, it is a way to respect national legislation regarding national minorities and shows that it is relevant teaching content (SFS 2009: 724). In order to analyse these perspectives, we must consider the content of the curriculum more broadly. One element in the fundamental values of Lsam11 is not included in Lgr11: “Sámi schools shall convey the norms, values and traditions of Sámi society and the Sámi as an indigenous people to pupils” (Lsam11: 7). In accordance with Hylland Eriksen (2007), the terminology and content of the previous citation provide some form of identity marker for the Sámi identity. Lsam11 also contains a number of other statements on fundamental values that it shares with Lgr11. For the sake of clarity, these are presented in Table 1. The above citations emphasise a set of values drawn from Swedish and Western society. The statements in Table 1 are common to Lsam11 and Lgr11 and therefore apply to the entire Swedish school system. By defining the values and identity of Swedish society, based on the previously described theories of imagined communities and identification, we can say that these statements also constitute a definition of “our” Swedish society. It portrays what is “we” as the “fundamental democratic values on which Swedish society is based” and the “ethics borne by a Christian tradition and Western humanism”. The ethics in question are emphasised as a “sense of justice, generosity, tolerance and responsibility”, as well as awareness of “sharing in a common cultural heritage”. Svonni (2015) argues that this type of formulation may lead to the assumption that these values and norms somehow belong specifically to Swedes or Westerners and, by implication, are lacking in all other groups. It is also interesting that Sámi schools have been given an additional recommendation to comply with compared to municipal schools, despite the fact that the values and knowledge contained in the curriculum expressly constitute a “common reference framework that everyone in society needs” (Lsam11: 9). This appears to be contradictory and leaves room for interpretation, perhaps as part of an attempted assimilation of Sweden’s

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Table 1  Provisions from Section 1 of Lsam11 and Lgr11, “Fundamental values and tasks of the school” I

II

III

IV

V

VI

Education should impart and establish respect for human rights and the fundamental democratic values on which Swedish society is based (p. 7).

In accordance with the ethics borne by a Christian tradition and Western humanism, this is achieved by fostering in the individual a sense of justice, generosity, tolerance and responsibility (p. 7).

Awareness of one’s own cultural origins and sharing in a common cultural heritage provides a secure identity which it is important to develop, together with the ability to understand and empathise with the values and conditions of others (p. 7).

In a deeper sense education and upbringing involve developing and passing on a cultural heritage – values, traditions, language, knowledge – from one generation to the next (p. 9).

The school should convey the more enduring knowledge that constitutes the common reference framework that everyone in society needs (p. 9).

Language, learning, and the development of a personal identity are all closely related (p. 9).

minority groups, as it assumes that “everyone in society” needs certain knowledge contained in the curriculum. It might also be interpreted as multiculturalism, given that the inclusion of the additional provision in Lsam11 also acknowledges the existence of a Sámi society with its own norms and values (cf. Hylland Eriksen 2007). Lsam11 states that education and upbringing involve “developing and passing on a cultural heritage” (Citation IV) and that there is “more enduring knowledge that constitutes the common reference framework that everyone in society needs” (Citation V). Lgr11 is also at pains to point out that “language, learning, and the development of a personal identity are all closely related” (Citation IV). When analysed using Anderson’s (1996) and Hylland Eriksen’s (2007) theories of identification and imagined communities and Brubaker’s (2004) theory on nations and

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belonging, the citations in Table 1 both include and exclude Sámi from the imagined community. While the references to “common cultural heritage” (III) and “developing a cultural heritage” (IV) appear to include the Sámi, they are apparently excluded by specification of the “values on which Swedish society is based” (I) and the “Christian tradition and Western humanism” (II). The latter also appears to hint at assimilation in its allusion to Swedish society and Western frameworks as the overriding approach to society, knowledge and values (cf. Hylland Eriksen 2007). The community may therefore appear inclusive or exclusionary, depending on which interpretations one selects. In the curriculum’s fundamental values and basis for identity creation, a picture emerges of a common Swedish-ness defined by counter-state nationalism, as citations I and II define the values and norms that belong to Swedish-ness. Citations III and IV also focus on developing and passing on a cultural heritage from one generation to the next; in this context, the term passing on can be linked to counter-state nationalism, while the term developing can be linked to state-framed nationalism in which the culture is constantly evolving (and might be interpreted as open and inclusive). Citation V has weaker links to a given type of group affiliation, even if it does allude to “enduring and common knowledge that everyone in society needs”. In other words, the additional guideline that “Sámi schools shall convey the norms, values and traditions of Sámi society and the Sámi as an indigenous people to pupils” can be viewed as both a complement to and contradiction of those statements defining what is to be included in Swedish values, cultural heritage and norms. It is not possible to fully analyse the implications of the curriculum’s fundamental values without also analysing the relevant syllabi, as it is the aims and content of these syllabi that the school’s fundamental values are fully delineated.

The Position and Rights of “the Other” The civics and history syllabi in Lsam11 have the same aims, core content and knowledge requirements as Lgr11. In other words, the subjects are central to conveying a content and message of “the more enduring knowledge that constitutes the common reference framework that everyone in society needs” (Lsam11: 9). The core content of the history syllabus that explicitly relates to the Sámi is “historical perspectives on indigenous Sámi and the position of

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other national minorities in Sweden” (Lgr11/Lsam11: 176). This citation is taken from the theme Democratisation, the post-war period and globalisation, from around 1900 to the present. In terms of the domains of education, this can be considered as belonging to the domain qualifications, in that it provides the necessary knowledge and skills to (e.g.) understand democratic structures in society (cf. Biesta 2011, 2020). However, the syllabus lacks both socialising and subjectification content on Sámi themes (cf. Biesta 2011, 2020). This suggests three interpretations of the content of the history syllabus on Sámi themes: (1) that the knowledge is subordinate to the general and ambiguous term position,2 thus diminishing Sámi history to the status of “the Other”3; (2) the content is not intended to prepare the pupil for any particular social or political order but is solely informative in nature, by extension implying that there is no Sámi social and political order in which to participate; and (3) that Sámi history is somehow a recent phenomenon dating back only a century, ignoring the Indigenous people’s traditional knowledge and connection to the land by viewing Sámi history solely from the perspective of modern history. In civics too, the content of the syllabus relating to Sámi themes can be assigned to Biesta’s qualification domain and the necessary knowledge to understand societal structures (Biesta 2011, 2020). In both the core content for years 4–6 and years 7–9, the content is linked to the specific rights and special status of the Sámi or, more precisely, the “indigenous Sámi people and other national minorities in Sweden. The national minorities’ rights” in years 4–6 (Lgr11/Lsam11: 201) and the “national minorities and the Sámi status as an indigenous people in Sweden and what their special position and rights mean” in years 7–9 (Lgr11/Lsam11: 203). The Sámi content in years 4–6 appears under the theme Individuals and communities, along with “the family and different forms of cohabitation. Sexuality, gender roles and gender equality” and “social security networks for children in different life situations, in school and in society” (Lgr/Lsam11: 201), both of which fall into socialising and qualifying, 2  In the original version in Swedish, the word situation is used. In Swedish: Historiska perspektiv på urfolket samernas och de övriga nationella minoriteternas situation i Sverige. Lgr11/Lsam11. 3  The recognised national minorities (Sámi, Jews, Roma, Tornedalers and Sweden Finns) in Sweden are all given the status of “the Other” in the school context (Spjut 2020, 2021a, 2021b); for further reading on “the Other” in the Swedish context, see Ajagán-Lester (2000), Kamali (2006) and Harrie (2016).

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while the Sámi content is solely qualifying. The other content in the section leads us to interpret the Sámi’s rights as a matter of individual minority rights rather than human rights. In years 7–9, the Sámi content appears under the theme Rights and the judicial system. One example of other content on the same theme is “human rights including the rights of children as laid down in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Their meaning and importance and what constitutes discrimination as laid down in Swedish law” (Lgr/Lsam11: 203). This is open to multiple interpretations by teachers or textbook authors, also from a minority-rights perspective that implies that Sámi children have the right to learn and develop the Sámi language and that the state has an obligation to encourage Sámi to preserve and develop their cultural identity (SFS 2009: 724). They might also interpret the content of the Convention on the Rights of the Child as a call to respect the child’s own cultural identity, language and values and that the children of an Indigenous people have the right to be taught about their own culture and to use their own language (SFS 2018: 1197). Such an interpretation would be consistent with the view of the Sámi as a minority and Indigenous people. However, judging by the results of previous research, the guidelines of the curriculum and syllabi are interpreted quite differently depending on who is interpreting, although it is usually from the majority-society perspective of Indigenous peoples and minorities (Spjut 2020). Given that there is a stereotypical image of the Sámi as reindeer herders, a teacher might well choose to focus on reindeer husbandry legislation. To summarise, this review demonstrates that knowledge about the Sámi in the syllabi for history and civics is largely subsidiary to knowledge about majority society, providing a supplement that serves only to describe the rights and special status of “the Other”, and even then only in relation to the Sámi’s position from 1900 until the present day. In principle, all teaching materials also adopt a majority-society perspective when interpreting the curriculum and describing the Sámi and other national minorities (Spjut 2020). This means that the Sámi are categorised (externally identified) by the majority population. It is especially important to underline that the Swedish state has exerted colonial influence over the Sámi in Sweden since the seventeenth century (Lindmark and Sundström 2016).

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Cultural Epithet in Curricula Content Creates Deviant Sámi-ness In Sámi school, the Sámi language is both a subject with its own syllabus and a teaching language that should have equal status to the Swedish language. One of the aims of Sámi school is that pupils should be functionally bilingual in both Sámi and Swedish languages (Lsam11). A language can be said to be a culture bearer and the curricula portray it as a key to learning and the development of a personal identity (Lgr/Lsam11: 9). As a school subject, Sámi language can also be viewed as a group-specific identity marker, as well as a language to transmit the teaching of other subjects such as history and civics. This, in combination with the lack of syllabi with Sámi themes in subjects other than Sámi language, means that the Sámi language syllabus also contains a great deal of other factual knowledge, that is, knowledge about the history and origins of the language, as well as about Sámi society, past and present (Lsam11: 214–215). That said, it should also be noted that, for obvious reasons, the Sámi language syllabus dedicates most attention to linguistic knowledge. While other factual knowledge linked to Sámi themes can be interpreted as qualifying or socialising, the educational domain of subjectification is missing. Qualifying content includes words and terms specific to “Sámi environments”, such as words in dialect, on nature, industries, societal structure and conditions. Content that can be interpreted as belonging to the socialisation domain addresses Sámi traditions, Sámi identity, life issues and cultural heritage. When it comes to language expression, comprehension and family names, these could be interpreted as belonging to both the qualification and socialisation domains, depending on what the terms refer to and how they are used. Familiarity with family names is one way to become part of Sámi culture, as this is an important element of building relationships within the group (cf. Biesta 2011, 2020). There is a heading in the syllabus entitled “Sámi culture”, with defined content. As this content is sorted under culture, it can be interpreted as socialising in its entirety, given Biesta’s contention that culture is socialising in and of itself (Biesta 2011). Under this heading, clearly socialising content includes Sámi traditions and cultural heritage. Cultural heritage is defined as traditional Sámi arts and crafts (duodji), music (joik) and clothing (Lsam11: 215). But, according to Biesta, much of the content under the heading of culture could instead belong to the qualification domain; for example, “traditional Sámi forms of accommodation, means of travel

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and commercial activity in the form of reindeer husbandry, hunting and fishing” and “Sámi cultural heritage in the form of different kinds of crafts and music”. Even the origins and development of the Sámi language are defined as cultural content in the syllabus. Perhaps the most interesting choice is to include “Sámi institutions and organisations” and “the Sámi Parliament, its activities and function” under the heading “Sámi culture”. This implies that everything to do with the Sámi and Sápmi can be interpreted as culture. As it deals with society, laws and organisations, the same knowledge in the civics syllabus would undoubtedly have been interpreted as belonging to the qualification domain. In other words, similar educational content (on the legal and political system) is contextualised differently according to whether it belongs to the majority or minority society, something that creates inequity as the Swedish systems are defined as legal and political while the Sámi are defined as a cultural entity.

Conclusions This chapter has dealt with how the Sámi and Sámi society are conveyed in the Curriculum for Sámi School and its constituent syllabi. The overall aim has been to analyse the stated aims of Sámi education; the issues relate to how Sámi values and content are presented in the curriculum and syllabi. The first conclusion of the analysis is that the core content of syllabi for civics and history is narrow, a fact also confirmed by other research studies (Svonni 2015). This study has further shown that the history syllabus covers only a century of Sámi historiography, while the Swedish historiography goes back 10,000 years. In combination with the content of the civics syllabus, which only addresses the Sámi’s special position and rights, this differentiates the Sámi from the rest of the population. The general nature of the recommendations in the syllabi for civics and history may result in the omission of content about Indigenous peoples and minorities from teaching, as confirmed by previous research (Spjut 2020, 2021a). This can also be related to Norlin and Drugge (2023), who point out that some teachers feel that their knowledge of Sámi themes is inadequate. Notwithstanding, further research regarding teaching Sámi content would be necessary to be able to draw conclusions on how (and to what extent) Sámi themes are taught in formal education. Secondly, the lack of explicitly Sámi themes in other syllabi, including civics and history, has led to the inclusion of a relatively large component

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of knowledge in the Sámi language syllabus. This knowledge is sorted under the collective concept of culture, placing the overarching responsibility for dealing with Sámi themes squarely on the shoulders of the Sámi language syllabus. The very fact that the Sámi Parliament or the rights of Indigenous peoples are treated as “cultural expressions” throws the disparity into stark relief, given that the equivalent themes related to the majority population would be Decision-making and political ideas and Rights and the judicial system (Lgr11: 203). Thirdly, the fundamental values of Lsam11 are contradictory and difficult to interpret, as they include provisions that reference both common Swedish values and specific values held by Sámi society. This could be interpreted as implying that everyone in Sweden shares a set of common values. It might equally mean that there are two sets of values to which the Sámi school must relate. This ambiguity is open to interpretations that both include and exclude Sámi from the Swedish national identity. An inclusive interpretation may be an expression of state-framed nationalism, in which all elements of society share common values within an inclusive and mutable national identity. An exclusionary interpretation, on the other hand, might be an expression of counter-state nationalism in which national identity is fixed and separate Sámi values differentiate the Sámi as “the Other” (cf. Hylland Eriksen; Brubaker et al.). The overall conclusion of the study is that Lsam11 has the potential to influence Sámi self-identification. Lsam11 describes that which is Swedish as the norm, inadvertently placing that which is Sámi as the exception (Hylland Eriksen 2004). The Sámi theme is also defined as a cultural expression, something that might be interpreted as banal nationalism (Billig 1995), contrasting Sámi-ness with “normal” Swedish-ness. This exceptional position, in combination with Sámi-ness as a contrast, thus mandates an external identification (categorisation) of the Sámi, given that the Curriculum for Sámi School is authored and established by the state. This means that Lsam11 has the potential to influence the (internal) self-­ identification of the Sámi. A number of difficulties arise when Sámi-ness is not described as equal in status to Swedish-ness. These difficulties regard (i) legislation concerning Indigenous peoples and minorities and (ii) how minority groups perceive equality. The National Minorities and Minority Languages Act (SFS 2009: 724) considers self-identification to be the most important factor for recognising a national minority (Elenius and Ekengren 2002). When external

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identification/categorisation—in this case by agents of the state through Lsam11—influences internal identification, the Sámi’s ability to self-­ identify is eroded. This relationship also diminishes the state’s ability to comply with national and international legislation concerning Indigenous peoples and minorities (e.g., the Convention on the Rights of the Child, SFS 2009: 724). How the minority group perceives equality is influenced by the majority society’s external identification/categorisation of the group in question. When the state (in the form of the education system) defines that which is Sámi as an expression of culture, Sámi-ness becomes subordinate to Swedish-ness. This has a negative impact on the multicultural approach that Sweden claims to embrace. Potentially, the asymmetrical relationship between Swedish-ness and Sámi-ness may be perceived in a similar light to the assimilation and segregation policies that prevailed in Swedish schools until the 1960s. The difference is that today it is implicit, whereas prior to 1960 it was explicit. We would like to make clear that the current curriculum and syllabi can in no way be equated with either the segregationist or the assimilationist approaches favoured before 1960, nor do we contend that the Swedish state is intentionally creating this asymmetric relationship. That said, we believe that there is evidence of subconscious structural discrimination to be found in Lsam11, grounded in the reproduction of past attitudes.

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———. 2017. Samisk utbildning I förändring: nomadskolan och processen för samer att bli likvärdiga samhällsmedborgare. In Samisk kamp: kulturförmedling och rättviserörelse, ed. Marianne Liliequist and Coppéli Cocq, 223–251. Umeå: Bokförlaget h:ström. ———. 2021. The Swedish Sámi Boarding School Reforms in the Era of Educational Democratisation, 1956 to 1969. Peadagogica historica. International Journal of the History Education: 1–19. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/00309230.2021.1942935. Online print 5 July 2021.

State Regulations and Inquiries Lgr11. Läroplan för grundskolan, förskoleklassen och fritidshemmet Skolverket. 2011. Stockholm: Edita. [Curriculum for the Compulsory School, Preschool Class and School-age Educare]. Lgr62. Läroplan för Grundskolan. Kungliga skolöverstyrelsen. 1962. Falköping: Skolöverstyrelsens skriftserie 1962. Lgr69. Läroplan för Grundskolan 1969. Skolöverstyrelsen. Stockholm: Utbildningsförlaget. Lgr80. Läroplan för Grundskolan Skolöverstyrelsen 1980. Stockholm: Liber Utbildningsförlaget. Lpo94. Läroplan för det obligatoriska skolväsendet och de frivilliga skolformerna. Stockholm : Utbildningsdepartementet. 1994. Lsam11. Läroplan för Sameskolan, förskoleklassen och fritidshemmet 2011. Skolverket. 2011. Stockholm: Edita. [Curriculum for the Sámi School, Preschool Class and School-age Educare]. SFS 1962a: 319 (Svensk författningssamling) Skollag 1962. ——— 1962b: 439. Kungl. Maj:ts Skolstadga. ———: 1985: 1100. Skollag 1985. ———:2009: 724 Lag om nationella minoriteter och minoritetsspråk. ——— 2010: 800. Skollag. ——— 2018:1197 Lag om Förenta nationernas konvention om barnets rättigheter. SOU 1960:41 (Svensk offentlig utredning) Samernas skolgång. Betänkande av 1957 års nomadskolutredning. Stockholm 1960. ——— 2017:91 Nationella minoritetsspråk i skolan förbättrade förutsättningar till undervisning och revitalisering. Stockholm 2017.

PART II

Competing Narratives in History Schoolbooks and Teaching Arrangements

Local and National History in Schoolbooks in South Tyrol from the End of the Second World War to the Present Day Roberta Mira

History, Schooling, Identity Since the nineteenth century, the teaching of history in schools has played an important role in nation building and citizen formation in many countries, including Italy. As a result, it has raised the interest of governments and, more generally, of politicians in guiding syllabi and textbooks and in the education and selection of teachers. History teaching has been, and remains, a breeding ground for debate and controversy, particularly regarding certain moment or phenomena of the past such as wars or dictatorships. This is especially true when it comes to border areas, where different histories, collective memories and views of the past can be found, due to the coexistence in a particular region of different cultural identities or ethnic or linguistic minorities (Cajani et al. 2019).

R. Mira (*) University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. S. Colla, A. Di Michele (eds.), History Education at the Edge of the Nation, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27246-2_7

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From this point of view, the South Tyrol (which has seen borders moved in the past and long unrest between the various linguistic groups residing in the area until a particular autonomous regime was granted which also took into account the education system) represents an interesting case study to analyse how schools and, more specifically, the teaching of history over time and within changing political contexts were identity-­ forming factors, both nationally and locally. Since the inclusion of South Tyrol within the Italian borders after the First World War, the school system has been the subject of various reorganisational initiatives from the authorities, as it corresponds with the need for nationalisation of the local population as demanded by the political powers. These initiatives ranged from an attempt at integration in the early days following 1918, to the enforced Italianisation approach during the years of Fascism, and the debate around protection of minorities which ensued after the Second World War, all met by resistance and opposition from the mixed-language population (particularly from the German-­language-­speaking community). From 1945 onwards, schools became an important element in the policy of respecting language minorities in South Tyrol and represent a sector in which the concession of political and administrative autonomy can be measured and evaluated. The main issues to be resolved regarded the possibility of using German language in schools and the teaching of a second language, but a debate also emerged on the teaching content and syllabi for various subjects. Faced with the prospect of a German-language-speaking school that constituted a merely “translated” version of the Italian schools, the South Tyrol German-speaking group made efforts to anchor the school system and teaching to the territory with its history and traditions, trying to develop a school that externalised the cultural features of the German-­ speaking population.1 In the pages that follow, we will look at these issues through the lens represented by the history textbooks used in the German-speaking schools of South Tyrol, from the end of the Second World War. In documentation stored at the Archive Department of the Province of Bolzano, used to

1

 See chapter by Andrea Di Michele in this book.

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identify the textbooks used in schools in different tiers,2 there does not seem to be any direct links between the journey to achieve autonomy of the Trentino-Alto Adige Region (and, later, the Province of Bolzano) with the guidelines issued to schools on which books to use in classrooms. Apart from general suggestions (aimed at preventing textbooks being changed too frequently) in ministerial guidelines and notices issued by provincial authorities following approval of the Statute of Autonomy in 1972 (which gave the Province control of syllabi and textbooks), no particular reference is made to specific textbooks, thus respecting the freedom of teachers/schools to choose. Any change in the choice of textbook seems to follow didactic reasoning and the updating of content. However, we will attempt to relate the various moments of evolution of the German-­ speaking schools with the adoption of history textbooks, looking at some of the most commonly used books over the decades. Examining the textbooks appears useful to us in order to highlight the problems linked to identification of books written in German that, however, corresponded in content with the general framework of syllabi in the Italian schools and to check how far the varying levels of importance attached in history textbooks to national and local history may have contributed to the transmission and construction of national or regional identity. To this end, it was decided to focus on the way in which the books treat certain significant moments in Italian history and that of the South Tyrol (Risorgimento, the world wars, the period following 1945) and thus an analysis was made of textbooks used in class to tackle national history and the modern era (for third-year middle school and the final years of high school or teacher training schools).3

2  In writing this chapter, various folders entitled Schulbücher (School textbooks) were consulted along with those of Auswahl der Schulbücher (Choice of School textbooks) of the Fondo Deutsches Schulamt for the period from 1945 to the early 1990s, which contained the minutes from meetings by teachers of the German-speaking schools in the Province of Bolzano regarding the choice of textbooks for each school year, related communications to the provincial School Board and lists of textbooks. 3  An analysis of books used in primary schools has been excluded due to the particular history curriculum of elementary education and the use of books not specifically focused on history, which makes comparison with other school tiers difficult. However, it should be noted that the teaching of history in primary schools is linked to students’ real life with family, town and local issues, and thus a study of primary schools in a situation like South Tyrol would certainly be of interest. Regarding reading books in primary schools at the end of the Forties, see Seberich (2000: 271–280).

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The Matter of Textbooks After the Second World War The reorganisation of the education system was just one of many problems that emerged after the Second World War in South Tyrol. However, this issue assumed particular importance in the context of relationships between different language groups for the establishment of autonomy by the German-speaking community. In the previous period following 1922, Fascism had imposed its ideology also on the province of Bolzano and had utilised Italianisation and fascism-isation of a border area with a mixed-language population as a symbol of completion of national unity, Italian-ness and successes achieved by the regime. The Fascists imposed the use of Italian on every public context and closed the German-language schools, stamping down on those which continued to use German as anti-national entities, while pushing (along with Hitler’s Germany) for the options of German citizenship for German-speaking  inhabitants in the province. After the South Tyrol Options Agreement of the late Thirties and the outbreak of the Second World War, the pressure of the Third Reich on South Tyrol gradually became stronger and when, between 1943 and 1945, the province of Bolzano (along with Trento and Belluno) was included in the  Pre-Alps Operation Zone, it was effectively annexed to the Reich. Regarding schools, the German occupation meant not only the reopening of German-­ speaking schools but also the establishment of their Nazi-oriented teaching approach (Seberich 2000: 66–110; Steinacher 2003; Di Michele and Taiani 2009). After the war and defeat of Fascists and Nazis, neither the National Liberation Committee of Bolzano (which reunited anti-fascist forces and the Resistance) nor the Allied Anglo-American Military Government of Occupied Territories (established in Italy while awaiting the country’s introduction of an institutional replacement after the dictatorship and conflict) wished to remove German-speaking schools. On the contrary, both entities agreed on the fact that teaching in the native language of German-speaking students needed to be guaranteed and the Italian government itself expressed a similar opinion in July 1945. The goal, however, was simply to recommence schooling on new foundations, different from those of the 20-year Fascist regime and the 1943–1945 period. This process formed part of the general reorganisation of the Italian education system, introduced across the entire country by the anti-fascist

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parties and new post-war institutions under the supervision of the Allied Forces. The project involved both the purging of teachers and remaining staff, and a review of teaching materials and syllabi used in lessons, and worked towards wiping out all traces of fascism while restoring democracy in schools (Di Pietro 1991). The schools reopened in autumn/winter 1945 after a series of complex negotiations between the central Italian government, the Allied Military Government and local stakeholders. These included the Superintendent of Education for Bolzano, Trentino-born Erminio Mattedi, who had trained as a teacher long before the arrival of Fascism, and the Assistant Superintendent for German-speaking schools, the minister Josef Ferrari, former chairman of the Azione Cattolica di Bolzano and well-known opposer of Fascism and Nazism (Seberich 2000: 113, 118–122). The Lieutenant Decree no. 775 of 27 October 1945, later modified by the provisional Head of State’s Legislative Decree no. 555 of 16 May 1947, regulated primary schools; middle and high schools were dealt with in December 1945 by the Allied Control Commission for the Province of Bolzano and later approved by the legislative decree of the provisional Head of State no. 528 of 8 November 1946 (Seberich 2000: 121–143, 156–169). Both Italian- and German-speaking schools had to adhere to the new teaching curricula established at national level. However, the German-­ speaking schools were faced not only with the general difficulties brought about with the relaunch after the war in various sectors of Italian public life but also specific logistic issues. Not least of these was the problem of finding German-language textbooks that were approved according to art. 3 of legislative decree no. 555: suitable for the teaching programmes, up-­ to-­date, and (obviously) different from those used in the Nazi era. The representatives of the German-speaking schools proposed using materials organised in monthly booklets, to be admitted for approval to the Allied Commission, until specific German-language books could be published (Seberich 2000: 122–126). Meanwhile, the Allies proposed using textbooks published in Switzerland, the only German-speaking country in Europe not to be occupied by Nazi Germany and which had remained neutral throughout the war.4 4  Landesarchiv Bozen (LABZ), Deutsches Schulamt (DS), ref. 1308, List of books from Switzerland, 18.8.1945; Board of Education in Bolzano to British vice-consulate in Switzerland, 12.11.1945; The Board of Education in Bolzano to the Board of Education in Udine, 4.3.1946.

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In October 1945, the Assistant Superintendent Ferrari wrote to the Minister of State Education and the Education Department of the Allied Forces Headquarters of Venice, regarding teaching programmes for middle and high schools in the province of Bolzano. Concerning the question of textbooks, he signalled the problems of price and difficulty in sourcing them, but promised that only German-speaking books authorised by the Ministry would be used—in the event that they could not be found, Italian books used in the schools of Bolzano would be adopted. Ferrari added that in some subjects it would be necessary for teachers to dictate notes or integrate materials from Italian books, stating that he was prepared to send such materials to Rome for authorisation.5 Despite the arrival of books from Switzerland and the efforts of Ferrari, books which had been used during the Third Reich era continued to circulate for some time. On 31 October 1945, the Assistant Superintendent’s office sent a circular to school managers and inspectors of the Bolzano, Bressanone and Merano regions to remind them that the use of Nazi-era books in classrooms was prohibited and must be suspended.6 But in June 1946 Ferrari had to repeat this warning as the continued use of Nazi-era books threatened to put at risk the entire system of German-language education in the South Tyrol. Ferrari ordered the immediate withdrawal of such textbooks and authorised the firing of teachers and school managers who continued to use them.7 It seemed to be a particular problem with regard to primary schools (at that time, the most numerous in the territory and attended by the greatest number of students) as can be deduced from explicit references to reading books, spelling books, arithmetic books and illustrated books.8 After this initial phase of reorganisation, the German-language schools in South Tyrol continued their activity within the framework of the First Statute of Autonomy of the Trentino-Alto Adige Region, as laid down in

5  LABZ, DS, ref. 1307, Ferrari to the Ministry of State Education, 8.10.1945; ref. 1610, Ferrari to the Allied Forces Headquarters of Venice, education department, 25.10.1945. 6  LABZ, DS, ref. 1308, Deluggi to school inspectors in Bolzano, Bressanone and Merano, 31.10.1945. 7  LABZ, DS, ref. 1308, Ferrari to headteachers in the province, 12.6.1946; Ferrari to school inspectors in Bolzano, Bressanone and Merano, 12.6.1946. 8  LABZ, DS, ref. 1308, Ferrari to school inspectors in Bolzano, Bressanone and Merano, 12.6.1946; The school inspector of Merano to headteachers, 15.6.1946.

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constitutional law no. 5 of the Italian Republic of 26 February 1948:9 this law gave the province of Bolzano secondary legislative powers over primary, middle and high schools and confirmed the use of German language in the various tiers of schools for the German-speaking community. The Italian State maintained primary legislative power over education and thus the German-speaking schools in South Tyrol had to conform to the national education system. While this meant a modification of syllabi to conform to ministerial programmes (with further adjustments for the German-speaking schools),10 the freedom of teaching in terms of textbooks guaranteed by art. 33 of the Constitution of the Italian Republic and rules for adoption of schoolbooks left a wider margin for action to teachers who could choose the texts.11 With regard to the books used, the guidelines established by the Ministry of State Education in the early post-war period remained basically the same over time: they called for respect of ministerial programmes in terms of book content but concentrated mainly on the timescale of decisions to guarantee prompt supply of books before lessons started and affordable cost for families by limiting the number of new textbooks to be used. In the event of alternative book choices, any decisions had to be precisely justified by teachers.12 Although awarded power over the choice of books, Bolzano teachers did not have many German-language books available to them that were printed and published in Italy or South Tyrol, and so they were obliged to continue searching for textbooks abroad. The adoption of foreign textbooks became a custom, enduring even up to the present day, but posing a number of problems (particularly in humanities and history books) because of the need to adapt books designed for a specific pedagogic and 9  Implementation of the Statute in the education system was not immediate (Seberich 2000: 375–386). Regarding the First Statute of Autonomy, see Steiniger (2006); Bernardini (2016); Gehler (2011). 10  See LABZ, DS, ref. 207, Ministry of Public Education, general department of cultural exchange with foreign countries and border areas, Programmi d’insegnamento per le scuole primarie e secondarie di lingua materna tedesca, 1956. 11  For primary school, see Legislative decree of the provisional Head of State 1497, 16.10.1947 and Decree of the President of the Republic no. 175, 28.1.1948. For middle and high school, see Royal decree no. 965, 30.4.1924, which remained valid even after the war. 12  See ministerial circulars on choice of textbooks for the different school years in LABZ, DS.

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educational context and for a specific school system to a situation with different syllabi, needs and organisation of classes and age groups of students. The South Tyrol teachers, supported by the local press and part of the political world and German-speaking community, believed it necessary to anchor the content of textbooks to the daily life of students, history and local traditions. These were elements that could not be found in books designed for other countries, which focused attention on issues different from the Italian context and even more so from the South Tyrol situation (Seberich 2000: 273–288). Already in 1948, the primary school inspector for the province of Bolzano defined the experiment of adopting Swiss textbooks as “failed”, due to the fact that “these deal only with the topics of that country”.13 Some years later in 1954, some teachers from the Kaufmännische Vorbildungsschule of Bolzano signalled the problem of reading books for use in German lessons at middle school, because “the foreign book does not take many things into account; for example, cultural factors pertaining to the country of origin and the State”.14 In both cases, the solution was found in the creation (in loco) by primary-, middle- and high-school teachers of textbooks for all tiers of schooling and the different subjects. Alternatively, as already written by Assistant Superintendent Ferrari in 1945, teachers could dictate notes to students and use materials that they themselves prepared. Regarding history books, the Austrian textbook by Karl Woynar was selected immediately after the war. Adapted by Josef Marini for the South Tyrol in 1921 and distributed in libraries and to private individuals, it had been approved by the Ministry of State Education15 and in 1950 the publishing house Poetzelberger of Merano printed a new edition. In the Fifties, this was the most popular textbook in middle and high schools in the Bolzano area,16 thanks to its status as a book written in the years 13  LABZ, DS, ref. 1308, The inspector of primary schools to the Istituto Di Toppo Wassermann of Udine, 9.6.1948. 14  LABZ, DS, ref. 2486, The director of the Kaufmännische Vorbildungsschule of Bolzano to the Board of Education, 12.4.1954. 15  LABZ, DS, ref. 1610, Ferrari to the Allied Forces Headquarters of Venice, education department 25.10.1945. 16  The book was used in the middle schools of Merano, Bolzano, Brunico and Bressanone, as well as training institutes, high schools and teacher training schools.

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immediately following the annexing of South Tyrol to Italy but preceding the Fascist era; despite being written in German, it offered an Italian perspective of national history and did not run the risk of being mistaken for a Fascist book, due to its earlier publication (Woynar 1921, 1950). Despite being adapted for the South Tyrol schools, Marini’s book merely touched fleetingly upon local history. In fact, the textbook described the Italian national history and Risorgimento in an entirely positive manner with a magnificent elogy to Cavour. The only local issue treated more extensively was the anti-Napoleonic battle of the Tyrol in 1809 where Marini described the figure of Andreas Hofer in an exalted manner. The book mentioned South Tyrol among the territories promised to Italy in the Treaty of London of 1915 on condition that it entered the war as part of the alliance against Austria and Germany. Regarding the effective extension of the Italian border to the Brenner pass and towards the northeast Adriatic, the book spoke about unjust treatment of Italy, which did not receive all the lands promised by the Allied Powers, and the unification of Italy under the national government. The book served political aims regarding South Tyrol in the period immediately following the war, when it was in the interests of the central government to implement a gradual Italianisation process in the Bolzano area, while making it clear that South Tyrol was effectively a part of the Italian territories (Di Michele 2003). Marini’s book concluded with the end of the First World War and this limited timeline was one of the main reasons why a number of teachers decided to adopt a more up-to-date substitute at the end of the Sixties. However, as there were no books written in German and published in Italy, the South Tyrol schools were obliged to turn once again to the international publishing houses for history books. To resolve the problem, from the mid-Fifties, the Association of South Tyrol middle-school teachers (Arbeitskreis Südtiroler Mittelschullehrer—ASM)17 began drafting school textbooks (supported by school boards and the German Board of Education), which were approved by the Superintendent and supported by the provincial authorities, also with grants awarded for school textbook 17  LABZ, DS, ref. 2486, The ASM to the Superintendent, 18.12.1959. Also, Seberich (2000: 294–296).

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projects to cover the costs of publication.18 All stakeholders were in fact interested in equipping schools for South Tyrol students with books written specifically for their context, so that they could develop a “German school” rather than simply a school which taught lessons in the German language. The use of textbooks printed in Austria or Germany did not satisfy the Italian government either. On the contrary, it fuelled fears that the texts published abroad did not include sufficient reference to national history or, worse, that they were presented in a manner deemed inappropriate for the educational programmes or offering a negative view of Italy. Around the centenary of the Unification of Italy in 1959–1960, for example, the Ministry of Education, Assistant Commissioner of the government for the province of Bolzano and the Regional Office of the Prime Minister, asked the new Superintendent Roberto Biscardo and new Assistant Superintendent Fritz Ebner for information on the content of history books used in the German-language schools, to ensure that the Risorgimento not be “presented in a distorted manner”.19 Biscardo, a lover of the German language and culture who carried out his duties as Superintendent between 1950 and 1968 by focusing on creating a good relationship with the South Tyrol German-speaking  community (Seberich 2000: 204–205), admitted that Marini’s book was by now out-of-date in terms of the ministerial programme and that some schools had substituted it with textbooks published abroad which he could not, however, guarantee as conforming to the curricular content. He specified that the teachers dictated or added missing parts of Italian history and, following a request to check the textbooks, he evaluated them and reassured the government regarding the absence of criticism of Italy or prejudices against the country, while committing himself to performing the same evaluation of newly adopted books. The proposal of the government’s Assistant Commissioner to check also the notes dictated by 18  LABZ, DS, ref. 2486, Provincial Council of Bolzano, Allocation III State Education and cultural activity, prot. no. 5030/III/DL/t, 30.9.1961; The ASM to the Board of Education, 1.12.1961 and 14.12.1961; Biscardo to the ASM, 31.1.1962; The ASM to the Board of Education 30.1.1962; Biscardo to the ASM, 6.2.1962. 19  LABZ, DS, ref. 2486, Ebner to the headteacher of the Classical Lyceum and middle schools in Bolzano, 26.10.1959. Ebner sent similar letters to headteachers of other schools. See also the General Archive of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers (AGPCM), Department for border areas (UZC), section III, b. 59, folder 405, The head of the Regional Offices of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers to the Minister of State Education, 19.1.1960.

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teachers was initially refused by the Superintendent who did not “recognise the legality of control” of the teachers’ work but at a later date Biscardo asked school boards to “surveil” any notes or supplementary materials used in history lessons.20 One year after the initial requests from the Ministry, in September 1960 Biscardo wrote to the ministerial General Office of Cultural Exchange and Border Areas regarding the textbooks used in the Technical and Business Training School of Merano: he stated that the books Grundriß der Geschichte and Zeiten, Völker und Kulturen, published, respectively, in Germany and Austria, were “written with great expertise and teaching ability, and with total objectivity”. He praised “the wide and great treatment of Humanism and Renaissance” and indicated the supplementary materials created by the teachers as the solution to some discrepancies with the national programme. According to the Superintendent, nothing impeded “the introduction of texts […] in the German-language schools as phrases such as ‘Despite the many years of alliance, in 1915 Italy declared war on Austria to obtain the goal it had desired for years: the incorporation of Trento and Trieste…’ cannot be considered offensive as they lack any critical judgement”.21 In July 1961, Biscardo returned to this issue, writing to the Ministry that he had “personally examined the textbooks of history and geography […] without finding any section that could be deemed offensive to the Italian nation” and that for the necessary supplementary material in history, civic education and Italian geography, recourse could be made to the “specific textbooks created by the group of middle school teachers in Bolzano which had been favourably evaluated”.22 In the same years, the introduction of civic education into the school curriculum (linked to history programmes and entrusted to history teachers) seemed to represent a confluence of the various local and national 20   AGPCM, UZC, folder 405, The  governmental Assistant Commissioner to the Superintendent of Bolzano, 7.12.1959; The governmental Assistant Commissioner to the Regional Office of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, 7.12.1959; The Superintendent of Bolzano to the Ministry of State Education, 1.3.1960; The  governmental Assistant Commissioner to the Regional Office of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, 5.3.1960; The Ministry of State Education to the Regional Office of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, 11.3.1960. LABZ, DS, ref. 2486, The Superintendent to the School Boards, 23.11.1961. 21  LABZ, DS, ref. 2486, The Superintendent Biscardo to the Ministry of State Education, 12.9.1960. 22  LABZ, DS, ref. 2486, The Superintendent Biscardo to the Ministry of State Education 8.7.1961.

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needs. It became evident, in fact, that there was a need to write textbooks directly in German on the Italian Constitution and the organisation/functions of the State so that they could be used effectively in the Germanlanguage schools of the province of Bolzano.23 At the end of 1958, the Superintendent Biscardo wrote to the Ministry, bringing attention to the lack of books written in German that corresponded to the ministerial teaching programmes and the need to create specific booklets while waiting for the publication of a textbook for German-speaking schools.24 In December of the following year, the ASM announced the publication of specific textbooks for civic education for middle schools and vocational schools and for high schools and teacher training schools.25

Textbooks in the Sixties The Sixties brought significant changes in national and local education systems. In 1962, the Italian government reformed the middle-school system, introducing a single middle school for all children between 11 and 13 years old, as the first cycle of secondary school (also known as lower secondary school) which allowed admission to upper secondary school (high school). In the Province of Bolzano, this reform resulted in a deluge of new middle schools in various municipalities, followed by a progressive increase in the number of students enrolling in high schools; the latter schools also grew in numbers in the following years (Seberich 2000: 319–343; 479–486). This reorganisation did not affect the regulations for the choice of textbooks. However, the new chapter of Italian and South Tyrol schools brought also the use of new textbooks. For history teaching, the use of books published abroad remained fundamental, but during these years, the activity of the ASM intensified, as it created two additional textbooks to join the books used in schools for Italian history: a work by Albert Grandi, Italienische Geschichte, for middle schools and one by 23  Regarding the difficulties encountered by teachers in choosing the textbooks for civic education, see, for example, LABZ, DS, ref. 2486, The headteacher of the middle school of Brunico to the Ministry of State Education 10.11.1958; The headteacher of the middle school of Merano to the Board of Education of Bolzano, 12.11.1958 and letters in the same tone sent from various schools in the Province. 24  LABZ, DS, ref. 2486, The Superintendent of Bolzano to the Ministry of State Education, 12.12.1958. 25  LABZ, DS, ref. 2486, The ASM to the Board of Education, 18.12.1959.

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Wolfgang Röd, Abriß der politischen Geschichte Italiens, for high schools  (Röd 1962).26 Thanks to agreements with the publishing houses, books were written, booklets on Italian history were added to the textbooks published abroad or parts of  foreign books used in the schools of Bolzano were reworked.27 To maintain its own activity, the ASM tried to gain funding from the Ministry of State Education and found support from Superintendent Biscardo. On various occasions, he positively evaluated the ASM books and made efforts to guarantee economic support, underlining in his letters to the central administration that it was necessary to have textbooks written in German that corresponded to the Italian teaching programmes. The Ministry did not supply the funding but declared interest in the activity of the ASM and asked it to present a proposal for publications.28 Among the history books used in the South Tyrol schools in the second half of the Sixties, we find one of those books reworked by the ASM and approved by the Board of Education as corresponding to Italian teaching programmes: this was the German book by Bernhard Deermann, Hans Becker and Arnold Voelske, Geschichtliches Unterrichtswerk, the edition for middle schools adapted for South Tyrol by Hubert Stemberger, and used by the vast majority of middle schools in the Province.29

26  LABZ, DS, ref. 2486, the ASM to the Board of Education, 18.12.1959. The ASM also produced textbooks of geography, Latin literature, reading books and other subjects. 27  LABZ, DS, ref. 2486, The headteacher of the state high school of Merano to the Board of Education, 22.6.1960; The ASM to the Board of Education, 6.7.1960 and Ebner to the Department of Schools and Culture of the provincial Council, 26.11.1960; The ASM to the Board of Education, 1.12.1961; ref. 218, The ASM to Biscardo, 2.11.1965; Biscardo to the Ministry of State Education 6.11.1965. 28  LABZ, DS, ref. 218, The ASM to Biscardo, 2.11.1965; Biscardo to the Ministry of State Education 6.11.1965; The ASM to the governmental Assistant Commissioner, 17.1.1966; Biscardo to the governmental Assistant Commissioner 21.1.1966 ;  the ASM to the Superintendent, 10.8.1967 and the Ministry to the Board of Education, 25.1.1968. 29  LABZ, DS, ref. 218, The ASM to Biscardo 9.11.1965; Biscardo to the ASM, 24.11.1965. The lists of textbooks held at the LABZ cite the book in a way that is not always standardised, sometimes the name of some authors is used and others at different times, and they may or may not include subtitles; sometimes it is referred to simply as Geschichtliches Unterrichtswerk by the publishing house Schöningh. Based on direct references to the book reworked by Stemberger, we find that 20 middle schools out of 36 of which we have lists of textbooks used this text in the second half of the Seventies; from a quick check of the textbooks catalogues, we believe, however, that different ways of citation may refer to the same book; thus, the percentage of schools using the book is actually higher.

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The book, which began with the French Revolution and arrived as far as the global reorganisation after the Second World War, was supplemented with specific sections on Italian and local South Tyrol histories. Compared with Marini’s books, the book was more balanced in its analysis of the relationship between Italy and Austria in the nineteenth century and the years of the First World War. Furthermore, dealing with the South Tyrol situation after 1919, Stemberger tackled the military government era and the civil commission of Trentino and South Tyrol, when the Italian approach to the German-language minority was conciliatory; Fascism with enforced Italianisation and the options for citizenship of the Third Reich; the treaty signed at the end of the Second World War by the Italian Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi and Austrian Foreign Minister Karl Gruber, that served as basis  for the first Statute of Autonomy of Trentino-Alto Adige, which—the text recalled—protected the rights of the South Tyrol minority, for example, with teaching in schools offered in German (Deermann et al. 1965). In the high schools and teacher training schools, another book from Germany was used: Geschichtlisches Unterrichtswerke. Die Neueste Zeit, edited by Robert Tenbrock and K. Thieme.30 The book was not integrated with supplementary content on Italy and thus could be used worldwide as a history book for German-speaking schools, with a focus on German events. Italian history was tackled only in certain contexts (the Risorgimento and Unification, the First World War, Fascism, the Second World War) but without paying any particular attention to Italy as was instead made in the Italian school programmes. The Risorgimento focused on Cavour and Piedmont with the events of 1848. Fascism was described in a couple of pages, looking at the socio-­ political situation of the post-war period, Mussolini, the March on Rome and, more briefly, the changes to electoral law and the homicide of Socialist politician Giacomo Matteotti. The long period of the regime was instead dealt with in a few lines, where the authors correctly defined Fascism as the “first totalitarian right-wing State” but only briefly listed some of its characteristics.The topic of the regime was then resumed in the text regarding the alliance with Germany, the attack on Ethiopia and its participation in the Second World War, but these were all only briefly considered. Local history, on the other hand, 30  Tenbrock and Thieme’s book was used in three out of seven of the high schools considered. Equal use was made of the book by Hans Gschrei, Europa und die Welt, published by Blutenburg in Munich (however, we have not found a copy of this to analyse).

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was not tackled in the book, apart from a short mention of South Tyrol as an “irredentist”31 territory from the Italian perspective with reference to the Triple Alliance or the First World War (Tenbrock and Thieme 1956). Some South Tyrol schools, however, flanked this book with the work by Röd on Italian history. This offered a summary of Italian history from the Middle Ages to the end of the Second World War which (probably to comply with ministerial instructions) focused strongly on the Risorgimento and looked in depth at schools of thought, insurrectionist movements, the role of the Kingdom of Piedmont and the wars against Austria. Röd also described liberal Italy after the Unification and First World War, although in less detail, and in the last chapter he briefly tackled Fascism, the Second World War and the birth of the Republic, supplying however essential and useful elements for understanding Italian history between the two world wars. Local history and the issue of South Tyrol were not included in the book, except for mentions of the “irredentist” regions and the shifting of the borders in 1918 (Röd 1962). If we consider that the history of the era after the First World War, believed to be too political and a potential source of friction, only entered school syllabi in the Sixties and did not look closely at Fascism (de Gerloni 2003: 33, 35–36), we can say that the books by Tenbrock-Thieme and Deermann and the summary of Italian history by Röd represented an innovation as compared with Italian schools. The Sixties also marked the launch of a process working towards greater autonomy of the German-language schools in South Tyrol. This process was linked to the more general move taken by the Italian government and institutions to resolve the South Tyrol issue which in those years had become pressing. At the end of the Fifties, in fact, the protest by the South Tyrol Party (SVP) and German-speaking community had grown, demanding greater autonomy from  the Region with Trento as the capital and central State; the Committee for an Independent South Tyrol had begun to mount bomb attacks on symbolic Italian sites (Steiniger 2000; Marcantoni and Postal 2014; Peterlini 2021). In response to these violent actions, the Italian government firstly activated strong repression measures but also set up a Commission to investigate the issue, composed of government ministers and Italian and South Tyrol experts. The Commission’s task was to propose modifications to the Statute of Autonomy to confer greater powers on the Province of Bolzano, cooling  This term is used in the book by Tenbrock and Thieme.

31

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the growing tension and averting secessionist action from the German segment of the population and the SVP (Scarano 2015).

History Textbooks in Schools According to the Second Statute of Autonomy The Commission’s work emanated the constitutional law no.  1 of 10 November 1971, with modifications and integrations to the 1948 Statute, and the Second Statute of Autonomy, issued by Presidential Decree no. 670 of 31 August 1972, which conferred numerous legislative powers on the two separate provinces of Trento and Bolzano as opposed to the overall entity of the Trentino-Alto Adige Region, thereby guaranteeing Bolzano the same rights as Trento (Marcantoni and Postal 2012; Peterlini 2000). With the new Statute and decrees of 1973, 1981 and 1983, the Province of Bolzano acquired greater powers in the education system which included the possibility of influencing the teaching syllabi (Seberich 2000: 402–408). On this foundation, the autonomy of the South Tyrol education system gradually developed, divided into three language-based schools—Italian, German and Ladin—each of which had its own specific characteristics within a shared and coordinated framework (Vidoni 2013). The Supervisor of the German-language schools, David Kofler, worked intensively on the schools in his charge, alongside the education councillor of the provincial council Anton Zelger, who maintained that the rules of the new School Statute guaranteed the continued existence of the South Tyrol population (Seberich 2000: 401). Precisely because of the Second Statute and the regulations issued by the Bolzano authorities, the Province was given charge of school books and in 1977 appointed a specific committee to draft regulations on the choice of textbooks to use in accordance with Provincial Law no. 15 of 1976, a decision which was entrusted to the Board of Teaching Staff based on feedback from Class Boards  meetings. Apart from correspondence with school syllabi, the regulations did not impose any particular restrictions on the choice of textbooks and, as previously with ministerial memos, it gave instructions mainly on containing costs and the maintenance of books for a certain number of years, asking teachers to justify (on a

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didactic, methodological or content basis) any decision to introduce a new book.32 Again in the Seventies but outside the strictly scholastic context, an Italian-Austrian history commission worked on the revision of textbooks for the two countries. The commission should have been established at the end of the Fifties, but its work was obstructed by the growing tension between Austria and Italy regarding the question of South Tyrol. However, within the changed context following approval of the Second Statute of Autonomy, the Commission analysed the textbooks of the two countries but in its conclusions limited itself to proposing the drafting of history books that overcame prejudices and avoided underlining the elements of friction between Austria and Italy (Mezzalira 2015: 156–159). Among the documents of the German Schools Board of Bolzano, there remain traces of some attempts at the beginning of the Nineties to create shared teaching material for Austrian Tyrol and South Tyrol, and also of a project for a shared history textbook, for which however difficulties arose in reconciling the different school syllabi and education systems.33 The changes introduced in the new Statute did not particularly affect the processes for adopting textbooks in classes, which continued along the lines of previous years: predominantly books from abroad, with the sections of Italian history adapted by South Tyrol authors for middle school use but not for high schools. One of the textbooks most commonly used in third year of middle school was the German book Geschichte. Neuzeit und neueste Zeit von 1789 bis zur Gegenwart by Kornelius Riedmiller and Max Lachner, adapted for use in the South Tyrol region by Hubert Stemberger.34 The book explored the nineteenth century and Risorgimento (movements of 1820–1821 and 1830–1831, Mazzini-ism, Neo-Guelphism and other schools of thought, the events of 1848 and the rise of Piedmont until the Unification and shift of control to Rome), while the description of the Liberal period, Fascism and the world wars (and post-war period) was less detailed. The author dedicated some paragraphs to local history, in which he spoke about the territorial and border changes, about  the issue of options of the South 32  LABZ, DS, ref. 218, Autonomous Province of Bolzano, Subdivision III, prot. 3581, 14.4.1977. 33  LABZ, DS, ref. 3199, the School Supervisor of Bolzano to the Tiroler Landesinstitut, 10.1.1991 and attached correspondence. 34  The book was used by 22 middle schools out of 37, according to the lists of textbooks held by LABZ.

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Tyrol population in the framework of the alliance between the Fascist Regime and the Third Reich and about  the situation of Bolzano after 1945 (Riedmiller and Lachner 1971). Beginning in the mid-Eighties, most middle schools adopted the ASM textbook Geschichte für Südtiroler Mittelschulen, written by various authors under the supervision of Alfred Brückner.35 The book took the approach of a general history. The second and third volumes (regarding medieval and modern history and the nineteenth-twentieth centuries) included the French and American Revolutions, and the Cold War, along with the key historic events of other countries. However, the focus was placed firmly on Italian history as with other books used in the rest of Italy: the Risorgimento (looked at in detail) was mentioned as involving wars of independence, and Fascism was examined with the right emphasis on various aspects, looking at its origins as well as the dictatorship itself. Other chapters looked specifically at the situation of Tyrol and South Tyrol: the struggle for independence against Napoleon and Bavaria at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the period from 1914 to 1915 and the years between 1945 and the Second Statute of Autonomy (Brückner 1983, 1984). The attention paid to Italian and local historical events convinced teachers of the book’s validity: the justification by Partschin middle school of the choice of this book stated: “This book amply tackles Tyrol history. This is very important because students must also know the story of their birthplace and the country where they live”.36 The book was used to good effect for a long time and in 2002–2003 a new and updated version was published. Regarding high schools, two of the most popular books in the Seventies were Zeiten und Menschen, a new edition of the collective work supervised by Robert Tenbrock, and Grundriß der Geschichte. Die moderne Welt written by Jochen Dittrich and Edeltrud Dittrich-Gallmeister.37 In Zeiten und Menschen, the history of the nineteenth/twentieth century was divided into two volumes, with the sections on Italian events following the format 35  The book appears to have been used in 29 schools out of 37 whose book lists for the academic year 1985–1986 have been preserved. The situation remained the same in the following years. 36  LABZ, DS, ref. 2472, Middle school of Partschins, Beschluss des Lehrerkollegiums Nr. 2, 31.5.1985, attachment Einführung des Lehrwerkes “Geschichte 3 für Südtiroler Mittelschulen” in den 3. Klassen, 11.4.1985. 37  Of 12 schools (high schools and teacher training schools), 5 used Zeiten und Menschen and 4 Grundriß der Geschichte.

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previously described in reference to other books. Paragraphs specifically dedicated to Italy looked at the Risorgimento process under Piedmont and Cavour, and the establishment of Fascism, with mention made of the main features of the regime’s ideology and structure.In the rest of the book, the history of Italy appeared only briefly, with reference to the negotiations with Germany: in the nineteenth century, the completion of the Unification thanks to the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars, the Triple Alliance desired by Bismarck; in the twentieth century, the alliance with Hitler, the Ethiopian war, the aid to Franco-supporters in the Spanish Civil War, the Munich Agreement, participation in the Second World War as a subordinate of Germany, the events of 1943–1945 and the post-war period. Regarding local South Tyrol history, reference was made to the First World War: the London Agreement and shifting of the border to the Brenner Pass in 1919 (Goerlitz 1968; Immisch 1966). Grundriss der Geschichte was another book destined to German high schools, tackling the period from the American War of Independence to the Cold War. An international history approach was offered, focusing mainly on political aspects, but with events of German history awarded the most attention. Despite not having any sections specifically adapted for teaching in South Tyrol schools, the book looked at key moments of Italian history, from the Unification of Italy to the Second World War, without entering into details and despite some parts of the text about Italy being written in smaller print to signal the “lesser” importance of the topic. In the case of the Triple Alliance, the text explored the friction between Italy and Austria regarding the regions like Trentino and South Tyrol which were considered by Italy to be part of its territory yet controlled unjustly by a foreign state. The text mentioned the beginning of Italian colonial expansion in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the war in Libya of 1911–1912 and more extensively looked at the participation of Italy in the First World War. The authors correctly explained the entrance of Italy into the conflict alongside Great Britain and France with the promise made to the Italian government of territorial acquisition of the “irredentist” areas and mentioned the shifting of the Italian borders to include South Tyrol at the end of the war. Fascism, meanwhile, was treated with greater attention than in other books. The authors defined the Fascist regime as a totalitarianism while admitting that it did not fulfil all its goals as such and described the structure of the State and ideology. The remaining sections on Fascism and Italy were included in the analysis of the foreign policies of Nazi Germany

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and regarded the alliance in the Thirties up to the Second World War; space was also dedicated to the armistice between Italy and the Allies in 1943, to the ousting and arrest of Mussolini, to his liberation by the Germans with the creation of the Italian Social Republic, and to partisan Resistance fighters. The book included supplementary material with documents and letters in which Italy was also analysed, for example, regarding the issue of the “irredentist”38 territories, including South Tyrol (Dittrich and Dittrich-Gallmeister 1970). The choice of textbooks in the following years was more varied. More frequent use was made of at least five textbooks in the high schools and teacher training schools: again Zeiten und Menschen and Grundriss der Geschichte; Spiegel der Zeiten by Hans-Erich Mager, Joachim Hoffmann and Franz Bahl; Fragen an die Geschichte curated by Heinz Dieter Schmid, all printed in Germany; and the two books Neuzeit and Zeitgeschichte by Walter Göhring and Herbert Hasenmayer produced in Austria.39 These were all textbooks of general and international history, with most of the book dedicated to German or Austrian events with Italian history only briefly mentioned. Spiegel der Zeiten was a two-volume book with a format very similar to that of Zeiten und Menschen as regards the general international history with a focus on Germany and Italian events (Mager and Bahl 1977; Hoffmann and Bahl 1971). The book produced in Austria by Göhring and Hasenmayer in the mid Seventies, which was generally more in depth than other books considered, analysed more carefully the events of the Risorgimento than other books, given its connection to Austrian history. It supplied more details (as well as Cavour, the king and Garibaldi, it also looked at Mazzini and Daniele Manin, protagonists of the anti-Hasburg uprising in Venice) and described the process of unification in a single paragraph, which went from participation in the Crimea War up to the inclusion of Rome in national territories in 1871. Unlike the German books, the wars of Prussia against Austria and France through which Italy gained Veneto and Rome  The term is used in the book by Dittrich and Gallmeister.  In the early Eighties, Zeiten und Menschen and Grundriß der Geschichte were used, respectively, by 5 and 4 of the 15 high schools considered. From the mid-1980s, the books mentioned result as distributed more evenly. Other textbooks used but to a lesser extent were Grundzüge der Geschichte by Eugen Kaier (Germany), Zeiten, Völker und Kulturen by Franz Berger (Austria), Geschichte für die Oberstufe by Anton Ebner (Austria) and Geschichtliche Weltkunde by Wolfgang Hug (Germany). 38 39

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were not described only from the German point of view; they were analysed as key moments of the Risorgimento in the Italian process of unification. There were also clearer accounts of irredentism and the tensions between Italy and Austria, the First World War and the issue of the shifting of borders to the Brenner Pass. The authors cited parts of the text of the Triple Alliance, according to which Italy declared itself neutral at the beginning of the conflict, and the secret Treaty of London with which the country agreed to enter the war against Austria in return for Trentino, South Tyrol, Trieste, Gorizia, Istria and Dalmatia. The Italian entry into war was also the subject of a question in the section of summary exercises. Space was also dedicated to the conflict, with reference to the Italian attacks on Isonzo, the Austrian attacks in 1917 and 1918 and the armistice with the resulting withdrawal of Austria from South Tyrol. Fascism was presented in a chapter alongside Nazi-ism, following the same structure of paragraphs in order to compare the two regimes, as required by an exercise for the students. The authors highlighted the difficult social and economic conditions of the years following the First World War and the growth of Nationalism and demands for the territories not assigned to Italy in the peace treaty, in order to explain the motives behind the rise of Fascism, its establishment among the Italian ruling classes and the wave of violence that shook the country. They traced the political career of Mussolini up to the march on Rome and the formation of the government, describing the Fascist ideology and principal features of the regime, defined as authoritarian rather than totalitarian as it was in German books. In this brief summary, space was dedicated to the Italianisation of linguistic minority groups such as Slovenians and South Tyroleans. The remaining events linked to the Fascist period were included (as in the other books looked at) in the description of Nazi Germany’s foreign policy and the Second World War. Regarding the post-war period, the loss of colonies and Trieste by Italy were mentioned, along with the De Gasperi-­ Gruber agreement. This was included in a chapter on Austria in the post-­ war period, speaking about the Austrian attempt to obtain from the winning powers a review of the Brenner borders, and it was said that with the agreement Italy undertook to guarantee a certain autonomy and economic/cultural advantages to the German-speaking population in South Tyrol, while guaranteeing the wartime emigrant South Tyroleans the chance to return to the province of Bolzano (Göhring and Hasenmayer 1972, 1974).

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A different discourse is reserved to Fragen an die Geschichte, the most innovative of the textbooks examined due to its conception as a workbook with a few brief texts to summarise the main events and a rich system of sources and images to assist work in class or individually. The book is based on a selective approach to topics, attempting to outline a learning track and develop critical thinking but inevitably leaving out some topics or only quickly touching on others. We find Italian history analysed in dedicated paragraphs only regarding the Risorgimento (from the movements of 1820–1821 to the taking of Rome in 1870–1871 with reference to the completion of national unification for the regions of Trento, Bolzano, Trieste and the Adriatic coast after the First World War) and the advent of Fascism, as in most of the books analysed, but it is the reason that the authors gave for this choice that may seem problematic. Both the Unification and Fascism are introduced in chapters on German history and with the explicit goal of supplying an example of parallel/similar processes in Germany, offering a more general European overview rather than singular events that have their own individual importance; regarding  fascist movements, it is clearly stated that they are broadly described to avoid mere comparison with Nazi-ism and a reductive interpretation of the Hitler regime. If, however, one thinks about the use of this book in Italian schools (and German-speaking schools) it is clear how the opposite effect may evolve, that is, a reductive reading of Italian fascism as less strong, aggressive and devastating than the German version (Schmid 1982, 1984). Recognising the limitations of foreign publications, more than one teaching board adopted also the textbook of Hans Kramer, Geschichte Italiens, published in Germany in 1968, which covered the modern and contemporary periods and tackled (in detail) the Napoleonic era, Risorgimento, liberal Italy, irredentism and nationalism, colonialism, the First World War, Fascism and the Second World War, the post-war period and birth of the Republic, the establishment stage and reconstruction right up to the early Sixties. The textbook’s merit lay in the reconstruction of an overall view of Italian history which could not be included in books focused on national events of other countries. Regarding local history, the book includes specific references to the South Tyrol situation and minorities, presented from the perspective of the South Tyrol and very critical of Italy (Kramer 1968).

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A Look at the Present Situation In the context of a general overhaul of Italian public administration and the relationships between the central government and the local authorities which culminated in the reform of Title V of the Constitution of 2001, and linked to the school reforms launched by Italian governments in the Nineties and early 2000s, a new phase of development of school legislation in Italy and the province of Bolzano began, which also regarded didactic organisation and the drafting of educational projects by individual institutes. The main laws on the school system still applied in Bolzano are Provincial Law no. 5 of 16 July 2008 regarding kindergartens and primary school and Provincial Law no. 11 of 24 September 2010 regarding secondary school. These laws and their implementation also contain instructions regarding curricula and educational/training goals that influence the content of individual subjects, with differing evolution for schools of different linguistic groups (Vidoni 2013). In the new millennium, the Germanspeaking middle schools and high schools of the province continue to use history textbooks published in Germany or Austria. As in the past, these are books designed for use in the aforesaid countries, and as a result the content, chronology and teaching materials (when not regarding world or European history) focus on the German/Austrian perspective. In middle school, as before, historians from South Tyrol adapt books published abroad, as in the case of Zeitreise (a book adopted in the South Tyrol edition). The book contains parts explicitly dedicated to Italy and references to the Tyrol and South Tyrol regions, ranging from mere mentions, as in the introduction to one of the chapters on the Italian Unification process (“In Bolzano as in any other Italian city, we find streets and squares named after Mazzini, Garibaldi or Cavour. They are important figures closely linked to the struggle by Italy for national unity”), to exercises, questions and research proposals, right up to entire chapters. While for the nineteenth century the analysis of local history focuses on Austrian Tyrol, economic aspects, Ladin valleys and the Trentino desire for autonomy, in the twentieth century attention moves to Fascism, enforced Italianisation, the options, war and Nazi domination. The South Tyrol situation after 1945 is the subject of an entire themed 20-page unit of Zeitreise 3; the chapter starts with the Treaty of Paris and ends with the relationship between South Tyrol and the European Union without neglecting the two Statutes of Autonomy, the season of bomb attacks in the Sixties and the Ladin population situation (Zeitreise 2 2012; Zeitreise 3 2013).

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A different scenario regards the high schools where the necessary supplementary analysis of Italy and specific local history is entrusted to teachers, who are called on to fill the gaps in Italian history, which is dealt with only marginally or not at all in the German/Austrian books, and the local history that does not appear in the books used in South Tyrol high schools. This is in no way a minor problem as, even after the approval of educational autonomy and greater powers given to the Province of Bolzano regarding schools, obviously, there remains a strong link to national guidelines on curricula and educational goals (Parschalk 2010: 84–86, 94). One possible reason for the difference between textbooks in middle and high schools (as seen in the Province of Bolzano from the Sixties onwards) can be found in the need to look at world history in the final year of high school in order to prepare for the high-school diploma. The proposal for substitution of the history book for school year 1988–1989 at the scientific high school of Vipiteno, in fact states the necessity of providing students with a history book that prepares them for the final exam with a good basic knowledge of history and dealing with the general historic contexts of the programme and, therefore, how a textbook responding to these demands with a certain focus on Italian history could be used, if even the teacher proposing it stated that it was “still insufficient for our needs”.40 It should be stated, for clarity, that not even the history textbooks of high schools in other regions (which focus on Italian history within an international framework) look at regional and local history, which is a  topic of school syllabi for the first school cycle. The almost complete absence of references to local history in the school books is amazing, however, considering the context of Bolzano and the curricular guidelines and insistence with which the German-speaking community had always underlined the importance of an education system that is aware of local traditions and identity. Among the projects to promote local history in the new millennium, the publication of three volumes of one work between 2010 and 2013 stands out: Passaggi e Prospettive. Lineamenti di storia locale/Übergänge und Perspektiven. Grundzüge der Landesgeschichte (Transitions and Perspectives. Features of local history). The work, preceded by initiatives to promote an exchange of ideas and a shared reading of history (Romeo 40  LABZ, DS, ref. 3153, Vipiteno scientific high school, report from the Board of teaching staff, 3.5.1988 and attachment justifying the adoption of Grundriß der Geschichte.

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2015), was promoted by the Italian, German and Ladin educational institutes of the Province of Bolzano. The “first book ‘in common’ on the history of Alto Adige/South Tyrol”41 was drafted according to a work method shared by the authors, historians and teachers of the three linguistic groups, which saw them work in couples on various chapters written in the mother tongue and translated into texts by colleagues; in this way, it was possible to transfer “the contents on one linguistic and cultural context to another” promoting the final goal of a textbook that offered “a global vision of local history which took into account the various perspectives” (Mezzalira 2015: 163, 162). The three volumes, published in German and Italian, are dedicated, respectively, to The Tyrol Area from the Dark Ages to Late Middle Ages, to Tyrol in the Modern Era, from the Protestant Reformation to the First World War, and to The Contemporary Era in Alto Adige looking at 1919 onwards. The volumes focus on history of the South Tyrol and Tyrol regions and, as a result, the timelines differ from those of traditional history books for schools, in order to award greater attention to local history. Also the choice of events tackled is linked to the local context. The events of 1848 and the period in which Italy underwent the Risorgimento are described from the Tyrol perspective with greater attention to the events of the German world and Hasburg Empire as opposed to the Italian context. This obviously is dealt with, connected to the struggle for autonomy and independence particularly by Trentino. Much space (40 pages) is dedicated in the second volume to the First World War, given its importance for the Tyrol and Trentino area, due to the complexity of the political and ethno-linguistic situation, the resulting division of Tyrol and the shifting of the Italian border to the Brenner Pass, as well as the peculiar features of a war fought among mountain tops by both sides. The contemporary period, analysed in the third volume, coincides for South Tyrol with its handing over to Italy at the end of the war, and the text focuses on the period between 1919 and the 1990s. This involves, as admitted by the authors themselves in the introduction to the book, the most conflictual period of time in the reconstruction and processing of the past, which often saw various linguistic groups split and clash over their respective histories and identities. More than 50 pages are dedicated to the Fascist period, beginning with the formation of the first groups in South Tyrol 41   Website of publishing it/9788882667429.

house

Athesia:

https://www.athesia-tappeiner.com/

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and the first violent actions, some of which (like the march on Bolzano) anticipated the approaching seize of power by Mussolini. The enforced measures of Italianisation in the region and resulting forms of resistance by the German-speaking people are dealt with, along with the application of race laws against the Jews, changes to the economic system and society with the mass organisation of the Fascist party. This part is linked also to another wide section on the options for German citizenship by South Tyrol residents agreed between Mussolini and Hitler, the role of Nazi Germany in the South Tyrol and Second World War, up to the last phase with occupation of the region by the Third Reich. The second half of the book is instead dedicated to the years from 1945 onwards and the path towards autonomy. Two large chapters tackle the First Statute of Autonomy and its application with effects on the South Tyrol political life and society, the international debate between Austria and Italy with the South Tyrol issue presented to the UN, the tensions and violence of the Sixties, the work that led up to approval of the Second Statute. The book ends with a description of the main socio-economic, political and cultural changes which took place in the Seventies in South Tyrol and an analysis of the new Statute and its application, up to the post-1989 season and reform of the Italian Constitution in terms of a new relationship between the State and regions with a definitive declaration of autonomy (Passaggi e Prospettive 2 2011, 2013). The local-oriented approach of the book allows analysis of some moments that normally are tackled neither in school books with a global history approach nor in Italian history books. This makes Passaggi e Prospettive more of a monograph than a typical school book, although the volumes maintain a didactic-oriented approach, a language aimed at classroom use and a link with national and international events through the use of timelines. The qualities of the work, which surely offers an in-depth look at South Tyrol events and a clear analysis of the dynamics within the territory of Bolzano, promoting convergence and dialogue between the different cultures of the community, also seem to be the very limitations of these books, which are difficult to use in schools. In fact, they can not substitute other history books as they do not look at global history and can scarcely be used alongside traditional textbooks due to the lack of time dedicated to following the general history syllabus (unless only a few significant events are tackled).

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The case of Passaggi e Prospettive, which transformed the way in which history was perceived by focusing on the South Tyrol issue, reveals clearly how school books can guide interpretation of the past and contribute to identity formation. It also highlights the difficulty of balancing local history content with that of national and international events. This is a difficulty that emerges also from analysis of the other books here considered in which, on the other hand, not only local history but also Italian history tend to be eclipsed by other topics; it seems possible to overcome this issue only with the use of texts such as those in middle schools, specifically designed to focus attention on local history while also adhering to national curricula. If we consider only those textbooks used in German-language schools of South Tyrol, we must state that these restore a partial and superficial view both of Italian events and South Tyrol events. In this sense, they seem inadequate both in transmitting a sense of identity and in providing knowledge of Italian history or the local history in detail, as would actually be required from the guidelines of educational goals and programmes. It seems to us, however, that we can state how different participants in the dynamics of South Tyrol schools which we have tried to follow in these pages saw the limitations and made efforts over time to resolve them by producing supplementary material or books specifically designed for local requirements. Naturally, the books are just one didactic tool used in schools alongside workshops and didactic activity of various forms, other materials, exploratory research. An analysis of these other tools aimed at identifying the supplementary didactic content used in schools in South Tyrol is beyond the scope of this current work, but could prove useful in order to continue analysis of the presence and equilibrium of content between local and national history in lessons and to show how, especially in a context like this, the work of teachers proves essential in supplying the right directions for navigating and understanding the past.

References Handbooks Brückner, Alfred, ed. 1983. Geschichte für Südtiroler Mittelschulen 2. Wien-Bozen: Osterreichischer Bundesverlag-Athesia. ———, ed. 1984. Geschichte für Südtiroler Mittelschulen 3. Wien-Bozen: Osterreichischer Bundesverlag-Athesia.

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Deermann, Bernhard, Hans Becker, and Arnold Voelske. 1965. Geschichtliches Unterrichtswerk, Ausgabe für Südtirol bearbeitet von Hubert Stemberger. Paderborn: Schöningh. Dittrich, Jochen, and Edeltrud Dittrich-Gallmeister. 1970. Grundriß der Geschichte. Die moderne Welt. Stuttgart: Klett. Goerlitz, Erich. 1968. Zeiten und Menschen. Das Werden der modernen Welt (1648-1900). Paderborn-Hannover: Schöningh-Schroedel. Göhring, Walter, and Herbert Hasenmayer. 1972. Zeitgeschichte. Wien: Hirt. ———. 1974. Neuzeit. Wien: Hirt. Hoffmann, Joachim, and Franz Bahl. 1971. Spiegel der Zeiten 4. Frankfurt/Main: Diesterweg. Immisch, Joachim. 1966. Zeiten und Menschen. Europa und die Welt. Das 20. Jahrhundert. Paderborn-Hannover: Schöningh-Schroedel. Kramer, Hans. 1968. Geschichte Italiens II. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Mager, Hans-Erich, and Franz Bahl. 1977. Spiegel der Zeiten 3. Frankfurt/Main: Diesterweg. Passaggi e Prospettive. Lineamenti di storia locale/Übergänge und Perspektiven. Grundzüge der Landesgeschichte 2. 2011. Bozen: Athesia. Passaggi e Prospettive. Lineamenti di storia locale/Übergänge und Perspektiven. Grundzüge der Landesgeschichte 3. 2013. Bozen: Athesia. Riedmiller, Kornelius, and Max Lachner. 1971. Geschichte. Neuzeit und neueste Zeit von 1789 bis zur Gegenwart, bearbeitet für Südtirol von Hubert Stemberger. München-Paderborn: Blutenburg-Schöningh. Röd, Wolfgang. 1962. Abriß der politischen Geschichte Italiens. Bozen: ASM-Ferrari-Auer. Schmid, Heinz Dieter, ed. 1982. Fragen an die Geschichte 3. Frankfurt/Main: Cornelsen Hirschgraben. ———, ed. 1984. Fragen an die Geschichte 4. Frankfurt/Main: Cornelsen Hirschgraben. Tenbrock, Robert, and K.  Thieme. 1956. Geschichtlisches Unterrichtswerk. Die Neueste Zeit. Paderborn: Schöningh. Woynar, Karl. 1921. Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Neuzeit, umgearbeitet von Josef Marini. Milan-Florence: Trevisini-Bemporad. ———. 1950. Lehrbuch der Geschichte der neuesten Zeit, umgearbeitet von Josef Marini. Meran: Poetzelberger. Zeitreise 2. Ausgabe für Südtirol. 2012. Stuttgart-Bozen: Klett-Duetsches Bildungsressort. Zeitreise 3. Ausgabe für Südtirol. 2013. Stuttgart-Bozen: Klett-Duetsches Bildungsressort.

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Secondary Literature Bernardini, Giovanni. 2016. L’accordo De Gasperi-Gruber. Una storia internazionale. Trento: Fondazione Bruno Kessler. Cajani, Luigi, Simone Lässig, and Maria Repoussi. 2019. The Palgrave Handbook of Conflict and History Education in the Post-Cold War Era. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Di Michele, Andrea. 2003. L’italianizzazione imperfetta. L’amministrazione pubblica dell’Alto Adige tra Italia liberale e fascismo. Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso. Di Michele, Andrea, and Rodolfo Taiani, eds. 2009. Die Operationszone Alpenvorland im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Bolzano: Provincia Autonoma di Bolzano-Athesia. Di Pietro, Gianni. 1991. Da strumento ideologico a disciplina formativa. I programmi di storia nell’Italia contemporanea. Milano: Bruno Mondadori. Gehler, Michael, ed. 2011. Akten zur Südtirol-Politik 1945-1958. 1945-1947: Gescheiterte Selbstbestimmung. Innsbruck: Studien Verlag. de Gerloni, Beatrice. 2003. Tra passato e presente: tradizione e innovazione nell’insegnamento della storia. In La storia fra ricerca e didattica, ed. Beatrice de Gerloni, 11–107. Milano: Franco Angeli. Marcantoni, Mauro, and Giorgio Postal. 2012. Il Pacchetto. Dalla Commissione dei 19 alla seconda autonomia del Trentino-Alto Adige. Trento: Fondazione Museo Storico del Trentino. ———. 2014. Südtirol. Storia di una guerra rimossa (1956-1967). Rome: Donzelli. Mezzalira, Giorgio. 2015. Il progetto di un manuale scolastico per la storia locale dell’Alto Adige/Südtirol. In La storia attraversa i confini. Esperienze e prospettive didattiche, ed. Luigi Blanco and Chiara Tamanini, 156–165. Rome: Carocci. Parschalk, Norbert. 2010. Geschichtsunterricht in einer europäischen Grenzregion. Blickpunkt Südtirol. Saarbrücken: SVH. Peterlini, Oskar. 2000. Autonomia e tutela delle minoranze nel Trentino-Alto Adige. Cenni di storia e cultura, diritto e politica. Trento: Ufficio di presidenza del Consiglio regionale in collaborazione con la Giunta regionale. Peterlini, Hans Karl. 2021. Feuernacht. Südtirols Bombenjahre Hintergründe, Schicksale, Bewertungen. Bolzano: Raetia. Romeo, Carlo. 2015. Alcuni aspetti dell’insegnamento della storia locale in Alto Adige/Südtirol. In La storia attraversa i confini. Esperienze e prospettive didattiche, ed. Luigi Blanco and Chiara Tamanini, 75–84. Rome: Carocci. Scarano, Federico. 2015. Le origini della Commissione dei 19 e il suo significato. In Dialogo vince violenza. La questione del Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol nel contesto internazionale, ed. Giovanni Bernardini and Günther Pallaver, 233–270. Bologna: il Mulino.

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Seberich, Rainer. 2000. Südtiroler Schulgeschichte. Muttersprachlicher Unterricht unter fremdem Gesetz. Bolzano: Raetia. Steinacher, Gerald, ed. 2003. Südtirol im Dritten Reich/L’Alto Adige nel Terzo Reich. NS-Herrschaft im Norden Italiens/L’occupazione nazista nell’Italia settentrionale. 1943-1945. Innsbruck: Studien Verlag. Steiniger, Rolf. 2000. Südtirol zwischen Diplomatie und Terror. 1947-1969. Vol. 3. Bolzano: Athesia. ———. 2006. Autonomie oder Selbstbestimmung? Die Südtirolfrage 1945/46 und das Gruber-De Gasperi-Abkommen. Innsbruck: Studien Verlag. Vidoni, Claudio. 2013. La scuola dell’autonomia provinciale. Cenni storici e profili statutari, ordinamentali e legislativi della scuola nella Provincia autonoma di Bolzano. Roma: Armando Editore.

From Petite to Grande Patrie: The Valle d’Aosta History as Told to Children Marco Cuaz

At the Borders of the Italian State Until the end of the 1880s, the teaching of Valle d’Aosta history in primary schools took place almost exclusively in French, the best-known and most commonly spoken language by virtually the entire population of the region for centuries. The Aosta Valley with fewer than 100,000 inhabitants, tucked away among the highest mountains in Europe and snow-­ blocked for months at a time, was in fact for centuries an intra montes land, characterised by the cultural ethnicity of a Franco-Provençal area. It had formed part of the Duchy of Savoy since the twelfth century, as a Province séparée, characterised by a long tradition of self-government and strong fiscal privileges (libertés et privilèges). It only became part of “Italy”

M. Cuaz (*) Aosta Valley University, Aosta, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. S. Colla, A. Di Michele (eds.), History Education at the Edge of the Nation, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27246-2_8

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in 1861, when it also lost its status as a province and became reduced to a simple “district” of the Province of Turin.1 After the unification of Italy (1861), within a climate of Nation Building that identified schools (particularly the teaching of Italian language and history) as a key tool in “making Italians”, a series of governmental interpellations attacked the “scandal” of a “small region of Italy” that was using a “foreign” language in its schools. To end said “scandal”, in 1884 (after two years of bitter arguments and heated negotiation), the Regulations for teaching of the French language were introduced; this regarded the principle of parity between the two languages in order to “assist the child in the gradual transition from French to Italian”. Essentially, the Italian language was to be introduced into primary schools for a number of hours equal to those of French language. This innovation was accompanied also by textbooks in Italian language that spoke about Italy, its geography and its history.2 It was precisely this issue of history teaching that ignited particularly heated arguments between the Aosta Valley and the Italian government. The national school programmes awarded history teaching the task of “making our country known and beloved, awakening the conscience and firing up pro-Italian sentiment”.3 For many Aosta Valley residents, however, the new Italian fatherland (the so-called Grande Patrie) was perceived as an extremely distant reality. In many parts of the population, especially in Catholic and conservative communities, it was also felt to be a very hostile environment.4 For many inhabitants of the Aosta Valley, the school curricula and textbooks adopted in schools in the Kingdom of Italy were felt to be a true “conspiracy against the truth”. According to Le Duché d’Aoste (the official 1  For a general history of the modern and contemporary Aosta Valley, see Stuart Woolf (1995). See also the classic works by Colliard (1976); Janin (1991); Cuaz et al. (2003). For a recent overview, see the reference books of Riccarand (2015) and Cuaz (2019). 2  A huge body of literature exists on the issue of language in the Aosta Valley, beginning with the pamphlet by Bérard (1862) in response to the pamphlet by Vegezzi Ruscalla (1861). Among the most important works, see Saint-Blancat (1979); Omezzoli (1995); Celi (2018). 3  This statement was made by the minister Baccelli in the “Inspection of school programmes” of 1894. On the problem of history teaching in the Italian schools, see Di Pietro (1991); Ascenzi (2004); Bianchini (2010). For a more general overview, Ferro (1986). 4  On the sense of identity in the Aosta Valley following the Unification of Italy, see the debate launched by Stuart Woolf (1995) and the collection of essays, where a specific bibliography can also be found, Cuaz (1996). For a recent update, see Cuaz (2015b) and D’Agostino (2018).

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newspaper of the diocesan curia), the schoolbooks presented historical events in a “distorted or entirely false” way. The protagonists of the Italian Risorgimento (Mazzini, Garibaldi, Cavour, Orsini) were described as heroes while the popes were cast as tyrants, cruel and despotic kings who resorted to all types of criminal acts. These books, read by children and their parents, invoked “dislike for the Pope and the Church”, “a repulsion of religious duties” and “scepticism and impiety”. The liberals (or, rather, the “Freemasons”, as they were generally described by all those who pressed for a secular environment in schools) were supposedly trying to substitute catechism with their books “full of mistakes”, in an effort to “train up revolutionaries” while creating “the greatest socialism and anarchy propaganda”.5 It was, therefore, necessary to produce textbooks to use alongside the existing Italian options, exploiting the possibility offered by the 1884 Regulations (an absolutely unique event in Italy) to use French in primary schools for a number of hours at least equivalent to the number of teaching hours in Italian.

A Textbook for Aosta Valley Schools Thus, in 1896, in a political climate poisoned by the conflict between State and Church, and at a time when the government was beginning to take control of the entire primary school system, the city council of Aosta announced a public tender for a reading book for use in primary schools of the Valley. It called for a book in French language, as allowed by the 1884 regulations on scholastic parity of the two languages, to teach all Aosta Valley children between the ages of 6 and 11 about the history, geography and culture of their land.6 5  “Le Duché d’Aoste”, 11 October 1896. Regarding the conflict between State and Church in the Aosta Valley, see Désandré (2008); Désandré (2011); Désandré (2021). Regarding Catholics, see Omezzoli (2002) and Omezzoli (2008). 6  Archives Historiques Régionales, Registre des Délibérations de 1896, liasse 51, 1896, délibération n. 4, p. 511. The history of primary education in the Aosta Valley was initially narrated by ecclasiastical historians as the petites écoles (arising from the efforts of the clergy, the pious and religious brotherhoods) were being suppressed by the State in favour of the new and emergent state primary school: secular, compulsory and free. See, in particular, Duc (1894); Trèves (1967). Regarding the whole question of primary schools and the conflict between State and Church in the supervision of education, see Cuaz (1988). Among more recent works, see Cuaz (2007: 69–82). Regarding specifically the teaching of history in Aosta Valley schools, see Cuaz (2015: 85–92).

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Three books were submitted in the public tender held by the city council, offering three different narratives of the Aosta Valley history. According to the Lectures pour les Ecoles et les Familles valdôtaines by Sylvain Lucat, a Liberal who worked as a municipal secretary for 23 years in Aosta and editor of the secular weekly publication “La Vallée d’Aoste”: “We are Italians and, as such, we love and lovingly foster the national language. We are Aosta Valley inhabitants and, as such, we have a precious inheritance to preserve and pass on intact to future generations: the French language”. According to Lucat, the main characteristic of the Aosta Valley population was their loyalty to the House of Savoy, demonstrated by the long wars against repeated attempts of French invasion and their participation in the recent wars of independence, when “the Aosta Valley paid munificently in terms of men to the country”. Unfortunately, today, according to Lucat, the Aosta Valley population (consisting of “sceptical and shy countryfolk” who are deeply attached to their land and “devoid of any speculative spirit”) has become “easy prey for foreign speculations”.7 According to the Lectures by Anselme Réan, a Liberal and Catholic doctor and journalist as well as founder of the Ligue Valdôtaine pour la défence de la langue francaise, the Aosta Valley population had instead always been “indépendants et libres, actifs et laborieux”. Réan also stated that the region had always been loyal to the House of Savoy, as patriots ready to sacrifice themselves for the “Grande Patrie” but who were also strongly attached to their mother tongue language. While avoiding controversial topics such as the recent wars of independence and the Unification of Italy, Réan gathered together in an ecumenical and conciliatory anthology the most diverse opinions from the Aosta Valley’s political and cultural worlds: all united through their belonging to the “patrie valdôtaine” and their shared intention to protect tradition, the French language and decentralised government. In the name of a shared love of the Aosta Valley, in facing the external enemy, there could no longer be “either conservatives or liberals”, but simply “Valdôtains avant tout”.8 The third book submitted in the tender, the Premier livre de lecture de l’Enfant Valdôtain, which later became better known under the title of Chez Nous, was published by the Soeurs de Saint-Joseph, a religious order dedicated to schooling for girls. In Chez Nous, Italy disappeared to make way for the Aosta Valley land alone and, particularly, the village with its 7 8

 Lucat (1900: 8).  Réan (1900).

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fountain, church belltower, the stable and the ancestral home. The typical Aosta valley inhabitant was the mountain dweller/peasant, a man with a “great ability for judgement and a high sense of practicality, shy, calm reserved, reflective, prudent”. An Aosta Valley citizen “loved tradition and believed in God”. Children had to learn to “remain an Aosta Valley citizen”, loving the fatherland but not allowing him/herself to be “corroded by a growing cosmopolitanism, by a false spirit of adaptation that would lead to the death of the character and particular features of our race”.9 But which fatherland? Italy, the Aosta Valley, or le Pays, l’Heimat, their own village? The very concept of a fatherland was subject to some uncertainty throughout the early twentieth century, during the trauma of the Great War, establishing itself gradually in various forms until 1925 and the full Fascist regime when it arrived at a precise definition: C’est le jardin, le pré, le champ qui entoure la maison… C’est la fontaine où vous menez boire le troupeau, c’est le bon pain qui vous nourrit… C’est l’école où vos maitres vous enseignent des saines et belles choses; c’est le joli village, bien tranquille où vous passez votre enfance, c’est le cimitière où reposent vos grands parents, vos aieux; c’est l’Eglise, la vieille Eglise qui vous parle de Dieu et du Ciel. Comme c’est beau la patrie! Quand vous serez hommes vous tacherez d’être utiles à votre cher pays en l’honorant par vos oeuvres, par votre conduite. Patrie chérie soit mon amour toujours!10

In September 1900, the city council commission unanimously selected the manuscript by Sylvain Lucat. But the world of schools (also for didactic purposes, considering that the books by Lucat and Réan were hardly suitable for children) chose Chez Nous. The Soeurs de Saint-Joseph 9  Sœurs de Saint-Joseph (1900). Naturally, the book was supported by the Church, which defined it as “une véritable encyclopédie enfantine”, with which it was possible to teach children to read and write as well as love God, parents, virtue and fatherland. See “Le Duché d’Aoste”, 4 October 1899. 10  “It is the garden, the meadow, the field that surrounds the house … . It is the drinking fountain where you take your herds to drink, it is the good bread that nourishes you … It is the school where your teachers teach you beautiful, healthy principles, it is the lovely peaceful countryside where you spent your childhood, it is the cemetery where your grandparents are laid to rest, your ancestors; it is the Church, the old Church that talks to you about God and the Heavens. How beautiful the fatherland is. When you are men, you will try to be useful to your dear land, honouring it with your work and conduct. Dearest fatherland, you will always be my beloved!” Sœur Scholastique (1925: 65). Regarding Chez Nous, see Chaberge (2007–2008).

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published a total of 19 editions between 1899 and 1925 and 14 between 1945 and 1962. It remained firmly in place throughout the Fascist era (even though the teaching of French was officially banned in all schools). It became the classic text used to educate three generations of Aosta Valley inhabitants, with the book finding a place in all homes.11 Other books which tried to imitate its style and content failed in their intent.12

Legitimising the Special Statute In the Sixties and Seventies, the influence of Chez Nous was crushed by modernisation. That agro-pastoral world, unchanging in the shadow of the belltower, gradually disappeared under the pressure of industry and mass tourism, immigration and television. The Italian language, particularly as a result of strong migration (30,000 Aosta Valley citizens emigrated between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and 40,000 immigrants left Italy during the twentieth century), almost entirely replaced French as the native tongue, and control by the Church over social behaviour began to slow down even in the most isolated mountain villages. Chez Nous, with its small ancient world, no longer had a place in the post-1968 society. There remained, however, the problem of finding a book to replace it, especially considering the fact that the birth of the autonomous Region with a Special Statute in the post-war period13 had posed a new problem for the Aosta Valley community: the legitimisation of a diversity that could no longer be founded on the “linguistic minority” now that general use of the French language was a distant memory. History, geography and traditions had to demonstrate that the autonomy awarded in the post-war period was not merely the result of certain circumstances created by the end of the Second World War but the natural effect of a centuries-long historic construction dating back to the Middle Ages if not ancient times. 11  The last edition of Chez Nous was published in 1962. Some years later, the public contest held by the Aosta City Council would be noted as a fundamental event in the cultural history of the Aosta Valley, and the three books would be remembered as “un hymne à notre Vallée … un monument élevé à sa gloire” which would inspire future generations and create sentiments of love and respect for the fatherland. See Bulletin de la Ligue Valdôtaine, March 1913. 12  An imitation, in the period following the Second World War, Ronc Desaymonet 1948–1952. Regarding school textbooks after Chez Nous, see Delfino (2009–2010). 13  Regarding the Special Statute of the Aosta Valley, the body of literature is obviously vast. For an initial overview, see Barbagallo (1991); Luther (1995); Louvin (1997).

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It had to demonstrate that the Aosta Valley residents were culturally (even ethnically, according to some) different from other Italians. In order to legitimise the “specialness” of the Valley, it was sufficient to re-read local history in terms of “persecuted linguistic minority”, “persistence of autonomist ideal” and a long battle for recognition of a “diversity”. It required a narrative where the Salassi (ancient pre-Roman inhabitants of the Valley) were “strong and courageous”, while the Roman conquerors were “avid and cruel”. A narrative where the Aosta Valley was once a happily self-governed region, speaking French as long as it were permitted. A region where they had always defended their autonomy: firstly, against the absolutism of the House of Savoy, then against the “voracious and tyrannical” Italian state, up to the achievement of rightful recognition of autonomy with the Special Statute.14 The first attempt arrived with a textbook by Jean-Pierre Ghignone, Civilisation valdôtaine, whose ideological imprint was made clear already in its interpretation of ancient history. The Romans were “cruel invaders” who exterminated the Salassi, “imposing their language and culture on survivors”. The Aosta Valley’s independence dated back to the Middle Ages, specifically to the Charter of Grace bestowed on the city of Aosta by Tommaso I in 1191. The eighteenth century end to ancient independence, “to satisfy the egotism and ambitions” of the House of Savoy, never succeeded in wiping out the “spirit of the Aosta Valley people, who would continue to fight to protect their independence”. The education policy of the modern Italian State, with the suppression of village schools and the insertion of Italian-­ speaking teachers, was a way to “displace the indigenous civilisation with that of the State”. Also the Aosta Valley Resistance group, during the Second World War, had as its “true aim, the achievement of autonomous ideals” unlike the “Italian Resistance” which while fighting for the defence of freedom and democracy also wanted to “build another centralised State”. The Special Statute issued to the Aosta Valley by the constituent Assembly, an event that concluded the excursus into Aosta Valley history, was a “betrayal of the expectations and struggles of the Aosta Valley people”: 14  For the origins of the autonomy history framework, see Colliard (1964). Among the most common examples, see Zanotto (1968) and subsequent editions; Colliard (1980); Nicco (1997). Regarding the birth and development of the autonomy framework, see Cuaz (2021).

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Un Statut contraire aux aspirations du peuple valdôtain puisqu’il lui imposait une autonomie qui était dépourvue de toute garantie internationale, qu’il assurait au pouvoir central un contrôle direct et unilatéral sur les quelques compétences attribuées à la Région et qu’il renvoyait à une date indéterminée la réalisation des articles fort importants concernant l’école et la zone franche.15

This history (which simplified the points of the autonomy framework for children) needed, however, to be rewritten in line with the mandates of active pedagogy, shifting from narrative to laboratory work, from lessons to research-based activity, as indicated for some time by the school of Freinet and the “Movement of Educational Cooperation”, a didactic project which enjoyed great success in those years, “where knowledge and skills are built, not merely acquired”. It was thus that, in the Eighties, two important innovations revolutionised the theory and practice of teaching of local history in the Aosta Valley schools: the application of principles of active schooling, focused on extensive use of the textbook and lab teaching; and the direct intervention of the Regional Authority, through the Department of State Education, in the management of history teaching. The emergence in 1980 of the IRRSAE (Regional Institute for Research, Experimentation and Educational Updating) and the direct production of textbooks in French language by the regional administration and freely provided to schools were tools through which the Region (firmly controlled by the Regionalism parties) tried to take control of local history teaching, guiding it within an approach of Nation Building.16 Two important publishing initiatives, in particular, still today are used to cover the entire time span of the Aosta Valley history as taught in primary and middle schools (nothing has yet been produced for the secondary schools). The first, Espace Temps Culture en Vallée d’Aoste (1996), an impressive work produced by the IRRSAE with experts from various sectors and vast resources, which is distributed to all students in all primary and middle 15  “A Statute contrary to the wishes of the Aosta Valley people as it imposes on them a form of autonomy completely lacking in international guarantees, which ensured central government direct and unilateral control over the few responsibilities allocated to the Region and which postponed to an uncertain date the introduction of the most important bills on schools and the French-speaking area”. Ghignone (1982). 16  G.E.V. (1984). Regarding Giovanni Pezzoli and the role of the IRRSAE, see IRRE VDA (2009).

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schools, set out explicitly (as underlined in the introduction by the Councillor for Education) “to identify the particular cultural features of our civilisation”.17 The second, the Cahiers du maître (2003), created by the historical Resistance Institute and concentrating on twentieth-century history, opened up to new topics such as immigration and industry in an attempt to closely link anti-Fascism to the particularism of the Aosta Valley, whose continuity in the Resistance movement legitimises the region’s special status.18 At the centre of both works lies the “diversity” of the Aosta Valley population: their belonging (until very recent times) to a French-speaking area; the special mountainous environment forged by centuries of agro-­ pastoral economy; the particular dialect linked to Franco-Provence languages; a long history of self-government attacked first by the House of Savoy and then by the Italian state; the traditions, legends and symbols of a past jealously conserved and defended against a national-industrial-­ Fascist modernity. As a frontier region, there remain the cross-border issues, partly because these frontiers were of scarce use in a Valley that from the early sixth century to the Second World War had remained basically isolated, a cul de sac rather than a carrefour (to use the highly popular metaphor of Bernard Janin), more often an enemy than a friend of Switzerland and France. It is also partly because the goal of the selected history is to legitimise the “specialness” of the Aosta Valley, not as a melting pot of people, a meeting place and area of fusion, but as a mountainous country that has been able to preserve its language and traditions despite repeated external attacks.

The Young Generation, Identity and History Was this huge political investment in schools (entirely similar to the classic activities of Nation Building) successful? Can it be claimed that local history, taught to youngsters in schools, today represents an important element of the Aosta Valley identity? We know that the history of schools cannot be judged solely in terms of curricula and textbooks. There are many steps of separation among the proposals of legislators and school boards and the learning performance of  IRRSAE VDA (1996).  Dallou and Multari (2003).

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pupils. This is particularly true nowadays, when school is no longer the main seat of training, and teachers are no longer the main custodians of knowledge. In a recent survey conducted by sociologist Giuseppe Giordan regarding sense of identity among the young Aosta Valley school population, it emerged that there is undoubtedly a total ignorance of the most important facts of local history. And it emerged clearly that history plays no part at all in the sense of belonging to the Aosta Valley experienced by young people today. In the questionnaire, set to all young inhabitants of the region in the first and last year of secondary school (around 1000 youngsters), some basic questions were asked about key events in local history. It emerged that they had practically no knowledge of these. From the questions aimed at identifying the main factors that link young Aosta Valley residents today to their region, two elements emerged strongly: the Alpine countryside and the regional welfare system. Basically, the survey revealed that young Aosta Valley citizens today feel their status as such not because they speak French or feel proud of their history but because they live in the mountains in a region that offers a welfare system far superior to that of other Italian regions.19 Despite huge investments of resources by the public authorities, at least in the young population, history does not seem to play any role in the Aosta Valley sense of identity. On the contrary, compared with the era of Chez Nous, it would seem that there has been a great step backward. I believe that there are at least two reasons for this. The first is the hyper-politicisation of history in an age group when students have not yet developed the necessary conceptual categories for reasoning and have not yet experienced sufficient socialisation to understand the complexity of the political conflict. Questions such as medieval exemptions, the conflicts between the centre and suburban area in modern times, concepts such as State, federalism and autonomy, are all completely foreign to a child. Chez Nous worked better because it talked about cows and stables, flowers and seasons, the fountain and the belltower. It told stories in just the same way as did the teacher Pierboni with his monthly anecdotes in the book Cuore. Today, making a 12-year-old child work on a medieval charter or a project on the Special Statute invites only boredom and a general rejection of history. The paradox in which local history teaching in the Aosta Valley  Giordan (2010).

19

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finds itself is that what is needed to “create Aosta Valley citizens” is political history because this is the only narrative that could offer legitimisation of the special autonomy (the economic and social history of the Aosta Valley is similar to that of all other Alpine areas) but political history is not suitable for children because they cannot yet understand it. The second reason is that in some informal surveys carried out among teachers, a strong discrepancy emerged between the guidelines established by legislators and actual scholastic practice. While in the official programme and guidelines, the topic of Aosta Valley’s special status seems to be awarded considerable space (especially in the primary school), in scholastic practice different activities are often to be found: all in the name of interculturalism. In actual teaching experiences, especially in classes where there are now a high number of students with foreign origins, the study of local history is often replaced (sometimes under the heading of “civilisation valdôtaine”) with cross-culture comparison, the study of different identities or role-playing, in an effort to promote debate, integration and the fostering of a multi-perspective history where different identities can invite mutual enrichment. In other words, there is a type of covert civil disobedience imposed also by the social origins of pupils, who are no longer shepherd folk and among whom fewer than one in five have four grandparents born and bred in the Aosta Valley.

References Sources Archives Historiques Régionales, Registre des Délibérations du Conseil communal d’Aoste (1896–1899). Bérard, Edouard. 1862. La langue française en Vallée d’Aoste. Aosta: Imprimerie catholique. Dallou, Antonella, and Rosalba Multari. 2003. Cahiers du Maître, 9 voll. Aosta: Tipografia valdostana. Duc, Jean-Antoine. 1894. Le clergé valdôtain et l’instruction publique. Aosta: Imprimerie catholique. G.E.V. (Groupe d’Enseignants valdôtains). 1984. Au Val d’Aoste et ailleurs. De la prehistoire à la romanisation. Aosta: Duc. Ghignone, Jean-Pierre. 1982. Civilisation valdôtaine. Aosta: Duc. IRRSAE, V.D.A. 1996. Espace, temps, culture en Vallée d’Aoste. Aoste: Imprimerie valdôtaine.

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Lucat, Sylvain. 1900. Lectures pour les Ecoles et les Familles valdôtaines. Ivrea: Garda. Réan, Anselme. 1900. Livre de lecture de l’enfant valdôtain, Aoste Imprimerie catholique (2 ed Lectures valdôtaines, Aosta ITLA 1968). Ronc Desaymonet, Anaïs. 1948–1952. Mon troisiéme livre; Mom quatrième livre; Mon cinquiéme livre; Mon Premier Syllabaire; Mon deuxième syllabaire, Torino Paravia. Sœur Scholastique. 1917. Chez Nous. Scuola Tipografica Sales. ———. 1925. Chez Nous-Petites Lectures. Torino: SEI. Sœurs de Saint-Joseph. 1899. Premier Livre de Lecture de l’Enfant Valdôtain. Imprimerie Catholique: Aoste. ———. 1900. Livre de Lecture pour la Jeunesse Valdôtaine. Imprimerie Catholique: Aoste. ———. 1955. Chez Nous Petites Lectures. Torino: Silvestrelli e Cappelletto. Trèves, Joseph-Marie. 1967. À la recherche de la fondation de nos écoles; Aperçu sur l’instruction du peuple avant l’école élémentaire moderne; Une injustice qui crie vengeance, in Recueil de textes valdôtains, vol. III. Aosta. Vegezzi Ruscalla, Giovenale. 1861. Diritto e necessità di abrogare il francese come lingua ufficiale in alcune valli della provincia di Torino, Torino.

Secondary Literature Ascenzi, Anna. 2004. Tra educazione etico civile e costruzione dell’identità nazionale. L’insegnamento della storia nella scuola italiana dell’Ottocento. Milano Vita e pensiero. AVAS. 1984. L’école d’autrefois en Vallée d’Aoste. Aosta Musumeci. Barbagallo, Renato. 1991. La Regione Valle d’Aosta. Ordinamento amministrativo delle regioni. Milano: Giuffrè. Bianchini, Paolo. 2010. a cura di. In Le origini delle materie. Discipline, programmi e manuali scolastici in Italia. Torino: SEI. Calvani, Antonio. 1990. L’insegnamento della storia nella scuola elementare. Firenze: Nuova Italia. Catarsi, Enzo. 1986. Storia dei programmi della scuola elementare. Firenze: Nuova Italia. Celi, Alessandro. 2018. Rifrancesizzare i Valdostani. Scuola e identità in Valle d’Aosta (1861–2017) in “Diacronie, Studi di storia contemporanea”, 34-2-2018: 1–18. Chaberge, Marie Claire. 2007–2008. Chez Nous. Un manuel pour l’histoire valdôtaine, tesi di laurea, Università della Valle d’Aosta, rel. Marco Cuaz, edita in www.storiavda.it. Colliard, Lin. 1964. La persistance de l’idéal autonomiste et de la pensée historiographique de J.-B. de Tillier aux XVIII° et XIX° siècles. Bulletin de l’Académie Saint-Anselme XLI: 325–335.

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———. 1976. La culture valdôtaine au cours des siècles. Aosta: Itla. ———. 1980. Précis d’histoire valdôtaine. Aosta: Imprimerie valdôtaine. Cuaz, Marco. 1988. Alle frontiere dello Stato. La scuola elementare in Valle d’Aosta dalla restaurazione al fascismo. Milano: Angeli. ———. 1996. Alle radici di un’identità. Studi di storia valdostana, Aosta Le Château. ———. 2007. Le “maestrine d’en bas”. Maestri elementari e conflitti culturali nella Valle d’Aosta fra Otto e Novecento, in Traditions et modernité, “Histoire des Alpes” 2007/12, Zurich Verlag: 69–82. ———. 2012. La scuola elementare in Valle d’Aosta: acquisizioni, problemi e prospettive di ricerca, in L’alfabeto in montagna. Scuola e alfabetismo nell’area alpina tra età moderna e XIX secolo, a cura di Maurizio Piseri, Milano Angeli, 149–158. ———. 2015a. L’insegnamento della storia locale nelle scuole valdostane, in La storia attraversa i confini, esperienze e prospettive didattiche, a cura di Luigi Blanco e Chiara Tamanini Roma Carocci, 85–92. ———. 2015b. La Valle d’Aosta fra italianità e petite patrie, in Luigi Blanco (a cura di), Ai confini dell’Unità d’Italia. Territorio amministrazione e opinione pubblica, Fondazione Museo storico del Trentino, 351–379. ———. 2019. Le Duché d’Aoste de l’occupation française à l’Unité italienne. In Les Etats de Savoie, du Duché à l’unité d’Italie, ed. Giuliano Ferretti, 429–456. Paris: Classique Garnier. ———. 2021. Storie della Valle d’Aosta, in www.storiavda.it. Cuaz, Marco, Paolo Momigliano Levi, and Elio Riccarand. 2003. Cronologia della Valle d’Aosta 1848–2000. Aosta: Stylos. D’Agostino, Simona. 2018. Qui somme nous? Cultura, identità e politica in Valle d’Aosta dall’Unità d’Italia al fascismo. Aosta: END. De Fort, Ester. 1996. La scuola elementare dall’unità alla caduta del fascismo. Bologna: Il Mulino. Delfino, Valentina. 2009–2010. I manuali di storia della Valle d’Aosta nella scuola primaria dal 1945 ad oggi, Tesi di laurea, Università della Valle d’Aosta, rel. Marco Cuaz. Désandré, Andrea. 2008. Notabili valdostani. Aosta Le: Château. ———. 2011. La Valle d’Aosta laica e liberale. Antagonismo politico e anticlericalismo nell’età della Restaurazione (1814–1848), Aosta Le Château. ———. 2021. All’oriente di Aosta: Massoneria e antimassoneria dai lumi ai fasci. Aosta: END. Di Pietro, Gianni. 1991. Da strumento ideologico a disciplina formativa. I programmi di storia nell’Italia contemporanea. Milano: Bruno Mondadori. Ferro, Marc. 1986. Comment on raconte l’histoire aux enfants à travers le monde entier. Paris: Payot.

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Giordan, Giuseppe, ed. 2010. I giovani valdostani e le sfide della modernità. Milano: Guerini e Associati. IRRE VDA. 2009. Giovanni Pezzoli un homme d’éducation et de culture. Aosta: Itla. Janin, Bernard. 1991. Le Val d’Aoste, tradition et renouveau. Aosta: Musumeci. Louvin, Robert. 1997. La Valle d’Aosta.Genesi attualità e prospettive di un ordinamento autonomo. Aosta: Musumeci. Luther, Jorg. 1995. Aspetti costituzionali dell’autonomia valdostana. In Storia d’Italia. Le regioni dall’Unità a oggi. La Valle d’Aosta, ed. Stuart Woolf, 743–772. Torino: Einaudi. Nicco, Roberto. 1997. Il percorso dell’autonomia. Aosta, Musumeci. Omezzoli, Tullio. 1995. Lingue e identità valdostane. In Storia d’Italia. Le regioni dall’Unità a oggi. La Valle d’Aosta, ed. Stuart Woolf, 137–202. Torino: Einaudi. ———. 2002. Dall’archivio di Jean-Joconde Stevenin: movimento cattolico e lotte politiche 1891–1956. Aosta: Le Château. ———. 2008. Vescovi, clero e seminari nella Diocesi di Aosta dalla fine dell’Ancien régime alla Prima guerra mondiale. Aosta: Le Château. Riccarand, Elio. 2000. Storia della Valle d’Aosta contemporanea, 1919–1945. Aosta: Stylos. ———. 2015. Cara Giulia, ti racconto la storia della Valle d’Aosta. Aosta: Musumeci. Saint-Blancat, Chantal. 1979. Trasformazione linguistica e culturale della minoranza valdostana. Aosta: Duc. Woolf, Stuart, ed. 1995. Storia d’Italia. Le regioni dall’Unità a oggi. La Valle d’Aosta. Torino: Einaudi. Zanotto, Andrea. 1968. Histoire de la Vallée d’Aoste. Aosta: Musumeci.

French School Textbooks on the History of Alsace in the Twentieth Century Eric Ettwiller

‘Children of our schools, learn the history of Alsace, this history will teach you to love France’. This last sentence from the preface of a regional history textbook published in 1920 (Waechter and Bouchot 1921: 5) sets out the principle that has guided the entire production of local textbooks since the beginning of the Third Republic according to Anne-Marie Thiesse, for whom ‘the republican primary school, which has sometimes been portrayed as the scene of a merciless battle waged by relentless Jacobins against regional cultures, has, on the contrary, cultivated a sense of local belonging as an indispensable propaedeutic to a sense of national belonging’ (Thiesse 2014: 4). Her study confirms Jean-François Chanet’s thesis on the relationship of teachers to the ‘small homelands’, which claims that ‘the Republic respected provincial traditions and customs, or accommodated them when it was unable to change them’ (Chanet 1996: 363). The second part of this statement refers to Alsace, a particular case examined by Chanet (Chanet 1996: 255–272). Alsace did not qualify as

E. Ettwiller (*) University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. S. Colla, A. Di Michele (eds.), History Education at the Edge of the Nation, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27246-2_9

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his sphere of study until 1918, when France regained possession of the region after 47 years of being part of the German Empire. Conquered by France under the reign of Louis XIV, Alsace had remained a predominantly German-speaking province, where primary education was only provided in French from the 1850s–1860s, and even then, not in all villages (Vogler 2003: 282, 284). The population spoke various German dialects, while Standard German was the language of writing and worship (Huck 2015: 128). From 1871 onwards, Alsace (together with part of Lorraine) formed a Reichsland, which was jointly owned by the other parts of the German Empire and administered by the emperor. The emperor was represented locally by a Statthalter who, assisted by a regional government, ran the Reichsland, whose population was represented by a regional assembly. Primary education was provided exclusively in German, except in French-speaking areas (a large part of Lorraine and some Alsatian valleys), where it was bilingual. Primary schools were confessional, following the pre-1871 model. Thus, when it regained Alsace in 1918, France, which had in the meanwhile become a secular republic, was faced with a major challenge. In 1924, the government of the Cartel des gauches (a coalition of radicals and socialists) announced its intention to introduce secular laws in Alsace, which had lost its autonomy; the population’s reaction was very hostile, especially among the Catholic majority (Gillig 2012: 63–68) and the project did not succeed. The Third Republic also agreed to include the teaching of German in the curriculum, as well as religious education (rector’s circular of 10 July 1923 mentioned in Chanet 1996: 261). Primary education in Alsace was nonetheless marked by the ‘direct method’ (Vogler 2003: 386–387), that is, teaching exclusively in French, notwithstanding the pupils’ ignorance of the language. Chanet focuses on the language issue rather than on the issue of history teaching in Alsace. However, it is no longer necessary to demonstrate that this teaching was charged with the mission of reinforcing patriotic sentiment in France, even before the emblematic textbooks of the Third Republic (Bruter 2010). The development of regional history textbooks was part of this strategy, as shown by Thiesse, who speaks of ‘a pedagogy of patriotic sentiment’ (Thiesse 2014: 4). But the situation of Alsace is particular: separated from France in 1871, mythologised by a French nationalism of which it is the ‘central motif’ (Turetti 2008: 108), the region was reintegrated into a triumphant France at the end of the First World War. In the meantime, Alsatians had developed a strong local

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patriotism (Boswell 2009: 119). The teaching of regional history in primary school contributed to its development: along the lines of a French ‘national novel’ as established by Pierre Nora,1 it emphasised the medieval past of Alsace, which was then part of the Holy Roman Empire (Harp 1998: 118). This Alsatian patriotism posed a threat to the centralised state of the French Third Republic after 1918. This chapter sets out to track, through the teaching of history, the trajectory of the historical identity of a long-disputed border region, caught between conflicting pressures to adapt to the French ‘national novel’ or alternative narratives. The issue of competition with the German ‘national novel’ is left out, for various reasons. Firstly, the teaching of regional history in primary schools before 1918 has already been studied by Stephen L. Harp, who perceives in the content of textbooks of the time ‘a fairly nuanced coverage of local history, medieval Germany history and contemporary Prussian leaders’ and concludes that the imprint of nationalism was quite discreet (Harp 1998: 118, 124). Secondly, there is a lack of data on the subject regarding the de facto annexation to Nazi Germany during the Second World War, and, above all, during the last century the region was French much longer than German, and the impact of regional history teaching in the French setting is therefore much greater on the historical identity of contemporary Alsace. The period considered here will therefore be the interwar and post-1945 intervals, which begins with a context of extreme hostility towards the ‘Germanic cultural heritage’ (Vogler 2003: 461) and evolves into one of Franco-German reconciliation and European construction. This research study will focus on regional history textbooks, following on from Thiesse, who has detected discrepancies between French and regional history as proposed in Alsatian textbooks (Thiesse 2014: 40, 51) but without pursuing this line of research. Textbooks are a significant source because they provide a framework of reference for teaching. All textbooks on regional or local history within the scope of this study will be examined: three for the interwar period (including the one mentioned at the beginning of this introduction), two for the years following the Second World War and only one for the end of the twentieth century. Other works that may be similar to textbooks will also be mentioned. While we can estimate the distribution of some of the textbooks, the great unknown is their use in the classroom. It should be noted that since 1918, the 1

 The expression is used in the conclusion of the last volume of his Lieux de mémoires (1992).

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teaching of Alsatian history has not been rigidly defined by the curricula but has been prescribed, whether it is followed or not.2 In the 1980s, a course called Langue et Culture Régionales (‘Regional Language and Culture’) was introduced in secondary schools but only as an optional module, taken by a minority of pupils. Nevertheless, whatever their degree of use, school textbooks on regional history bear witness to the representations of the past that have crossed and continue to cross Alsace.

A ‘Frenchified’ History During the Interwar Period Two textbooks for primary schools were published by Strasbourg publishers shortly after the end of the First World War and the return of Alsace to France: while German was banned as a language of instruction, the aim was to provide new learning materials with an eminently political mission, which was naturally to ‘Frenchify’ the minds of Alsatian youth. Until the 1930s, they remained, according to the research conducted for this article, the only ones of their kind. The first textbook is entitled Petite histoire d’Alsace et de Strasbourg à l’usage des écoles. The year of publication is not indicated, but it is most likely 1920.3 The identity of the authors—the preface specifies that there are several—also remains unknown, but a spelling mistake betrays the German-speaking origin of at least one of them.4 Despite the mention of Strasbourg in the title, the preface indicates that the book is intended for all primary schools in Alsace. The second textbook is entitled L’Histoire de l’Alsace en vingt leçons. Also published in 1920, it was written by Laurent Waechter and Léopold Bouchot. Waechter’s profile is particularly interesting. Born near Hagenau (Haguenau) in 1877, this shoemaker’s son had a successful career in German primary education in Alsace-Lorraine: the teacher was posted 2  The first regulatory text encouraging the teaching of local history and geography dates from before the reconquest of Alsace by France: it is a circular of 25 February 1911, addressed by the Minister of Public Instruction Maurice Faure to the rectors of the Académie (Thiesse 2014: 10–11). The use of local and regional history was again promoted after the Second World War (primary education curriculum of 17 October 1945, ministerial instructions of 7 December 1945). 3  The book refers to the festivities in November 1919 for the anniversary of the entry of French troops into Strasbourg (Petite histoire d’Alsace [1920]: 54); furthermore, the publisher’s address on the cover will not be the same in 1921. 4  ‘Nos truppes [editor’s note: troupes in French, Truppen in German] glorieuses trouvèrent le même accueil cordial dans l’Alsace entière’ (Petite histoire d’Alsace [1920]: 54).

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from 1908  in a teacher-training college (Lehrerseminare), before being appointed director of a Präparandenschule in Lauterburg (Lauterbourg) (1913).5 Retained by the French administration, Waechter was appointed primary school inspector in the north-western part of the Bas-Rhin (1919) and then inspector in charge of the organisation of adult education in the north of the department (1920).6 Between these two appointments, he stayed near Nancy for ‘professional development’. It was certainly there that he met Bouchot. Born near Toul in 1869, the Lorraine teacher had been headmaster of a primary school in Nancy since 1911 (Nicolas 1933: LVII). He was the author of the textbook Vingt-cinq leçons sur l’histoire de la Lorraine et du Barrois (Bouchot 1913) and inspired L’Histoire de l’Alsace en vingt leçons; a new and expanded edition of his textbook on Lorraine was also published in 1920.7 L’Histoire de l’Alsace en vingt leçons was a great success, which led to the publication of a new edition in 1921 with the addition of a twenty-first lesson on ‘Alsace and Lorraine since the Great War’. It is this edition that is the subject of our present study (Waechter and Bouchot 1921). In 1924, a third edition, revised and enlarged, corrected the title; the cover shows 20,000 copies sold. If the preface to the Petite histoire d’Alsace reveals nothing of the book’s patriotic objectives, the same cannot be said of the preface to L’Histoire de l’Alsace en vingt leçons, from which the most significant quote has already been cited. The author of this preface is no less than Christian Pfister, Dean of the Faculty of Letters at the new French university in Strasbourg. This Alsatian, who chose to leave his native region in 1871 to pursue his studies in France, welcomed the liberation from the ‘heavy and odious foreign yoke’ (Waechter and Bouchot 1921: 5). He does not hesitate to affirm that medieval Alsace was ‘a member […] of the kingdom of the Franks, even at the time when, nominally, it was part of the Germanic Empire’, which is of course completely false. The two authors in turn announce the patriotic content of the book: ‘To make known what Alsace really was in the past is not to make particularism, but to resurrect much French glory’ (Waechter and Bouchot 1921: 7). 5  It may also be noted that Lorenz Waechter—as he was called at the time—was granted leave to teach at the Deutsche Schule in Rome between 1904 and 1906 (AA, 105AL1461). 6  It is known that in 1919, in Lauterbourg, accusations of Germanophilia were made against Waechter, but the administration did not give them any credence (AA, 105AL1461, the commissaire de la République to the recteur d’académie, 01.09.1919). 7  The curator of the Musée lorrain in Nancy recommends it ‘particularly to the teachers of Moselle’, which had also just returned to French sovereignty (Sadoul 1920).

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Let us compare the structure of the two books. The Petite histoire d’Alsace contains 19 chapters: 18 chronological chapters and a final one devoted to ‘Strasbourg through the centuries’. It is in Chapter 12, devoted to the ‘Thirty Years’ War’, that France enters the scene. As for L’Histoire de l’Alsace en vingt leçons, which has 21 chapters in its 1921 reprint, we arrive at ‘Alsace reunited with France’ in Chapter 8. Moreover, as Thiesse has noted, this textbook is interspersed with boxes listing, for each period, ‘corresponding events in national history’, which leads the historian to say that ‘Alsatian history, as a result, seems to have been an integral part of national history from the outset’ (Thiesse 2014: 51). The structure of the two textbooks is, then, different. And the content? For the Petite histoire d’Alsace as for L’Histoire de l’Alsace en vingt leçons, the Gallic past is used to legitimise the ethnically French character of the Alsatians, supposedly descendants of the Gauls. Waechter and Bouchot write: ‘The various peoples who came to inhabit this fertile region mixed and formed the Gallic people, of the same origin as all the other French and quite different from the Germanic races settled on the other side of the Rhine’ (Waechter and Bouchot 1921: 9). This confirms historian Laird Boswell’s observation about the importance France placed on ethnicity in its relationship to Alsace (Boswell 2009: 119). In both textbooks, Caesar’s victory over the Germanic Ariovistus in 58BC is seen as the founding act in a history of resistance to eastern neighbours. The Alamanni, who drove out the Romans at the beginning of the fifth century and remained in Alsace, are described as harmful and transitory invaders. The Petite histoire d’Alsace notes as a consequence of the victory of the Frankish king Clovis over the Alamanni that ‘the Franks introduced their regulated legislation into our country’ and that ‘the towns and villages destroyed by the invasions of the Alamanni rose from their ruins’ (Petite histoire d’Alsace [1920]: 10). Treatment of the Merovingian and Carolingian periods is not difficult for a patriotic reading of regional history, as Clovis and Charlemagne are part of the French national story. A more delicate period, from this point of view, arrives with the division of the Carolingian empire and the annexing of Alsace to what would soon become the Holy Roman Empire. The Petite Histoire d’Alsace chooses to sidestep political history. The authors manage to avoid use of the word ‘empire’, which appears only in the section on the Peace of Westphalia. Only one emperor is named, as a relative of the Alsatian Pope Leo IX. The only political framework provided by the textbook is as follows: ‘In the 11th century Alsace was part of the Duchy

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of Alamania for some time. But the country was completely independent’ (Petite histoire d’Alsace [1920]: 21). L’Histoire de l’Alsace en vingt leçons similarly addresses the problem of belonging to the Holy Roman Empire: ‘The Holy Roman Empire was then an agglomeration of domains of all kinds, a tangle of fiefs […] which more or less recognised the authority of the emperor’ (Waechter and Bouchot 1921: 16–17). The two authors paint a picture of a region ruined by private wars … except for Strasbourg, which ‘became an independent republic’. No emperor is mentioned. Thus, while Alsace was the stronghold of two major dynasties in the history of the Holy Roman Empire, the Hohenstaufens and the Habsburgs, the two textbooks invent an Alsace that was virtually detached from the empire. Waechter and Bouchot even go so far as to describe a fourteenth-­ century Alsace asking for ‘the help of France to restore order’ (Waechter and Bouchot 1921: 20)! The propaganda task is easier for the transition to French rule in the seventeenth century. L’Histoire de l’Alsace en vingt leçons presents a province ‘reunited with France, not by force, but because it placed itself under the protection of the king’ (Waechter and Bouchot 1921: 27). The Petite histoire d’Alsace does not hide the reluctance of ‘some free towns’ but states that ‘the people of the countryside on the contrary preferred to depend on a neighbouring king than on a distant emperor’ and concludes that ‘they were right’ (Petite histoire d’Alsace [1920]: 37). The book is dithyrambic about the ‘great advantage’ of ‘the complete reunion of Alsace with France’ (Petite histoire d’Alsace [1920]: 37). L’Histoire de l’Alsace en vingt leçons ventures into linguistic matters: ‘the people use the Alsatian dialect almost everywhere; French is, however, used in several regions […]; German is used only as an official and literary language’ (Waechter and Bouchot 1921: 36) but the authors do not explain the reason behind the use of this language. Then came the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, the Restoration, the Second Empire, the 1870 war and its consequences, the annexing of Alsace and part of Lorraine to the new German Empire, denounced by the Alsatian and Lorraine deputies in Bordeaux in February 1871: reproduced in full in L’Histoire de l’Alsace en vingt leçons, this protest is summarised in the Petite histoire d’Alsace. For the other events, the two books make different choices. The Petite histoire d’Alsace goes straight to the First World War, while Waechter and Bouchot depict an Alsace suffering under a ‘German yoke’ that follows all the clichés of the ‘lost provinces’ myth (Turetti 2008), starting with the false number of 400,000 Alsatians and

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Lorrains who left their native land to join France in 1871–72 (Waechter and Bouchot 1921: 50).8 For the First World War, the Petite histoire d’Alsace describes the movements of the French army and ends with its entry into Strasbourg in November 1918, all in the same final chapter. L’Histoire de l’Alsace en vingt leçons devotes a chapter to the conflict itself, suggesting massive desertions of Alsatians from the German army (Waechter and Bouchot 1921: 56).9 A separate chapter deals with the armistice. Chapter 21, added for the second edition, portrays Alsace as French again. It points to rapid progress in the acquisition of the French language. The conclusion takes a political stand, defending ‘assimilation’. In 1931, a new textbook dealing with regional history appeared: Histoire nationale et régionale à l’usage des écoles primaires d’Alsace et de Lorraine. It was written by Brother Etienne Fritsch, a teacher in a rural Catholic secondary school in the Bas-Rhin (Sibler 1987: 121). The new textbook was intended only for elementary-level education: it begins with the ‘origins’ of Alsace and ends in 1610, the year of the assassination of King Henry IV of France. Two other volumes apparently followed for the intermediate levels (Sibler 1987: 123), with the continuation of the history, but no examples could be found in the course of research for this article. While Fritsch does not indulge in vociferous propaganda, his choice of mixing French history and the history of Alsace, in a much more thorough manner than in L’Histoire de l’Alsace en vingt leçons, could only transmit a distorted vision to the young pupils, who would know everything about the Capetians, but not have encountered the name of even a single Germanic emperor. It is one thing to include the history of Alsace in a national curriculum, but it is quite another to omit all references to the Germanic rulers in the chapters dedicated to local history. In a region where the history of the Holy Roman Empire was painstakingly taught until 1918, this absence is inevitably noticed. In 1938, the autonomist deputy Joseph Rossé—also a former teacher but removed in 1926—wrote in an editorial for the monthly magazine of the youth movement of the Alsatian Catholic party, the Union Populaire Républicaine (UPR): ‘Unfortunately, current school programmes and methods teach the life of 8  The historian Alfred Wahl estimated the number of Alsatian-Lorraine emigrants in 1871–72 at 128,000 (Wahl 1974: 190). 9  Historians Jean-Noël and Francis Grandhomme refute this myth: while they acknowledge that ‘it is impossible, given the current state of the sources, to give a figure for deserters’, they note that the percentage of prisoners among the mobilised Alsatians-Lorrains was not very different from the German average (Grandhomme and Grandhomme 2013: 84).

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Vercingetorix in much greater detail than the most magnificent episodes in the history of our little country’ (Rossé 1938). Although polemical in nature, the statement is no less an expression of a shared malaise: the UPR, a party that navigated between regionalism and autonomism, was the preferred choice of the majority of Alsatian voters.10 If we add to the textbooks some oriented children’s literature such as L’Histoire d’Alsace racontée aux petits enfants d’Alsace et de France by the caricaturist Hansi, which is full of ‘historical shortcuts whose aim is to demonise the Germans’ (Bruant 2008: 111), we can see that the context of the interwar period was not conducive to the transmission of a history of Alsace that took into account the region’s Germanic past.11 However, a regional and local history had already been taught in German schools before 1918, as part of the Heimatkunde. Textbooks had been written for the whole of Alsace-Lorraine and for the different districts (Kreise). These books remained in the libraries of teachers and families too. It is likely that many teachers, trained in the German era, shared Rossé’s feelings about the crushing of regional history by the French ‘national novel’.12

After the Second World War The de facto annexation of Alsace by Nazi Germany in June 1940, which lasted until the end of 1944 or the beginning of 1945, depending on the locality, subjected young people to a historical narrative that was the reverse of the previous version. The artist Tomi Ungerer testifies to this in a book of memories about his childhood: ‘As for the teaching of history, imagine my surprise to learn that our ancestors were not Gauls but alte 10  In the 1936 legislative elections, the UPR won in 9 of the 16 Alsatian electoral districts; together with two dissident communists, one centre-left autonomist and four Lorrainers from the department of Moselle, the UPR deputies formed a parliamentary group in the Chamber of Deputies that was specifically Alsatian-Lorrain: Joseph Rossé was the secretary of this group (Baechler 1982: 498–500). 11  Published in 1912 for a mainly French audience (Bruant 2008: 107, 117), L’Histoire d’Alsace racontée aux petits enfants d’Alsace et de France was republished after the First World War (Hansi 1919). 12  Chanet concludes too quickly from the answers to a questionnaire that autonomism was ‘unanimously rejected’ by the teaching profession in Alsace (Chanet 1996: 267). In the same sentence, however, he specifies that this movement was ‘embodied in the teaching community at the time by Joseph Rossé, assistant professor at the Colmar primary school […] and future deputy of the Haut-Rhin’. As a matter of fact, Rossé was not isolated in his professional environment: he was a trade union leader.

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Germanen, that Charlemagne alias Karl der Grosse did not speak a word of French and that the Franks, the Burgunder, in cahoots with the Vandals, had come from the east to colonise France’ (Ungerer 1991: 47).13 The content of the teaching reported by Ungerer is, historically, relatively accurate. The Nazi historical discourse on Alsace was, however, false because of its nationalist obsession and its refusal to acknowledge any French imprint.14 When France regained control of Alsace, it undertook a much more thorough de-Germanisation policy than that of post-1918. The pre-war autonomists, designated as responsible for the annexation of 1940, were the preferred target of the purge courts and in 1945 the prefect of the Bas-­Rhin even considered the possible transplantation of certain villages with a reputation for being German-friendly to south-west France (Vonau 2005: 140, 175). In the same year, the teaching of German was removed from the curriculum of Alsatian primary schools; it was reintroduced in 1952, but as an optional subject and ‘without much result’ (Huck 2015: 256–257, 259–266). In schoolyards, pupils who spoke Alsatian were punished (Huck 2015: 253–255), and the slogan ‘c’est chic de parler français’ (‘speaking French is fashionable’) was displayed everywhere (Vogler 2003: 461). Alsatian identity had become taboo (Vogler 2003: 462). The teaching of history is part of this cultural eradication process, with the publication of a new regional history textbook: Histoire d’Alsace à l’usage des établissements scolaires des premier et second degré, which appeared in 1946. The author was Pierre Haas, born in 1897 near Belfort (in this small part of French-speaking Alsace that remained French after 1871), a volunteer in the French army in 1917, a prisoner of war, an employee in the finance administration after 1918 and, finally, a teacher. He was stationed in Strasbourg when the Second World War broke out and returned there after the conflict, to teach literature and history in a technical secondary school (Schouler 2001). The book’s preface was written by another man from Belfort, Marcel Edmond Naegelen, son of an Alsatian who supported France. Naegelen was a teacher at the Protestant Ecole normale in Strasbourg from November 1918, a militant trade 13  It should be noted, however, that the Germanic origin of the Franks appeared in two history textbooks of Alsace between the wars (Petite histoire d’Alsace [1920]: 10; Fritsch 1931: 25). 14  This can be seen very clearly in the catalogue of a historical exhibition held in Strasbourg in 1942 (Rapp, 1942).

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unionist for the introduction of secular laws in Alsace and a socialist elected to the Strasbourg town council. He fought hard against the autonomists during the interwar period; he was a Resistance fighter during the Second World War, a member of parliament at the Liberation, and was appointed Minister of National Education in January 1946 (Strauss 1996). The ministerial preface sets the tone of Haas’ Histoire d’Alsace: ‘Alsace, it is a fact, has lived for a long time on the fringe of the French community. Its life was detached from it, at the threshold of the Middle Ages, only to rejoin it at the end. In modern times, two abductions have separated it again. The foreigner has too often tried to use this as a pretext to proclaim his Germanism. Impartial history must reject this claim’. Naegelen thus claims that Alsace has always lived ‘on the edge of and almost outside the Holy Roman Empire’, subjugated by French Gothic art and soon claiming the protection of the French kings (Haas 1946: 3). The book contains 34 chapters, each introduced with an engraving and followed by a summary, questions and readings. The distribution of the chapters clearly favours the French periods: a quarter of the textbook is devoted to the Revolution and the Empire. Haas instrumentalises the Gallic Alsace, reduces the Alamanni imprint to nothing and mentions only two Holy Roman emperors (Haas 1946: 13, 23, 27–28). The Hohenstaufen are presented without being named; Haas only notes that ‘during their reign, blood flowed; the suburbs of Strasbourg and Rouffach, as well as Molsheim, were burned’ (Haas 1946: 27). He also sees the beginning of Alsace’s allegiance to France in the sixteenth century (Haas 1946: 46). The real French period, beginning in the seventeenth century, is naturally shown in a particularly favourable light (Fig. 1). Haas intends to show the fusion between France and its new province, even if it means inventing an essentially French immigration to repopulate Alsace after the Thirty Years’ War (Haas 1946: 75), whereas the majority of the immigrants came from German Switzerland and the southern area of the Holy Roman Empire (Boehler 1994: 279–289). Then comes ‘German domination’, which opens with an engraving of departing Alsatian families with the caption: ‘Alsatians leave Alsace en masse to avoid becoming Germans’ (Haas 1946: 140) (Fig. 2). The next chapter, on ‘German administration’, intends to demonstrate ‘the persistence of French feelings’ (Haas 1946: 146). After the First World War, ‘France brings freedom’ (Haas 1946: 154). However, the author cannot conceal the Alsatian unease: ‘The people were led to believe that France intended to hinder the freedom of religion. This agitation caused considerable harm to Alsace, which it did a disservice to in

Fig. 1  Illustration from Histoire d’Alsace (1946). The choice, to evoke the eighteenth century, of a ceremony celebrating the “reunion” of Alsace with France, intends to show the adherence of the population to its French destiny

Fig. 2  Illustration from Histoire d’Alsace (1946). The caption, “The Alsatians left Alsace en masse to avoid becoming Germans”, suggests an exodus of the majority of the population, which is far from the reality

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France, and to France, whose prestige in the world it weakened’ (Haas 1946: 155). The chapter on ‘intellectual life in the 19th and 20th centuries’ considers only artists, writers and scholars who had made a career in France, with the exception of the writer René Schickele, ‘who expresses himself in German, but whose thought is French’ (Haas 1946: 163). The last chapter, on the Second World War, is very factual and deals with both general and regional history. A review published in 1948 in the Revue d’Alsace, an Alsatian historical journal, summarised the historical education proposals for Alsatian youth as follows: Hansi’s Histoire d’Alsace, Haas’ Histoire d’Alsace and a novelty, the subject of the review, the Histoire d’Alsace pour les jeunes, by Lucien Sittler, archivist of the Town of Colmar (Joachim 1948). The work, magnificently illustrated by a renowned artist, is not a textbook but instead a narrative, which does not hesitate to use legends or have historical or non-­ historical characters speak (Sittler 1951). The tone is both regionalist, showing Alsace as a specific entity due to its Germanic heritage, and patriotic, exalting the French destiny of the region from 1648 onwards. The regionalist approach was soon to be found in a school textbook, although its distribution was limited to one town. The aforesaid book is Haguenau. Histoire d’une ville d’Alsace racontée aux jeunes, published in 1950 by the Museum of Haguenau.15 The author is also a municipal archivist, André Marcel Burg, who was born in 1913 in a village near Strasbourg and served as priest, doctor of theology, curator of the museums, archives and library of Haguenau from 1946 (Traband 1984). In his foreword, the mayor of Haguenau presents himself as the initiator of the work: desirous of providing his constituents with a good knowledge of their past, he ‘asked the young and active curator of the library, archives and museum of Haguenau […] to write a history of our town, intended for young people first of all, but no less recommendable for adults’. Is it, then, a school textbook? It can be considered as such, thanks to its presentation in nine chapters, divided into numbered sub-­ chapters, illustrated and followed by readings; also, at the end of the book, there is a ‘pedagogical supplement’, one page per chapter with a questionnaire, a list of objects from the period covered that are kept in the Town Museum and a dialogue to be interpreted or invented by the pupils. The primary school inspector who introduces this supplement sees in the local 15  I would like to thank Jean-Michel Niedermeyer for bringing the existence of this book to my attention.

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remains links between ‘the small history’ and ‘the great history of the Nation’; he cites two official texts from 1945 encouraging the use of local history in primary education to ward off any accusation of ‘snobbery’ or ‘fashionable regionalism’ (Burg 1950: 141). ‘It was in response to this wish […] that Monsieur A.  M. Burg […] composed the present little work, in order to put in the hands of the teachers and pupils of this town a precious working instrument’, he explains (Burg 1950: 142). The expectations of the school authorities thus interfered with the municipal order. The history presented by Burg is devoid of the nationalistic view to which the textbooks examined earlier have accustomed us. Regarding Antiquity, the Celts (who ‘start from Germany’), the Germans and the Romans are all presented as invaders (Burg 1950: 11, 13). The author points out that after Caesar’s victory over Ariovistus, a Germanic tribe (the Triboqui) ‘remained in Alsace and settled in the region between the Zorn and the Moder’ (Burg 1950: 15). The importance of the Alamanni, who were ‘above all farmers’, for the cultural history of Alsace is made clear: ‘This occupation of our country by the Alamanni and the Franks had many far-reaching consequences. Alsatian has been spoken here ever since’ (Burg 1950: 19). Chapter 2, ‘Haguenau is born and grows’, focuses on the Hohenstaufen emperors, who built a palace in the town. One of the titles of this chapter states that ‘Haguenau grew under the protection of the Hohenstaufens’: we are far from the suburb burners described by Haas! Chapter 3, ‘Haguenau, free imperial city (Freie Reichstadt)’, which deals with municipal institutions in the Middle Ages, dares to be nostalgic: ‘Haguenau, free imperial city! Haguenau, capital of the Decapolis! Haguenau, the seat of the Great Bailliage! What a great role our city played in the past, a much more important role than now!’ (Burg 1950: 45). Chapter 4 on ‘Life in Haguenau in the Middle Ages’ brings the atmosphere of the time to life in the original German description. The Thirty Years’ War opens Chapter 5, entitled ‘Troubled Times’. After the conflict, Haguenau resisted the French monarchy, whose troops set fire to the town twice. How could the resistance of Haguenau and its destruction by France be presented without being suspicious from a patriotic point of view? ‘The cause of all the difficulties is the poorly drafted and unclear Treaty of Westphalia’, explains Burg (Burg 1950: 72), who clears France of responsibility for the two fires, having reacted in February 1677 to the advance of imperial troops and in September 1677 to the actions of a local bandit (Burg 1950: 75–76). Chapter 6 presents ‘Haguenau, Town of the King’: the old municipal organisation disappears

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and ‘the people are hardly satisfied with these changes’ (Burg 1950: 83) but, on the other hand, ‘in times of peace, the policing is well done in the kingdom of France’ (Burg 1950: 89). ‘The revolutionary hurricane’, tackled in Chapter 7, was particularly violent in Haguenau: Burg recalls that the imperial army of Wurmser, a general of Alsatian origin, received a favourable reception in the town and that many inhabitants subsequently fled the advance of the revolutionary troops (Burg 1950: 101–102), but he also encourages children to remember the names of Napoleonic generals who were originally from Alsace.16 Chapter 8, ‘From the First to the Second Empire’, deals briefly with political life, including the capture of 1870 and the relative responsibility of Napoleon III (Burg 1950: 112). The ninth (and final) chapter deals with the period ‘from 1871 to the present day’, that is, until the aftermath of the Second World War. The author uses an interesting tactic to talk about the Reichsland period in positive terms: he completely ignores the political context and talks about the achievements of the then mayor. It is also worth noting the author’s neutrality in presenting the general context of the period: ‘Three wars broke out in our country: France and Germany fought over Alsace and four times Alsatians had to change their nationality. Each time, serious disturbances resulted and economic life was disrupted’ (Burg 1950: 127). This does not prevent him from describing the enthusiastic welcome of French troops in 1918 and the suffering of the population under the Nazi regime during the Second World War. Although it gives expression to a voice that is free of nationalist phraseology, the local Haguenau manual, which is both cautious and daring, is nonetheless an isolated work. Why Haguenau and not other towns in Alsace? It is difficult to answer this question. It is true that Haguenau was one of the towns in Alsace—like Strasbourg and Colmar—that had an autonomist municipality during the interwar period, but the mayor, Désiré Brumbt, writer of the preface to the manual, was the one who overthrew this municipality in the 1935 elections. It is known that the municipal archives of Haguenau were for a long time directed by Abbé Gromer, an autonomist general councillor who was succeeded by Abbé Burg in 1946, but there is no information on the latter’s political opinions.

16  The dialogue proposed for this chapter is a discussion between two burghers of Haguenau, one wanting to flee before the revolutionary troops, the other wanting to stay because he has ‘faith in the French nation’ (Burg 1950: 149).

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A New Approach at the End of the Twentieth Century Although the dialect and Alsatian character had their defenders from the end of the 1940s, notably with the Barabli—a bilingual satirical cabaret founded in Strasbourg in 1946 by the actor and playwright Germain Muller—it was the events of May 1968 that kick-started an Alsatian cultural movement; a left-wing Front Culturel Alsacien demanded official recognition of Alsatian history in the mid-1970s (Peter 2018: 36–42, 53). ‘The reappropriation of the past among young activists in the early 1970s was difficult and gradual’, recalls Armand Peter, who points to an ‘editorial weakness’ (Peter 2018: 114). In this context, a few teachers, under the patronage of the rectorate, designed booklets for primary schools. Two of the booklets in this series, entitled Découvrir l’Alsace, were mainly historical: L’Alsace à l’âge de fer (Oberlé 1975) and L’Alsace romaine (Oberlé 1976). These books, full of exercises which also provide an opportunity to do French and mathematics, are free of any patriotic discourse but they do not constitute a history of Alsace in the strict sense of the word, if only because of the periods covered. However, the need for a new historical account of Alsace, purged of nationalist propaganda which does not go down well with European construction, is felt. In its 1979 annual review, the Barabli mocked the discourse of the school textbooks in use until then, by showing a female teacher reciting to her class: ‘Alsace has only existed since 1648. Before 1648, Alsace was nothing at all: an uncultivated, swampy country where mosquitoes, snakes, the Hohenstaufen and the Habsburgs reigned’.17 The actors—some of them elderly—who play this skit are disguised as children, which increases the comic effect while illustrating the infantilisation of Alsace; on the blackboard is written: ‘Hansi is the greatest Alsatian’. The 1980s marked an inflection point. The circonscriptions d’action régionale created in 1960, which until then had only been a framework for regional planning, became collectivités territoriales (territorial authorities) in 1982. Alsace was once again a political object. The same year, the rector of the Académie de Strasbourg recognised German as a regional language and

17  This sketch appears under the following link: https://sites.ina.fr/germain-muller/ focus/chapitre/2/medias/Muller00203, accessed 17 April 2022.

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introduced a ‘Langue et Culture Régionales’ option in secondary education.18 Nevertheless, it was not until 1990 that a new textbook on the history of Alsace appeared: L’Alsace, une histoire, even though the work ‘is not strictly speaking a textbook’ but ‘rather a companion intended primarily for middle school and high school students, but equally for the general public’, according to its authors (Vogler et al. 1995: 12).19 There are five authors: Bernard Vogler, professor of Alsatian history at the University of the Humanities of Strasbourg, wrote five of the nine chapters and directed the whole project, the other four chapters being divided between a lecturer (Georges Bischoff), two secondary school teachers (François Igersheim and Charles Zumsteeg) and the director of the Antiquités historiques et préhistoriques d’Alsace (François Pétry). The preface, co-signed by the chairs of the two Alsatian departments and the president of the regional council, is at the same time a legitimisation of Alsace within the French framework and a recognition of its hybrid and European character (Vogler et al. 1995: 7). This is followed by a foreword by Senator Henri Goetschy, former president of the Haut-Rhin General Council, who was very active in the defence of bilingualism (Vogler et al. 1995: 8–9). In fact, there are three forewords, one in French, one in Alsatian and the third in standard German, with different contents. In the French version, we learn that it was Goetschy who ‘suggested’ to Vogler ‘to write a condensed history of Alsace for young people’. To be a ‘link between two great neighbours’, Alsace must ‘love its own personality and identity’. In Alsatian, Goetschy congratulates the historians who wrote the book for having written an ‘objective and truthful history’. Finally, the standard German version recognises German as a regional language, as did the rector. The authors set the tone of neutrality right from the introduction: referring to the various changes of sovereignty since the Holy Roman Empire, they point out that these were accompanied by ‘vexations, grievances and resentments’, making no distinction between French and 18  Rector Deyon’s circular ‘on regional language and culture in Alsace’ of 9 June 1982 states: ‘Alsatian, which is spoken by the majority of the inhabitants of this region, has as its written expression a language of international culture and diffusion, German’ (quoted in Denis 2015: 131). 19  This book is a continuation of those previously studied: its use is optional and the age range of the pupils in the colleges after the school reforms of the 1960s corresponds to that of the oldest pupils in primary education before these reforms.

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German annexations (Vogler et al. 1995: 11). But neither was it a question of fostering Alsatian nationalism on ethnic grounds: ‘Alsatians are not a homogeneous people’. François Pétry reminds us of this as he finishes his treatment of Antiquity: ‘Alsace is […] a land of fusion of peoples’ (Vogler et  al. 1995: 41). Like Burg, the archaeologist points out that Germanic tribes populated a large part of the region in Roman times; similarly, he mentions the presence of the Alamanni as mercenaries and settlers ‘well before’ their defeat by the emperor Julian the Apostate in 357 (Vogler et al. 1995: 28, 38). Georges Bischoff, dealing in the second part with the Middle Ages, mentions the various Germanic emperors, who are even listed from the ninth to the seventeenth century (Vogler et al. 1995: 52). Its last chapter, on the Habsburg possessions in Alsace, is written in German; further chapters and texts in German follow. The title of Part 3, ‘The Renaissance and the Golden Age’, is also characteristic of the new emphasis on the Holy Roman Empire period. In the following section, which covers the period in which Alsace became French, Vogler points out that the Peace of Westphalia was far from giving all of Alsace to the French king (Vogler et  al. 1995: 99–100). The historian traces ‘the stages of annexation’ by Louis XIV, while stressing that it was not well accepted (Vogler et al. 1995: 103). The Revolution and the First Empire are the subject of a ten-page fifth part. In Part 6, on the period 1815–1870, François Zumsteeg devotes a chapter to the language question and reproduces, among other things, excerpts from an 1867 essay on ‘the conservation of the German language in Alsace’. The most significant novelty appears in the following parts. Part 7 is entitled ‘The Reichsland’, the official name of Alsace-Lorraine  between 1871 and 1918, which in itself shows a desire to consider the German regime objectively. François Igersheim, the author, does not dwell on the 1870 war, nor on the Bordeaux protest. He clearly presents the new institutional and political situation. Above all, he shows the development of the region, with the ‘urban boom’, the ‘new boom’ of industry, the ‘changing life’ in the sense of greater comfort, ‘the right to security, leisure, culture’ and ‘a very important and well-equipped imperial university’ (Vogler et al. 1995: 152, 156, 161–164). In the chapter on the revival of the Alsatian identity, Igersheim quotes Schickele in the original German. The rest of the story, which is just as sensitive, is dealt with in Part 8, ‘Tears and Reconciliations’. Here Vogler discusses the Alsatians sent to French internment camps during the First World War, the expulsion of ‘almost all Germans’ after the conflict and all the difficulties of returning to France.

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He addresses the issue of Alsatian autonomism by clarifying terminology, distinguishing between ‘separatists’, ‘autonomists’ stricto sensu and ‘regionalists’ (Vogler et al. 1995: 171, 177). Finally, Part 9, also written by Vogler, deals with Alsace from 1945 onwards and addresses, among other things, the issue of bilingualism and regression of the dialect. It is surprising that there is no reference to immigration, even though the three contributors to the preface see the book as a way of integrating Alsatians from elsewhere. At the very end of the twentieth century, a small booklet was published by Heimetsproch un Tradition, an association for the preservation of the dialect in Alsace and Moselle: Chronologie de l’Histoire d’Alsace. The book is aimed particularly at ‘secondary school pupils’ (Urban and Kussmaul 2000: 4), especially in bilingual courses, since the first half in French is followed by its equivalent in German. The copy consulted comes from a classroom library of a private bilingual primary school in Haguenau, the ABCM-Zweisprachigkeit network, which practises regional language immersion.

Conclusion As a student in a private secondary school in Colmar at the turn of the century, I encountered very few digressions on the history of Alsace. The Langue et Culture Régionales option was only offered at the lycée, and I took this until the baccalaureate. We studied geology, viticulture, half-­ timbered houses and traditions, but not history. L’Alsace, une histoire was available at the ‘centre de documentation et d’information’ (school library), but the textbook was never used for the option. This short ‘ego-histoire’ shows the limits of the new historical discourse in terms of penetrating the school public. More attractive, perhaps, are the comic books on local history that have been flourishing since the early 2000s but not all of them are free of the nationalist undertone.20 In the interwar period and after the Second World War, we saw a denial of the Germanic component of Alsatian history as part of a project ‘with overtly colonial overtones’, as Boswell describes post-1918 policy (Boswell 2009: 118). The 1950 textbook from Haguenau, which we have seen to distance itself from this propaganda, had developed avoidance strategies 20  This is particularly true of the two world wars (Ettwiller 2019: 57–58; Ettwiller 2021: 18).

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for dealing with patriotically sensitive periods such as the Reichsland, which is only objectively addressed in the 1990 textbook. In fact, even during the production of the latter work, there were debates about terminology between the authors and the regional civil servants involved in the project: one of the latter saw the expression ‘barbarian invasions’ as a deprecatory judgement about the Alamanni. The anecdote is recounted by one of the co-authors, who has since become director of the Institute of Medieval History at the University of Strasbourg, in an essay with a provocative title, Pour en finir avec l’histoire d’Alsace (Bischoff 2015: 30). Paradoxically, in 2021, this now-retired professor spoke out in the regional press against a bill introduced by an Alsatian MP calling for the generalisation of regional culture and history teaching in France (Bischoff 2021). He claimed there were enough museums to teach Alsatian youth their history. However, it turns out that the place of historical mediation most frequented by the Alsatian school public is the Mémorial d’Alsace-Moselle in Schirmeck, which deals almost exclusively with the Second World War, with a presentation that is sometimes tendentious, such as the panel associating the German annexation of 1940 with the ‘return of the German language’, even though German was the majority language of the Alsatian press throughout the interwar period. Given the importance of history in the representations that Alsatian schoolchildren still project onto Germany today and the negative charge that these representations confer on the German language in Alsace (Faucompré 2020), one cannot fail to make a link between the way in which regional history has been taught in the past and the decline in the use of standard and dialectal German among the population. Logically, if a more objective history of Alsace were to be taught, it should (conversely) contribute to the promotion of bilingualism.

References Unpublished Sources - 105AL1461, Laurent Waechter’s personal file. 5M HAG PHIL communauté, chroniques: Chronique du pensionnat Sainte-­ Philomène, 13.03.1931. AL Section: Archives of the administrations of Alsace-Lorraine, 1871–1945, sub-­ Section 105AL, Oberschulrat (High Council of Schools). Archives d’Alsace, Strasbourg (AA). Archives des Sœurs de la Divine Providence de Ribeauvillé, Ribeauvillé (ASDPR)

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Online Sources https://sites.ina.fr/germain-­muller/focus/chapitre/2/medias/Muller00203. Accessed 17 April 2022. Excerpt from a 1983 France 3 report on a website of the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA) devoted to Germain Muller: https://sites.ina.fr/germain-­muller/.

Secondary Literature Baechler, Christian. 1982. Le parti catholique alsacien, 1890–1939. Du Reichsland à la république jacobine. Paris: Ophrys. Bischoff, Georges. 2015. Pour en finir avec l’histoire d’Alsace. Pontarlier and Strasbourg: Belvédère. ———. 2021. Une loi pour enseigner l’histoire régionale? Quelle Schnapsidee !. Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace, October 10. Boehler, Jean-Michel. 1994. La paysannerie de la plaine d’Alsace (1648–1789), tome 1. Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg. Boswell, Laird. 2009. Rethinking the Nation at the Periphery. French Politics, Culture & Society 27: 111–126. Bouchot, Léopold. 1913. Vingt-cinq leçons sur l’histoire de la Lorraine et du Barrois. Nancy: Vagner et Lambert. Bruant, Benoît. 2008. Hansi, l’artiste tendre et rebelle. Strasbourg: La Nuée Bleue. Bruter, Annie. 2010. L’enseignement de l’histoire nationale à l’école primaire avant la IIIe République. Histoire de l’éducation 126 (2): 11–32. Burg, André Marcel. 1950. Haguenau. Histoire d’une ville d’Alsace racontée aux jeunes. Haguenau: Musée de Haguenau. Chanet, Jean-François. 1996. L’École républicaine et les petites patries. Paris: Aubier. Denis, Marie-Noële. 2015. Les politiques linguistiques en Alsace et la régression du dialecte. In Contacts, conflits et créations linguistiques, ed. Guylaine Brun-­ Trigaud, 129–141. Paris: Éditions du Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques. Ettwiller, Eric. 2019. L’histoire régionale de la Première Guerre mondiale dans les écoles alsaciennes. In 1914–1918 en Alsace-Moselle, ed. Eric Ettwiller and Eric Mutschler, 11–59. Ebersheim: Unsri Gschìcht. ———. 2021. Quelle culture historique pour les Alsaciens du XXIe siècle ? Land un Sproch 219: 18–19. Faucompré, Chloé. 2020. Didactiser les représentations des élèves: une méthode innovante pour faciliter l’apprentissage de l’allemand en Alsace. In Rupture et transmission. Histoires, langues et liminarités en Alsace depuis 1815, ed. Dominique Rosenblatt and Gérard Schaffhauser, 129–151. Lautenbach: Stockbrunna. Fritsch, Etienne. 1931. Histoire nationale et régionale à l’usage des écoles primaires d’Alsace et de Lorraine. Cours élémentaire (des origines à 1610). Colmar: Union.

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Gillig, Jean-Marie. 2012. Bilinguisme et religion à l’école. La question scolaire en Alsace de 1918 à nos jours. Strasbourg: La Nuée Bleue. Grandhomme, Jean-Noël, and Francis Grandhomme. 2013. Les Alsaciens-Lorrains dans la Grande Guerre. Strasbourg: La Nuée Bleue. Haas, Pierre. 1946. Histoire d’Alsace à l’usage des établissements scolaires des premier et second degré. Paris and Strasbourg: Istra. Hansi [Jean-Jacques Waltz]. 1919. L’Histoire d’Alsace racontée aux petits enfants d’Alsace et de France. Paris: Floury (first edition: 1912). Harp, Stephen L. 1998. Learning to Be Loyal: Primary Schooling as Nation Building in Alsace and Lorraine, 1850–1940. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Huck, Dominique. 2015. Une histoire des langues de l’Alsace. Strasbourg: La Nuée Bleue. Joachim, Jules. 1948. L’histoire pour la jeunesse. Revue d’Alsace 88: 256. Nicolas, Emile. 1933. Compte-rendu de l’exercice 1932–1933. Mémoires de l’Académie de Stanislas, année 1932–1933, 183e année, 6e série 30: LI–LXVII. Oberlé, Jean-Claude. 1975. L’Alsace à l’âge du fer. Colmar: Alsatia. ———. 1976. L’Alsace romaine. Colmar: Alsatia. Peter, Armand. 2018. Mémoires militantes de la culture alsacienne, 1945–2015. Bergheim: bf. Petite histoire d’Alsace et de Strasbourg à l’usage des écoles. 1920. Strasbourg: A. Vix et Cie. Rapp, Alfred. 1942. Das Elsass, Herzland und Schildmauer des Reiches. 2000 Jahre deutscher Kampf am Oberrhein. Strasbourg: Oberrheinischer Gauverlag und Druckerei GmbH. Rossé, Joseph. 1938. Erwirb es…. Jung-Elsass, August. Sadoul, Charles. 1920. L. Bouchot, Vingt-cinq leçons sur l’histoire de la Lorraine et du Barrois. Le Pays lorrain 12: 45. Schouler, Georges. 2001. Haas Pierre Joseph. In Dictionnaire biographique du Territoire de Belfort, tome 1, 299–300. Belfort: Société belfortaine d’émulation. Sibler, Denys. 1987. Frère Etienne  – Emile Fritsch. Pays d’Alsace 139/140: 121–123. Sittler, Lucien. 1951. Histoire d’Alsace pour les jeunes. Colmar: Alsatia (first edition: 1947). Strauss, Léon. 1996. Naegelen Marcel Edmond. In Nouveau dictionnaire de biographie alsacienne, vol. no 28, 2796–2798. Strasbourg: FSHAA. Thiesse, Anne-Marie. 2014. Ils apprenaient la France. L’exaltation des régions dans le discours patriotique. Marseille: OpenEdition (first edition: 1997. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme). Traband, André. 1984. Burg André Marcel. In Nouveau dictionnaire de biographie alsacienne, no. 5, 422. Strasbourg: FSHAA.

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Turetti, Laurence. 2008. Quand la France pleurait l’Alsace-Lorraine: les “provinces perdues” aux sources du patriotisme républicain, 1870–1914. Strasbourg: La Nuée Bleue. Ungerer, Tomi. 1991. A la guerre comme à la guerre. Dessins et souvenirs d’enfance. Strasbourg: La Nuée Bleue. Urban, Walter, and Marc Kussmaul. 2000. Chronologie de l’Histoire d’Alsace. s.l.: Heimetsproch un Tradition. Vogler, Bernard. 2003. Histoire culturelle de l’Alsace. Strasbourg: La Nuée Bleue (first edition: 1994). Vogler, Bernard, et al. 1995. L’Alsace, une histoire. Strasbourg: Oberlin (first edition: 1990). Vonau, Jean-Laurent. 2005. L’épuration en Alsace. La face méconnue de la Libération, 1944–1953. Strasbourg: Editions du Rhin. Waechter, Laurent, and Léopold Bouchot. 1921. L’Histoire de l’Alsace en vingt leçons. Nancy, Paris, and Strasbourg: Berger-Levrault, second edition (first edition: 1920). Wahl, Alfred. 1974. L’option et l’émigration des Alsaciens-Lorrains (1871–1872). Paris: Ophrys.

PART III

Managing Complexity and Multiperspectivity in the History Classroom

Teaching Sami Pasts and Presents: Complexities in Teaching Practice in Contemporary Swedish Classrooms Anna-Lill Drugge and Björn Norlin

How is it possible to teach about the history and civics of minorities in an informed and sensitive way when you yourself have never studied such issues during your own school days, let alone while completing teacher training at university? What teaching material do you use when there are no textbooks that deal with these topics in an initiated manner? How can you navigate classroom discussions when the potential risk of unearthing stereotypes and prejudices acts as a constraint? These are issues raised during interviews with a group of Swedish school teachers of social

A.-L. Drugge (*) Department of Language Studies, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] B. Norlin Department of Education, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. S. Colla, A. Di Michele (eds.), History Education at the Edge of the Nation, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27246-2_10

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studies—including geography, history, religion and civics—with regard to teaching young teenagers about one of the national minorities (the Sami) while trying to meet the requirements of the national curriculum. This chapter focuses on a set of those interviews, conducted as part of a 2017 project aimed at charting how Swedish teachers perceived the task of teaching about issues related to Sami history and contemporary life and what difficulties they saw in this—supposedly—sensitive area of study.1 We will soon come back to the question about why this topic can be seen as sensitive or even controversial. This chapter starts by mapping the broader educational and political context within which these teachers navigate while practising their profession and then go on to explore more deeply various aspects of day-to-day classroom concerns. The reason for this broad introduction—mapping the emergence of a new public body of historical knowledge regarding minorities, new disagreements over history and new didactical pressures on teachers—is that we see it as crucial to acknowledge more precisely the wider landscape of knowledge production and educational processes of which schooling, curricula and the teaching of history and civics form a small part. It is also an effort to establish a less polarising approach for researchers engaged in Sami thematics, hopefully facilitating dialogue across epistemological standpoints. Furthermore, this chapter should be read as a pilot study in the sense that it aims to explore a hitherto poorly researched topic believed to be highly relevant for future studies and to aid such future studies by directing them into important focus areas.

Politics, Education, and Minority Histories Today there are several ongoing processes in Sweden that affect education, pedagogy and the teaching of history and civics, connected to the five officially recognised national minorities: the Jews, the Roma, the Swedish Finns, the Sami and the Tornedalers. Starting on an overarching level, such processes originate from political recognition of these groups as cultural minorities, including various objectives to meet the requirements of existing legislation to support the rights of these groups in developing their languages and cultures as a part of Swedish society. On a second 1  The project was funded by the Sami parliament and resulted in a series of teaching guidelines produced in collaboration, now published on the Sámi Information Center website www.samer.se.

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level, this also embraces educational policy, including means of implementing this minority status in educational objectives, curricula and pedagogical practice and, not least, of assisting the spread of knowledge about minorities to the public at large (cf. Svonni 2015; Spjut 2021; Svonni and Spjut 2023, this volume). Recognised as an indigenous people (since 1977), the Sami population holds a protracted legal position among the nationally minorities with extended rights in several areas and governmental representation in the form of the Sami Parliament. Regarding both the Sami and the Tornedalers, the prime focus is on the northern regions. These are regions that are characterised by historically deep-rooted and multifaceted social and cultural traditions, as well as strong cross-border contacts (cf. Elenius et  al. 2015; Olsson et  al. 2016), but that from Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish and Russian nation-centred perspectives are often given a peripheral status in both politics and historiography. A central element of creating public awareness of the national minorities is to teach basic facts about these communities as part of the school curriculum, but also to produce and disseminate new historical knowledge about these groups and their place within Swedish society. In other words, the goal is to give new, or updated, minority histories a more prominent place within the canon of public national history. During recent decades, this has often revolved around negative historical treatment—for instance, state policies aiming at segregation and/or assimilation (often by means of schooling)—and how this resonates with contemporary conflict and perceived societal injustice as well as stereotyping. In Sweden, such efforts include research on anti-semitism in post-war public discourse (Bachner 1999), the “Swedification” of Finnish-speaking minorities and Tornedalers as a part of the nation-state formation process (Elenius 2001, 2006; Nordblad 2015), Swedish antiziganism in past and present (Selling 2013) and Swedish colonialism and its consequences for the Sami (Fur 2006, Fur and Hennessey 2020; Össbo 2020). As regards the Sami, the impact of indigenous studies and post-colonial approaches in research has worked as an additional catalyst for broadening the perspectives to a global arena, introducing new methodologies, ethics and epistemologies as well as new collaborative ways of doing research (Drugge 2016a, 2016b, 2022). These efforts to generate new historical knowledge concerning the national minorities also include the enactment of official white papers in collaboration between governmental agencies, minority-led organisations and academic scholars from various disciplines. Such white papers have come to recognise mistreatment in both the Swedish state’s handling of

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the Roma (Regeringskansliet 2014) and regarding the historical relations between the Church of Sweden and the Sami (Lindmark and Sundström 2016).2 Furthermore, as regards both the Tornedalers and the Sami, national “truth commissions” are currently operating. Similar processes have also taken place and/or are underway in Norway and Finland (Szpak and Bunikowski 2021; Risten Juuso 2018). Many of these efforts—the white papers in particular—not only aim to establish “officially approved” histories on their specific areas at stake, but are also educational in essence. They aim to incorporate new narratives (often critical towards the state) as a part of the national history by spreading them to the public via institutions like schools, museums and other public forums as well as with the publication of teaching materials (cf. Kommissionen mot antiziganism 2015; Arvidsson and Åström Elmersjö 2021; Norlin and Lindmark 2021). In a similar way, the newly launched Swedish government’s truth commission on the treatment of the Sami has the principle objective of accumulating knowledge to spread to the public and future generations. More precisely, the goal is to “spread knowledge about and increase the general understanding of Sami history and how historical injustices affect today’s conditions for the Sami and work to ensure that this knowledge is passed on to future generations” (Regeringen, Dir. 2021).3 This development thus follows an international trend of installing truth and reconciliation commissions, and white papers, as instruments for recognising historical injustices and—among other things—of teaching about them as a way to remedy a lack of public knowledge while supporting redress, democratic development and societal inclusion (cf. Torpey 2003; Neumann and Thompson 2015; Sjögren 2016; Keynes et al. 2021) (Fig. 1). These current trends of voicing new histories regarding the minorities and their position in Swedish society—often taking the present as their point of departure—have not emerged without raising questions and criticism. Such concerns have come from scholars who see the academic freedom and traditional work of historians at risk from these kind of 2  An official apology and ceremony was conducted and publicly broadcast as recently as November 2021 (https://www.svenskakyrkan.se/samiska/ursakt-till-det-samiska-folket). 3  Regeringen, Dir. 2021: 103, https://www.regeringen.se/4aab29/contentassets/471 2a7127d6a4a30954004aa010c1af7/kartlaggning-och-granskning-av-den-politik-somforts-gentemot-samerna-och-dess-konsekvenser-for-det-samiska-folket-dir.-2021103.pdf. A similar objective can be found in the Finnish truth and reconciliation preparation report (Risten Juuso 2018), 258–61.

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Fig. 1  Repatriation and reburial of Sami remains in a ceremony in Lycksele, August 9, 2019 (the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples). Sami skeletons—mostly skulls—were dug up from burial sites in both Sweden and other parts of Sápmi during the nineteenth century and up to the 1950s, in order to facilitate research into archaeology, craniology and race biology. This was done with the complicity of local priests and often without consent of the local Sami community. The remains were later deposited in various institutions and museums. Since 2007, official demands to set up public institutions for Sami remains and return them to their original burial grounds have been raised by Sami organisations (Ojala 2016). The repatriation of Sami remains—from 25 individuals—in Lycksele involved several stakeholders but was also a part of the reconciliation processes between the Church of Sweden and the Sami. It marks the biggest large-­ scale repatriation in Sweden up to the present day. Photo: Petter Engman (Västerbottens museum)

‘histories-on-demand’ enterprises (see Ericsson and Sjögren 2011; Sköld and Sandin 2016), viewing them as too simplified and orientated towards moralism or political activism or as instituting unwarranted victimisation and homogenisation of minorities (Arvidsson 2011; Hjelm 2020, 2021). In contrast, others view such official attempts of history writing in order to acknowledge and compensate for past injustices as all too meagre and bland, not taking full responsibility for actual redress and the established legal rights of minorities (Öhman 2016; Cramér et al. 2017; Kuokkanen

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2020).4 Furthermore, research on areas such as colonialism and historical abuse of minority groups from state institutions can also be viewed as contaminated, reproducing a victimisation of the minorities that merely works as a continuation of the traditional role of scholarly research and knowledge production as a tool for suppression (Cameron 2019).5 Related to this is an ongoing discussion in both Sweden and Norway about who is eligible to do, decide and direct research on, for instance, the Sami—for example, only representatives from the Sami community and/or researchers schooled in indigenous (collaborative) methodologies and theories or also other academic scholars (Hjelm 2021).6 All in all, such criticisms and ongoing discussions demonstrate the great complexities that tend to arise when trying to establish shared understanding of the past with regard to often politically charged contemporary issues. The discussions can be seen as rooted in different epistemological standpoints, ideas on history and the present, on concepts like truth and objectivity as well as of views of the place of indigenous peoples in contemporary society (cf. Norlin and Sjögren 2019). Furthermore, these sometimes opposing positions tend to reinforce fixed binary categories that prevent the possibility of acknowledging both challenges and benefits simultaneously, that is, that Sami education and education about the Sami can be both beneficial and problematic at the same time (cf. Kawehau Hoskins 2017). A parallel ongoing development that has also affected public engagement in minority histories relates to the new possibilities of communication and community building that digital media has offered since the 1990s. Since then, there has been a rise in various new digital spaces where histories are created, communicated and spread. This has meant that more stakeholders outside of the academic world are able to engage with and participate in producing representations of the past, sometimes for the explicit sake of ethno-political mobilisation or driven by the notion that academic history and the history taught in schools is just not satisfactory  Tomas Cramér et al., https://samefolket.se/kyrkans-vitbok-duckar-for-viktiga-fragor/.  This fear of being victimised is also expressed in the Finnish preparation report from 2018. “The indigenous Sami people do not want the reconciliation process to become a victim story under any circumstances”. In Swedish: Urfolket samerna vill inte under några omständigheter att försoningsprocessen ska bli en offerberättelse. 6  This discussion has, for instance, been triggered by a report from the Swedish Sami parliament about future research, generally aiming to take more control over what research is carried out on the Sami. 4 5

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and accurate enough (Elenius 2010; Cajani et  al. 2019). This has also given representative organs from the minorities—including the Sami parliament and Sami youth organisations—new tools to control how Sami history is presented. This history is communicated via official websites connected to these organisations (e.g. Samiskt informationscentrum) but also via digital platforms for primary/secondary school teaching in social studies and not least through the use and spread of social media (Cocq and Dubois 2020).7 In addition to this, the present position and history of the minorities in Sweden has also been repeatedly highlighted by publicly renowned representatives from minority groups such as singers, artist and screenplay writers (cf. Sandström 2020; Ledman 2012). This has regularly occurred in connection to contemporary conflicts over land rights, mining and energy prospecting in reindeer grazing lands, increasing tourism, and so on, conflicts that have also worked as triggers for representations of the past. An example concerning the Sami is the international award-winning and historically orientated film Sami Blood (2016) by Amanda Kernell that highlights, for instance, the role of past education in the form of Sami nomad schooling—a prominent contemporary symbol of state mishandling of the group—and the loss of cultural belonging and identity among Sami children.8 Similar themes, that is, loss of culture, language and parent-child bounds, can be found in the published memoir of former pupils at these schools (Huuva and Blind 2016), a publication that formed part of the Church of Sweden’s white paper.9 This pinpoints the dual role of education in the present context; on the one hand, with schooling as a site of perceived historical injustice and, on the other, as a resource for contemporary redress. All in all, the development described above highlights the broad spectra of educational impulses regarding Sami-related issues that exist today, impulses that (as we will see) also influence how teaching practice is perceived by the interviewed teachers.

7  Cf. http://www.samer.se/; http://www.samer.se/2137. These websites provide general historical overviews of, for example, colonialism and Sami history and are created to educate the public and also to be used in schools, https://www.so-rummet.se/kategorier/historia/ historiska-teman/urfolk-och-minoriteter#. 8  https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5287168/. 9  In a very similar manner, boarding schools as sites for loss of language and culture are highlighted in the Finnish preparation report as a potential area of investigation (Risten Juuso 2018), 270–73.

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Minorities and Compulsory Schooling In the year 2000, it was decided that modifications were to be made in the existing curriculum for compulsory schools (Lpo 94), by introducing basic knowledge about the Swedish national minorities in the teaching of pupils at this level (a background to the longer history of Sami schooling and educational policy in Sweden is provided in Svonni and Spjut 2023, this volume). In the curriculum in force today (and at the time that the teacher interviews were conducted)—Lgr 2011—curricular demands regarding the topic of minorities can be found at all levels of educational guidelines: in the overarching goals, the central teaching content prescribed, and in more specific requirements connected to specific teaching subjects (Spjut 2021: 104). Spjut has, however, stressed the complexity of establishing coherence between all these instructions to teachers, making it difficult to know how to handle the formal requests in practice. Furthermore, regarding the Sami more specifically, Svonni has argued that these requirements still have little potential to live up to the full expectations of international conventions on the rights of indigenous people to be supported in developing their language, culture and history (Svonni 2015; Svonni and Spjut 2023, this volume). However, since 2014, the Swedish National Agency for Education (Skolverket) has provided teachers with certain material on how to teach about the national minorities (including Sami “perspectives” and possible questions to address in teaching) and, as a recent study concluded, the possibilities and support for teaching about the minorities has indeed seen some improvement in recent years, not least in the textbooks with more extended and up-to-date knowledge (Spjut 2020). Nevertheless, the development during recent decades is still to be seen as a very poor fundament if the aim is to support a thorough understanding of the Swedish minorities in all school children and to supply a base for cultural identification among minority children. The reason for this is probably not only a lack of attention, but also a practical issue: too much required teaching content in too few hours. Sami Pasts and Presents as Controversial Topics? The question about why the teaching of Sami pasts and presents might be seen as a contested and sensitive area must be viewed in relation to the processes described in the background section of this chapter. There is a lot of knowledge production occurring, which also causes disagreements

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and tensions—the paradox here being that the more knowledge exists, the more difficult conditions are for teaching. Furthermore, previous research in social studies has also established a clear link between the teaching of topics such as minorities, the indigenous Sami and colonialism and a broader educational area, namely, what is perceived as “controversial societal issues”. In short, social studies teachers tend to perceive topics such as climate change, immigration, xenophobia, racism, colonialism, nationalism and LBGTQ+ as controversial, in the sense that they could potentially evoke tense discussions as well as disparate opinions in classrooms, discussions and opinions that are sometimes hard for teachers to handle didactically (Larsson 2019; Larsson and Larsson 2021). So, in other words, teachers today who see it as their responsibility to teach children and teens about national minorities launch themselves into a potentially charged area of teaching, equipped with complicated formal guidelines, limited educational material and little didactic aid as regards to teaching. On top of this comes the pressure from the external bulk of knowledge produced outside of the school context, knowledge that clearly signals the multifaceted nature and complexity of teaching the area at stake.

Educationalisation, Recontextualisation and Remediation So how can we theorise about this? As highlighted in previous research (Keynes et al. 2021), the knowledge production in relation to truth commissions, white paper projects, reconciliation processes and so forth can be partly framed by a concept such as educationalisation (cf. Smeyers and Depaepe eds. 2008; Depaepe 2012). This concept can be understood as the fact that societal and political issues which need to be publicly handled regularly are being absorbed into pedagogical discourses and transmitted to the education domain for further processing. This should not only be perceived as related to institutionalised schooling; such educational efforts can be viewed more generally as taking place in various public forums and social media channels, where they are dealt with by different stakeholders/ educators (Norlin and Lindmark 2021). Nonetheless, schooling is still a central arena for educationalisation. In a study on how the white book on the Roma in Sweden found its way into schools, Arvidsson and Åström Elmersjö (2021) combine theories of Michael Apple (2000)—the concept of official knowledge—and

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Basil Bernstein (1986)—the concept of recontextualisation. In this study, they show how the official knowledge from the Roma White book was transformed into teaching material (a textbook) to suit a certain school level (lower secondary schools), subjects and syllabi (history and social studies) and to a specific teaching domain (teaching about human rights). This recontextualisation also meant that the official knowledge from the relatively instrumental governmental report was adjusted for teaching by, for example, forefronting individual examples and experiences and adding visual elements (Arvidsson and Åström Elmersjö 2021). Building on ideas of teachers being of central importance as active agents in a process of recontextualisation, a link could also be made to curriculum theory regarding specific arenas of realisation and mediation and to the central place of teachers as interpreters and remediators of formal curricula and teaching material in relation to pupils and teaching practice (Lundgren 1989; Englund 2005; Englund, Forsberg and Sundberg 2012). We will come back to how these theories fit in with our analysed context at the end of the chapter, but what is examined in the interviews can indeed be interpreted as teachers being central nodes in such knowledge transmission processes and the fact that they primarily tend to position Sami-related issues in relation to teaching in history and civics.

Teaching Sami Pasts and Presents In this study, we focus on experiences and opinions from compulsory school teachers of social studies subjects. The reason for this selection was based on the fact that Sami content within the syllabi is predominately visible within the area of social studies subjects (including geography, history, religion and civics). As has been demonstrated by Svonni, the inclusion of Sami content in education is more precisely connected to the subjects of history, civics and religion. This means that teachers engaged within the Swedish educational system are encouraged to include Sami content in just a minority of all the available subject areas in the curricula and with a specific focus on the domains of teaching mentioned above (Svonni 2015). Although present in the curricula, there are currently no official requirements that trainee teachers be provided with knowledge about Sami issues, placing the Swedish teacher education programmes well behind the progress made in countries like Norway and Finland in this regard (Keskitalo & Olsen 2021).

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The starting point for the interviews leans on in the opinions expressed in various encounters with teachers and teacher students over the past decade, in which they have pointed out their own lack of knowledge about Sami issues as a hindrance that affects their ability to teach about Sami society in their classrooms. In the Swedish curriculum for compulsory school, pre-school, class- and after-school activities, one of the goals is that every pupil, on completing secondary school, should have acquired “knowledge of the national minorities’ (the Jews, the Roma, the indigenous Sami, the Swedish Finns and the Tornedalers) culture, language, religion and history” (Lgr11, section 2.2). Based on this goal, and on current curricula for certain subjects (e.g. social studies subjects), there are steering documents to support the integration of Sami content in teaching. At the same time, Sami issues are seldom taught in schools, and Sami perspectives are not necessarily included to any larger extent in contemporary teacher training. Against this backdrop, this study seeks to explore what kind of difficulties teachers claim to encounter in relation to teaching on Sami history, culture and society and what they need in order to feel confident in working with these topics. Already at this point, it should be underlined that the results of the interviews have led to collaborative initiatives to implement improvements for teachers. These will be explained further in the concluding section of the text. Methods In this study, six school teachers and one trainee teacher were interviewed about their attitudes and reflections on teaching about Sami issues. All the respondents were teachers/trainee teachers in history and/or civics, and their responses to the questions connected to their practical teaching in these subjects. The connection between history and its various implications on contemporary society was recurrently pointed out by all the teachers, particularly in relation to perceived complexities in their teaching practices. The interviews were conducted in 2017, and all of them were carried out with teachers working in the county of Västerbotten in Sweden, an area that can be defined as traditional Sami land. School heads were contacted, who suggested a number of teachers that they thought would be useful to interview for the study. In total, the teachers belonged to three different schools. At the time of the interviews, the teachers had different levels of work experience; most of them had worked for more than ten years, and one of them was still doing teacher training, supervised by

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one of the interviewed teachers. The interviews have been analysed and organised thematically, based on a content analytical approach suggested by Hsieh and Shannon (2005). According to Hsieh and Shannon, three different approaches to content analysis can be defined. Firstly, the conventional approach in which the analysis is data driven, in the sense that codes and themes are defined during the data analysis itself, very similar to what is also described as an inductive approach (Hsieh and Shannon 2005, Braun and Clarke 2006). The second approach is the directed content analysis (sometimes also defined as a deductive approach), in which codes have been defined already before the analysis and can be adjusted along the way. The directed approach takes its point of departure from theory and research findings, and specific themes are searched for in the data set already from the start. In this approach, the researcher starts by identifying the key concepts, which are later formulated in open-ended questions about the predefined categories. Lastly, Hsieh and Shannon present the summative approach, in which certain keywords are selected before and during the analysis on the basis of the researchers’ own field of interest and relevant literature. In this study, the data has been analysed by making use of the directed content analytical approach. The questions and themes were defined already before the interviews; open-ended questions were asked and the ambition was to explore the reflections and opinions of the respondents on a set of predefined themes. The topics were selected on the basis of previous dialogues with teachers and trainee teachers, in which they highlighted the following specific areas concerning the prerequisites to teach on Sami issues in the mainstream classroom: a lack of prior knowledge about Sami issues, teachers’ needs in relation to teaching on Sami issues and the lack of relevant and updated teaching materials. Every interview took between one and two hours, and a set of pre-­ prepared questions were used as an interview guide. However, the content of the interviews took different directions depending on what the teachers considered important to discuss. The teachers themselves chose the place for the interview, four were carried out at the schools and two by telephone. All six interviews were conducted in Swedish, and a translation into English was made afterwards. The study is restricted both in number and geographical spread and does not express the general view of the teachers as a whole. However, it does provide an insight into some of the challenges that teachers might experience when approaching Sami topics in the schooling environment and possible ways to overcome them. Quotes from the teachers are presented in relation to the most recurrent

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subject areas and constitute examples that mirror the overall discussions on that specific theme.10 Teacher Education and the Lack of Knowledge Starting off the interviews, the question of prior knowledge was brought up in order to achieve an overview of how the teachers themselves interpreted their own understanding about Sami issues. All teachers stated that their knowledge was limited, and they pointed out that their teacher training education had not provided them with the skills they needed in order to be able to teach on matters related to Sami history, culture and contemporary life: I have no memory of us talking about Sami issues in teacher training. Perhaps the colonization of Lapland was mentioned in history, but it was not something we analysed or talked about further. We also did not talk about what responsibility we have as teachers, nor did we problematise the image of the Sami.

The teaching material that the teachers had collected about Sami issues was not found in textbooks but was instead discovered (by themselves) through a variety of sources, mostly web-based. The information website samer.se, run by the Sami parliament, was of importance, as were other websites and forums directed specifically towards teachers (e.g. the websites minoritet.se and lektion.se). All of the interviewed teachers had actively engaged in learning more on their own, and they all articulated that it was clearly up to the individual to seek more information since it was not provided as a part of their teacher training: “I have not gained any knowledge through teacher training. Equal to zero”. The teachers were thus rather critical about the lack of Sami content in their own teacher training and reflected on why this was the case. It was obvious that they were disappointed by this void, and they had different explanations as to why it exists. One of the teachers talked about the Sami being present in the curricula, but neglected in the teachers’ actual lessons: Something is hidden away here, which is never brought up. It is probably a fact that very few people talk about this part of history in their teaching. But 10  The quotes have been made deliberately anonymous in order to prevent the possibility of identifying individual participants of the study.

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we MUST talk about these things according to Lgr11 [the curricula, authors note], and despite this it is easily de-prioritised.

Fully aware of their knowledge gap, one issue brought up was also a sense of shame for not knowing more. One of the teachers related this to the historical backdrop of discrimination towards the Sami: You are almost ashamed when you realise that you don’t know more than this. Really something has gone wrong, why do we not know more? I think that of course, in some way this has had effects far too long, that the Sami have been pushed aside, and that it might be based on the fact that no one has knowledge, really, it is due to some kind of cultural, structural racism perhaps.

One teacher argued that the lack of knowledge actually creates a status quo due to the workload that many teachers experience; there is simply not enough time to explore the topic in a way that would be desirable: As a social studies teacher in compulsory school, there is an incredible amount of work to do, it is understandable that teachers de-prioritise the Sami content because it simply takes too much time to know how to do it and what material you can use.

Teachers’ Needs The teachers who were interviewed for this study had clear ideas about what they would need in order to be able to include more content related to Sami issues in their teaching. It was obvious that the support asked for was hands-on material that could be introduced directly to the students. Easy-to-use teaching materials would increase the probability of them being used in the classroom: “If there is a material that you can just grab, with instructions that are understandable, then there is a good chance that it will also be used”. The teachers wished for teaching materials that contained facts and information on one hand but that simultaneously have a clear connection to the knowledge requirements as expressed in current steering documents: I would really need, for example, factual texts with practice questions that can be more analytical. It is important that it is clearly linked to the knowledge requirements, that there is room for the students to develop their rea-

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soning. It would be great if there were teacher guides that clearly show how to connect to the knowledge requirements.

Several teachers highlighted that it would be strategic if instructions and teaching materials were developed in a way that made it possible to use when teaching not only about the Indigenous Sami but also about national minorities in general: The best would be if there were material about the Sami that could also work when discussing national minorities more generally. Bringing in Sami issues within that framework would mean a greater chance of using the material.

Another suggestion from the teachers was to implement media material within the existing web-based support platforms that are regularly used by many teachers in social studies (SO-rummet, lektion.se, minoritet.se): It would be very good to have access to pictures, sounds, interviews and movies. Preferably where young people are in focus, people who live like the Sami in a variety of ways—not just the old image of Sami in a “kåta” [Sami traditional house, authors note]. And “unnecessary” facts are always good to work with, a little “did you know that…”—stuff, it interests the students.

The majority of the respondents stated that there is a great need for updated and easily accessible visual material for use in the classroom. The films that were available for teaching at the time of the interviews were perceived as old and out-of-date, making it difficult for the students to identify with the content. Shorter educational films were wished for, preferably available online for a more inclusive approach: It is good if there is a variety of books, factual texts, sound, image and digital material. Easy digital access is very important, especially for those who do not “keep up” the pace in class and may need to access the material at home a little later.

In addition, the need for further education for teachers was called for and several of the respondents stated that there is a need to work on increasing knowledge among teachers at a more structural and profound level:

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Above all, there is a need for further training, not just self-selected, but one that is modelled so that the municipalities prioritise it. Some kind of writing, text, material, lecturer, to use as a starting point and discuss further. But it should not only be for social studies teachers; EVERYONE should get it, we must lay the foundation for this on a broader level.

The Issue of Teaching Materials One of the most obvious challenges highlighted by the teachers was the difficulty of knowing how to determine whether or not a teaching material is appropriate to use or not. Much of the traditional material available was produced a long time ago and was not perceived as suitable for use in contemporary teaching. The balance of representing the past through older material, and simultaneously connecting it to the present, was seen as a difficult task. In this context, the respondents expressed a fear of contributing to reproducing stereotypes about the Sami by using “wrong” teaching materials in the classroom: You do not want to give a wrong picture, it must be correct. You want both Sami culture, symbols, etc., you still want to show it, so that you do not forget it, but it is also necessary to include the modern Sami everyday life to understand the whole picture. You need things that are connected to the modern, you have to see what is NOW, not reinforce the prejudices that exist. Today, children are so open to so much, much more now than if they were compared 10–15  years ago. They think differently, they are more norm-critical and ask pretty cool questions.

The expressed anxiety about inadequate teaching materials should be interpreted in relation to the previous discussion on lack of knowledge among the teachers and the risk of creating a catch-22 situation. The awareness of the knowledge gap is apparent, affecting the possibilities for teachers to identify and choose teaching materials that they can feel comfortable in using.

Concluding Remarks On returning to the larger context and theoretical approach of this chapter—bearing the processes of educationalisation and recontextualisation in mind—it is apparent that the interviewed teachers are fully aware of the emerging mass of knowledge and perspectives regarding Sami history and civics that exist outside institutionalised education today. They also see

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these as highly important—but difficult—areas of teaching. This, in turn, raises general concerns about how these historical and contemporary perspectives are to be handled in the classroom, how they should be integrated with the knowledge requirements of the Swedish curricula and how they should be presented in initiated and sensitive forms to young teenagers. It is also evident that the interviewed teachers find themselves quite alone in this recontextualisation and remediation process where the bulk of knowledge about the Sami needs to be slimmed down and adjusted to fit teaching and classroom practice. As described previously in this chapter, bringing up various ‘controversial’ issues in the classrooms is often perceived as a challenging task by teachers. Regarding teaching about the Sami, this appears to be even more complex and requires a multilevel process. On an individual level among the interviewed teachers, for instance, the controversial element in teaching Sami history and civics seems to connect to a fear of appearing ignorant or even racist in relation to a contemporary discourse on minorities and indigenous peoples—enforced by researchers, politicians and social media influencers—which challenges the identity politics of the state and where issues of representation, racialisation and (the proper) use of language is regularly being addressed. Furthermore, this interacts with background knowledge and interpretations of Sweden’s colonial history and its negative impact on the Sami community today, issues which are at least vaguely known to the public and which often tend to place Sami and non-­ Sami in a binary victim-perpetrator position. On top of this lie ongoing public debates on economy, work opportunities and land use (mining, hunting, fishing, tourism, etc.) in traditional Sami reindeer grazing areas. More precisely, this is a question of historically recognised reindeer herder rights to land use, vis-à-vis a broader—Sami and non-Sami—public interest in developing local communities and protecting existing conditions for recreational activities. This has been a highly contentious issue during recent decades, both at a local and national level, and with several juridical processes involved.11 In all these arenas, history is highly and constantly present. So, which other specific conclusions are to be drawn from this 11  An illustrative and critical question from a public perspective was posed recently by a law scholar regarding hunting and fishing rights in traditional Sami areas: Shall some groups of Swedish citizens [referring to the Sami villages; a minority of the Swedish Sami population], on the base of ethnicity, really be given special rights that their neighbours and other citizens do not enjoy?, a question that echoes through the history of Swedish Sami politics since at least the late nineteenth century. This is a seemingly valid standpoint from a broad public perspective, but from an indigenous rights perspective, it is obviously highly provocative. Tobias Indén, “Girjasdomen ger klen vägledning om jakten och fisket i fjällen”, Dagens nyheter, May 14, 2022.

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pilot study, and what potential and important areas for future studies does it signal? Regarding conclusions drawn from the interviews it can— firstly—be claimed that the teaching of Sami content seems to set specific demands and challenges for teachers. For most subject areas in a mainstream setting, it is relatively easy as a teacher to know where to turn to further your education and deepen your knowledge. In terms of some subject areas that are viewed as more complex, such as the Holocaust, major government investments have been made to encourage school leaders, educators and students to increase their knowledge.12 Training materials, teacher guides and literature are made available, and it is relatively easy to obtain support in the actual practical teaching. When it comes to Sami issues in particular, the situation is quite different and a lot of extra work still needs to be done by the individual teacher. As demonstrated in this study, teachers refer to several challenges that prevent them from engaging in teaching on Sami topics. Firstly, the issue concerning lack of knowledge calls for attention. It is unusual for a teacher to have learned about Sami conditions during his or her school days or during teacher training. In other words, as a teacher, you are thrown into the deep end. Given this lack of prior knowledge, there is an obvious risk that teachers may unintentionally reproduce stereotypical narratives about the Sami. Sami issues are perceived as both complex and controversial among the interviewees, and with the awareness of their personal lack of knowledge comes a fear of being perceived as ignorant or racist. Secondly, the issue of teaching materials needs to be addressed further. One parameter that teachers face is the difficulty of making selections among the vast amount of sometimes tendentious and dubious literature and source material. As a teacher with limited knowledge about Sami society, it is difficult to know what is to be regarded as legitimate knowledge in contemporary times and what should be left out. The difficulty of navigating this whirlpool is understandable, especially given the abundant amount of publications, literature and source materials that have been produced within discourses marked by (for instance) race biology research or stereotypical descriptions of the Sami population. The existence of these kinds of pitfalls are well known by teachers, but difficult to handle without adequate preparation on how to 12  For instance, Forum för levande historia [The Living History Forum], https://www. levandehistoria.se/english.

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do so. To put it bluntly, it appears “easier” to opt out of talking about Sami issues simply because it is hard to determine what can be considered politically correct knowledge to pass on to your students. Thirdly, teachers are clear about what they would need in order to feel comfortable in teaching about Sami content. The results indicate that educators are often eager to work with Sami issues in their teaching, but the lack of formal support risks preventing this from happening on a broader scale, despite good ambitions and a willingness to accomplish a positive change. Teachers offer a number of examples of what this support could consist in, ranging from general education on Sami history and civics on a broader scale, to precise instructions on teaching materials that have been “quality checked” as suitable for classroom activities and adjusted for the contemporary young generation. To end this chapter, we wish to return to one of its aims, namely, to direct future studies into important focus areas. Firstly, such a topic should certainly be expanded upon, with studies that concentrate on exploring how teachers at different levels of the school system teach about Sami-­ related issues in their classrooms, how they prepare and organise their teaching practice, in which area of teaching they primarily locate Sami-­ related issues and what actual teaching material they use while doing this. Secondly, and perhaps the most important area signalled by the interviewed teachers, is to place more focus on university teacher training, including how it organises teaching about the indigenous Sami and how it helps to equip future teachers with suitable knowledge and didactic aid for carrying out their future professions. Finally, and more broadly, this chapter has highlighted the need to find better ways to handle the obvious inconsistency between the political objectives of including knowledge about minorities at various levels of education and the actual means and resources provided for this objective in teaching practice. Excursus: The Practical Outcome of the Interviews The interviews presented in this article have already acted as a starting point for developing lesson templates for the benefit of teachers that seek to engage in Sami issues in their educational practice. In order for the reader to gain an understanding of the outcomes, some background information is now offered. The interviews were conducted as part of a project initiated and funded by Samiskt informationscentrum in 2017, in which the goal was to investigate and understand what teachers in the Swedish

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elementary schools needed in order to include Sami issues in their educational practice.13 Parallel to the aforementioned project, the Sami youth organisation Sáminuorra applied for funding at the Ministry of Education in collaboration with Umeå University, suggesting the development of the initiative Nuoras Nurrii (“From youth to youth”).14 In short, the suggested Sáminuorra initiative involved Sami youngsters operating as path-­ finders who could be invited by schools to have conversations with pupils about Sami culture from their own points of view. The application was successful, and Sáminuorra received funding for Nuoras Nurrii, where Sami path-finders have been engaged in school visits for several years. One clear challenge for the path-finders was the lack of knowledge about Sami society that was found in the schools, not only among the pupils, but also among teachers. To assist both the path-finders (by preparing the pupils with some basic knowledge about Sami culture before the visit) and the teachers (by supporting them in how and what to discuss in class about Sami issues before the visit), a set of lesson templates were developed, based on comments in the interviews presented in this article.15 The objective in providing teachers with this hands-on teaching material was multiple. Firstly, the idea was that if the teachers were provided with templates suggesting what and how to teach about Sami issues, they would hopefully be more likely to do so not only in preparing for the Nuoras Nurrii visit, but also in the future, and among teachers on a broader scale. Secondly, elaborating lesson templates that corresponded to the learning objectives of current curricula could make it easier for the teachers to identify and understand where Sami content might fit in to existing subject areas without actually changing the curricula itself. And thirdly, as a decolonial strategy, the teaching material was itself developed in close collaboration with knowledge holders carrying personal experience of Sami culture and society in some way. 13  Samiskt informationscentrum [The Sami Information Centre] operates as a section of the Sami Parliament in Sweden, with the mission to initiate and distribute knowledge about Sami issues in Swedish society on a national level. Samiskt informationscentrum runs the webpage samer.se, a source of information supported by the Sami Parliament, and accessible to everyone. 14  The application was elaborated by Isak Utsi, the chair of Sáminuorra at the time, and Anna-Lill Drugge, at the time researcher at the Centre for Sámi Research—Vaartoe. The Nuoras Nurrii project was inspired by the Ofelaš initiative in Norway. 15  The templates are available at the Samiskt informationscentrum webpage: https://www. samer.se/sapmi-i-skolan.

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Narration and Equivocation: Locating State, Nation and Empire in the Pre-university History Examination Syllabi of England and Scotland Arthur Chapman and Joe Smith

Introduction: Identity and Equivocation The year 2007 saw the anniversary of two significant events in the history of the United Kingdom, its empire and its component nations: the 1807 abolition of Britain’s involvement in the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the 1707 Act of Union which unified the parliaments of England and Scotland. Although the British government observed some of the rituals of memorialisation for both events, a contrast between the tone and content of

A. Chapman (*) University College London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] J. Smith University of Stirling, Stirling, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. S. Colla, A. Di Michele (eds.), History Education at the Edge of the Nation, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27246-2_11

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these anniversary ‘celebrations’ tells us much about the story that the UK tells about itself and the relationship between the nations which comprise it. For the British Government, the abolition of Britain’s involvement in the Transatlantic Slave Trade offered an unproblematic national narrative: the slave trade was regrettable, but Britain’s withdrawal from it was a cause for national celebration. The British Government was careful not to apologise for the slave trade—fearing this might galvanise calls for reparations payments—but it did offer repeated expressions of ‘sorrow’ and ‘regret’. On 27 March 2007—the 200th anniversary of abolition—the British parliament passed a motion expressing ‘regret that many thousands of Africans suffered horrific, degrading and immoral treatment as a result of the slave trade’ and commemorating ‘the dignified and brave manner in which enslaved Africans rose up against their oppressors’ (UK Parliament 2007).1 The event was similarly celebrated in civil society—between £15 million and £20 million in National Lottery funding was awarded to commemorative projects between 2006 and 2008 which comprised both large grants to museums and universities and much smaller grants to grassroots projects. While researchers have commented on the contrast between an ‘official narrative’, which sought to portray the abolition as the policymaking achievement of enlightened White parliamentarians and the diverse micronarratives uncovered by community groups (Oldfield and Wills 2020), the 2007 bicentenary offered a minimally shared narrative: ‘Britain’s involvement in the slave trade was bad, and its abolition was good’ (Walvin 2009). Although such a pithy summation demeans the monstrosity of the slave trade, it did, at least, represent the first real ‘national conversation’ in the public sphere about the legacies of Britain’s imperial past (Hall 2018). This simplistic but shared national narrative contrasts with the political fault lines exposed by the Tercentenary of the Act of Union just five weeks later. For the Labour Government of the day, the anniversary was politically awkward—the 1707 Act was too noteworthy to ignore, but it was long-standing Labour policy to roll back the Act through the devolution of decision-making powers to national parliaments. Indeed, to celebrate 1  This parliamentary statement of ‘regret’ followed an apparently unscripted ‘sorry’ from Prime Minister Tony Blair in a press conference with Ghanaian president, John Agyekum Kufuor, which contrasted with the ‘sorrow’ that Blair had earlier professed in more official statements on the matter (Addley and Muir 2007).

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the 1707 Act would mean celebrating the abolition of the Scottish Parliament—the very parliament that Labour had re-established in 1999. Ambivalent about the 1707 Act, and wary of bolstering support for the separatists Scottish National Party (SNP) in upcoming elections, commemorations of the Tercentenary by the UK Labour Government were muted.2 Just two days later, as predicted in opinion polls, the SNP replaced Labour as the largest party in the Scottish Parliament. A week later Prime Minister Tony Blair—blamed by his party for ‘losing Scotland’—resigned. The Union between Scotland and England, whose anniversary seemed so easy to ignore, was suddenly an important political issue. The comparison between these anniversaries is stark: while abolition had provoked a conversation that ‘could not be avoided’, a conversation around the Act of Union seemed to be actively avoided. These quandaries reflect the challenge of negotiating at least three layers of complexity when attempting to tell national histories: the level of the national identity (England, Scotland), the level of multi-national state identity (Britain/the United Kingdom) and the level of British imperial identity. Negotiating these layers is a particular challenge for curriculum makers for at least three reasons. First, defining any of these layers of identity poses political difficulties, particularly in a period when the continued existence of the British state is a live political issue (Nairn 1981; Weight 2002). Second, British imperial entity, that had the most significant impact on the meaning of Britishness for most of that concept’s history (Edgerton 2019), is now both historic and a difficult history to manage in a post-imperial context. Third, the curriculum authorities and examination boards trying to negotiate these layers need to seek to avoid controversy and the accusation of taking a politically partisan stance on complex questions. In this paper, we set out to explore what representations of national pasts in public examinations can tell us about relations between the component nations within the multi-national state structure of the United Kingdom. What do these representations tell us about national narrative paradigms in England and Scotland and what asymmetries and symmetries do they express and reveal? The fact that the United Kingdom contains four distinct educational jurisdictions with their own educational systems 2  One Scottish Conservative MP, David Mundell, argued that official recognition had amounted to ‘simply holding an event to introduce the new £2 coin to which the Chancellor did not even bother to turn up and which the Secretary of State graced for only five minutes’ (Hansard 2007: 419WH).

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and, thus, their own history syllabuses and national examinations enables us to explore how both the Scottish and the English national pre-­university examination syllabuses give us a way into these issues and one that, hitherto, has been largely unexamined. Before exploring contrasts in the paradigms and perspectives on their shared and separate histories, we provide some contextual background on ‘British’ history.

Britain as State, Britain as Place: When Was Britain? The correct terminology for referring to different components of the British archipelago can be confusing for Britons and international readers alike (Blakemore 2016). It is important in the first instance to distinguish between Britain in a geographic sense and Britain in a political sense. Geographically, ‘Britain’ or ‘Great Britain’ refers to the largest of the British Isles which was separated from mainland Europe by rising sea-­ levels around 8000 years ago. This relatively straightforward geographical definition is complicated somewhat by the commonplace use of the label ‘Britain’ to refer to the country more properly known as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. This synecdochic use of ‘Britain’ is understandable insofar as ‘Great Britain’ is by far the largest of the islands which comprise the British archipelago, but it is inaccurate and imprecise: most obviously, because there are many UK residents who live on islands other than Great Britain. However, the use of the ‘Britain’ to refer to the state rather than an island is also unhelpful from a historical point of view. In the thirteenth century, there were three discernible nations on the island of Britain— Wales, Scotland and England. In 1284, Wales was conquered by England and after 1301 the title ‘Prince of Wales’ ceased to refer to the ruler of an autonomous nation and instead became an honorific conferred on the eldest son of the English monarch. Wales lost much of its remaining autonomy in the sixteenth century when it was legally ‘incorporated’ into ‘the realm of England’. In 1603, the death of England’s Elizabeth I without an heir meant that the throne of England (which by then notionally included Wales) was offered to the Scottish King James VI as Elizabeth’s closest relative. This ‘Union of the Crowns’ brought the three historic nations of the island of Britain under a single monarch—James VI of Scotland and I of England—who styled himself ‘King of Great Britain’.

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After this Union of the Crowns, James was King of two distinct nations—Scotland and England—each with its own parliament. It was not until 1707—with the passage of the Acts of Union in 1706 (in England) and 1707 (in Scotland)—that the nations of the island of Britain were united under a single parliament—it is from this point on that one can refer to Britain as a state as well as geographical entity. In 1801, the parliament of Ireland was dissolved to form ‘The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland’, which became ‘The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’ after Irish partition in 1921. The history of the legal and official terminology is one thing and the significance of terms as identities is another, albeit related, thing: an Irish unionist who might never have visited the island of Great Britain might describe himself as ‘British’ while a Scot who lives in Britain might reject the term. In her ground-breaking cultural history Britons, Linda Colley (Colley 1994) sees British identity as forged through the national and international wars of the long eighteenth century. Others have located Britishness as emerging through the process of imperialism—as Britain expanded its Empire, it became more supportable to talk of a place called Britain. In this sense, Britain made its Empire, but the Empire made Britain. A recent book argues that ‘Britain’ is best seen as a post-war construct, coeval with the institutions of the Welfare State and the era of the post-war Keynesian consensus (Edgerton 2019). Correspondingly, the impact of the end of Empire, of devolution and identity challenging reforms—such as systematic de-industrialisation in the Thatcher (Weight 2002)—have been seen as presaging the decline of Britishness and, in Tom Nairn’s prophetic phrase, ‘the break-up of Britain’ (Nairn 1981). Taking this into account, the question of whether to use the term ‘Britain’ or ‘UK’ or ‘England and Scotland’ in curriculum documentation is not straightforward. Does Britain become a meaningful political entity after the union of England, Scotland and Wales under a single king in 1603? Or after their union under a single parliament in 1707? Does our conception of this political Britain extend beyond the island itself to include Northern Ireland? Moreover, although various political unions have created a new ‘British’ state which overlays the nations of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, each of these nations continues to exist as cultural and linguistic communities within delimited geographic spaces. The simplistic idea of a unified Britain has been complicated further by the re-creation of national parliaments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland which confers a further legislative identity on these nations too.

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Education, Nationhood and the State What is true of the history state formation in the British archipelago is true, also, of the history of state educational structures and institutions: there are multiple stories to be told. Histories of education within the United Kingdom reflect the histories that led to ‘unification’. In Wales— conquered and finally absorbed into the British state in 1535 and 1542— there was no independent state-story to be told in the modern period, and it is only with the devolution processes enacted in the late 1990s that a history of independent Welsh educational governance can be told (Reynolds 2008; Senned n.d.). The story is very different in Scotland, however—the ‘union’ of the two states in 1707 was by treaty and both the Scots and the English parliaments ratified it. Together with the Law and the Church, Education was one of three arenas in which Scotland retained significant autonomy following the 1707 Act of Union with England. For Robert Anderson, Scottish education consequently acts as ‘a mark of national identity to be defended against assimilation with England’ which leads to a system ‘characterised by a peculiar awareness of its own history’ (Anderson 2018). Scotland’s educational self-concept is encapsulated in its system of Higher qualifications as the route to university entry. Since 1963, the commitment to meritocracy has been maintained through a highly centralised system of national examinations which offers universities a superficially objective metric to judge the quality of applicants. Meanwhile, the very short course of study for Highers (typically less than a year) encourages students to become generalists, with more successful students passing many more than the usual five. Since 1997, Scottish Highers have been administered by the Scottish Qualifications Authority, a national body charged with designing syllabi, setting examinations and awarding qualifications. The English pre-university examination—the ‘Advanced Level’—has a history going back to the 1950s when it replaced the Higher School Certificate. Advanced Levels can be taken in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Examinations in these jurisdictions are provided by a number of Exam Boards—a Welsh board, for example, WJEC, and three English boards (AQA, OCR and Edexcel), which compete with each other for adoption by schools. Since devolution under New Labour in the 1990s, education policy in England, Wales and Northern Ireland has begun to diverge, as education policy has been placed under the control of devolved

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administrations (Reynolds 2008), and has begun to approximate to the Scottish dispensation, however, without the distinct traditions of examinations and qualifications that can be observed in England and Scotland.

Research Design This paper proceeds through comparative content analysis (Schreier 2014)—we look at how content in official syllabus documents in two national jurisdictions is organised by identifying and analysing content headings and the content text beneath these, before exploring what these reveal about assumptions or conceptualisations which might underlie them. Throughout the paper we offer conclusions with varying degrees of certitude. In some cases, our interpretations are low-inference—as when we note the presence or absence of coverage of a particular time period or theme. At other times, our conclusions lean more heavily on interpretation. In both high- and low-inference cases, we acknowledge the contingency of our conclusions and take care to provide ample justification for them. Our study is exploratory and is confined to high-level analysis of curriculum architecture only—in other words, we are concerned here with how content is organised at the level of exam units or exam papers and curriculum divisions. We are not concerned, in this paper, with a systematic fine-grained analysis of all the text in syllabus documents or in the supporting documents that accompany examination syllabuses (such as exam papers, mark schemes and examiners’ reports). This limitation is deliberate and motivated by the following considerations. First, the documents we are examining are often of highly variable length, and asymmetries in analysis would emerge if we analysed all the text in the English specifications (which are both more expansive and more detailed than that Scottish ones) and in the Scottish ones. Second, this paper is exploratory and further and systematic fine-grained analysis will be undertaken at further stages of research if the patterns revealed in this analysis suggest that the questions we pose here merit pursuing further. A further limitation of the analysis attempted here is this: we confine ourselves in this paper to the analysis of syllabus documents and do not endeavour to construct a context for them by examining policy papers related to curriculum design or by seeking to interview those who produced the documents. Again, this is a pragmatic limitation and we do not rule out further and more in-depth research if the findings we develop here merit further investigation.

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We select three episodes, in particular, for analysis in this paper, having first presented an overview of the syllabus documents that we focus on. This selection constitutes a purposive sample (Scott and Morrison 2006) of data informed by theoretical considerations arising from our knowledge of each country’s history and a desire to cover a broad chronological range. Consequently, we focus our analysis on three phases in the relationship between Britain, Scotland and England. 1. Pre-1603—Scotland and England as separate kingdoms. Here we discuss the period during which we can still unproblematically talk about two nation states or, less anachronistically, two kingdoms. Given the potential scope of the pre-1603 period, we focus specifically on The Reformation as a tumultuous event which manifested differently in the two countries. 2. c. 1650–1900—‘Britain’ is made. Historians have long emphasised the role of the imperial project in fomenting an idea of ‘Britain’ as a state. The 1707 Act of Union was motivated, in part, by the desire of the Scottish elite to share access to English colonies. Thereafter, the imperial project can be seen as a joint enterprise during which the union matured. 3. 1900–2000—A ‘mature’ Britain? During the twentieth century, the union has been at both its most secure (during the high-water mark of Empire between the two world wars) and its most vulnerable after the 1970s as a discourse of devolution and/or of independence begins to emerge. Our data sets for this research are impacted by asymmetries—as has been adumbrated. In England, three separate examinations bodies are licenced to offer recognised university entrance qualifications (OCR, Edexcel and AQA); Scotland, meanwhile, has just one (SQA)—we analyse three separate versions of ‘history’ for England, therefore (AQA 2021; Edexcel 2017; OCR 2021) and only one for Scotland (SQA 2019). In addition, while economies of scale mean that English examination boards can offer a wide range of potential topics for students to study, Scotland’s smaller population means that only a much smaller range of topics is viable. Finally, while English students study four historical topics in two years, Scottish students study three units in one year. Consequently, English examination syllabuses are considerably more detailed than those in Scotland.

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We shift, depending on the degree of resolution we are working at in what follows, from analyses that synthesise all three English documents and compare them with the Scottish one to analyses that focus at one English syllabus document only. We make these shifts clear in what follows and moderate the degree of comprehensiveness with which we make claims accordingly.

Data and Discussion Syllabuses in Overview An overview of the Scottish and English syllabi immediately reveals divergent views on constitutional questions of what Britain is and when it came into being. Figure 1 compares the Scottish syllabus’ representation of this history (the blue and the brown elements) with that of one English exam board’s history specification (OCR 2021). A glance at the diagram shows a fundamental difference between the national narratives that the two countries adopt. In Scotland, content is organised into topics under three headings—‘Scottish Contexts’, ‘British Contexts’ and ‘European and World Contexts’—with schools required to choose one topic from each. Schools have a considerable degree of choice within these contexts—there are five ‘Scottish’ topics, five ‘British’ topics and ten ‘European and World’ topics (just one of which focuses substantially on the world beyond Europe and North America). In England, meanwhile, no distinction is made within ‘British’ topics, except where topic labels pre-date the establishment of Britain, when ‘English’ topics can be observed. This section will now explore this difference in more detail, but it is important to say here that these two narrativisations—which we term the ‘split screen narrative’ (Scotland) and the ‘continuity state narrative’—will re-emerge periodically through this analysis. To look first at the overarching English approach. Here we see a single examination paper focussing notionally on ‘British’ History. In the years before the Union of the Crowns in 1603, the titles of these papers refer to ‘England’, these titular references to ‘England’ stop in the years between 1603 and 1707 when England was incorporated into Britain. Thereafter, the papers focus on ‘Britain’ and no further reference is made to ‘England’ as an entity. Thus, ‘Britain’ is seen as something which supersedes England at some point in the seventeenth century. The syllabus is vague on this

1100

1300

1500

1600

The Early Stuarts and the Origins of the Civil War 16031660

Britain and Ireland 1900-85

Britain 1851-1951

1800

Liberals, Conserv atives and the Rise of Labour 1846– 1918

1900

Britain 1930– 1997

Britain 1900–1951

WW1

Migration and empire

From Pitt to Peel: Britain 1783–1853

1700

The Making of Georgian Britain 1678– c.1760

Act of Union

Slave trade

OCR ‘British’ topics in white

England 1485–1558: the Early Tudors

England 1547– 1603: the Later Tudors

England 1445– 1509

1400

England 1377– 1455

SQA ‘Scottish’ topics in maroon SQA ‘British’ topics in Blue

1200

England 1199– 1272

Reformation

Century of Revolutions

Fig. 1  English, Scottish and British History in the Scottish and English Pre-University Syllabus Documents: overview

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Anglo-Saxon England and the Norman Conquest 1035-1107

Scottish wars of Independence

The Creation of the Medieval Kingdoms, 1066–1406

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The Wars of Independence, 1249– 1328 The age of the Reformaon, 1542–1603

The Wars of Independence, 1286–1328

Mary Queen of Scots, and the Scosh Reformaon, 1542– 1587

BRITISH

SCOTTISH

Fig. 1  (continued)

The impact of the Great War, 1914–1928

Britain and Ireland, 1900– 1985

The Making of Modern Britain, 1880–1951

The Era of the Great War, 1900–1928

Britain, 1851–1951

Changing Britain, 1760–1914

Migraon and Empire, 1830–1939

The Atlanc slave trade

The Atlanc Slave Trade, 1770–1807

Migraon and empire, 1830– 1939

The century of revoluons, 1603–1702

War of the Three Kingdoms, 1603–1651

The Treaty of Union, 1689–1740

Church, state and feudal society, 1066–1406

The Creaon of the Medieval Kingdoms, 1066–1406

The Treaty of Union, 1689– 1715

HIGHER

NATIONAL

OBSERVATIONS

Common structure Scots on the Western Front, Domesc impact on Society, domesc impact on economy, domesc impact on polics. Not clear why Naonals is longer??

Presented differently. At N5 Immigrant to Scotland their experiences and Emigrants and their experiences. At Higher: internal migraon, immigrant experience, ‘The impact of Scots emigrants on the empire’ and ‘The effects of migraon and empire on Scotland, to 1939’

Same structure – worsening relaonship with England, Arguments for and against, process of passing act and effects

More focused on MQS at N5, no discussion of Ref outside Scotland. One quarter of N5 looks at ‘Mary in England, 1567–1587’

Very similar. Not clear why Higher Starts in 1249 when both levels begin with succession crisis aer Alexander III.

crisis in Northern Ireland, by 1968’

N5 – Poverty, Liberal reforms, Impact of WW2, Alee reforms H – Ireland before 1914, WW1 and Ireland, Anglo Irish Treaty, Irish Civil War, ‘An evaluaon of the reasons for the developing

N5 – Health and housing, industry, transport, democrac reform H – causes and extent of democrac reforms 1851-1828, Liberal reforms and their effecveness, Alee reforms and effecveness

N5 – Triangle trade, Britain and the Caribbean, the capves experience and slave resistance, the abolionist campaigns H – Reasons for the development of the ST, the importance of ST to Brish economy, An evaluaon of the factors governing relaons between slaves and their owners, An assessment of the implicaons of the trade for African sociees, An evaluaon of the obstacles to abolion, An evaluaon of the reasons for the success of the abolionist campaign in 1807

N5 – Polics before 1625, ‘rule of Charles I in England and Scotland, 1625–1640’, challenges to royal authority, War and the role of Cromwell, to 1651 H -Polics before 1625. ‘the policies of Charles I in Scotland, up to 1642’, An evaluaon of the reasons for the outbreak of civil war in England, an evaluaon of the reasons for the failure to find an alternave form of government, 1649–58, the revoluon selement 1688-1702

N5 – Normans and Feudalism, Henry !!, Role of the Church, Decline of Feudal Society H – Feudal society, the church, David 1, Henry 2, John, Decline of feudalism

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process which implicitly conflates England with Britain. In this conception, England (and by implication, Scotland) ‘ceased to be’ in the years after 1707, with the new unitary state of ‘Britain’ taking its place. It can only do this by concentrating solely on England in the years before 1707 and ignoring the possibility for a ‘British history’ which precedes this. We refer to this as a ‘continuity state’ narrative. Although the diagram considers just one examination board for reasons of space, the same process of the supra-nation superseding the nation state is evident in others. In AQA, for example, ‘Unit 1C The Tudors: England, 1485–1547’ is followed by ‘Unit 1D Stuart Britain and the Crisis of Monarchy, 1603–1649’. In Edexcel, Unit ‘1B England, 1509–1603: authority, nation and religion’ is followed by ‘Unit 1C Britain, 1625–1701: conflict, revolution and settlement’—formulations that date the shift slightly earlier than OCR but that share the same patterning. In contrast, to this single examination ‘continuity state narrative’, the Scottish ‘split screen’ narrative is underpinned by two separate examination papers: one in ‘Scottish’ History and one in ‘British’ History. Unlike England, British History does not ‘begin’ when Britain begins (1707) and nor does Scottish history ‘stop’ at this point. Instead, the histories of both Britain and Scotland are distinct, and both stretch back 1000 years. Both approaches entail logical inconsistencies: for its part, the ‘continuity state’ narrative must adopt a putative date when England ceased, and Britain began. Interestingly, two of the three English examination boards date this to 1603 when England adopted Scotland’s king, not 1707 when Scotland’s parliament was dissolved. Indeed, the AQA syllabus has a course entitled, ‘Stuart Britain and the Crisis of Monarchy, 1603–1702’— here we have a concept of ‘Stuart Britain’ used to refer to the island of Britain under the Union of the Crowns, rather than Britain qua nation state (which was not formed until shortly after the unit of study concludes). However, if Britain is to be understood geographically after 1603, how do we explain the disregard for Scottish affairs before 1603? Conversely, ‘split screen narrative’ approach makes it easier to conceptualise the histories of Britain in the years before 1707, but the coexistence of separate ‘British’ and ‘Scottish’ histories becomes more problematic once Scotland lost its constitutional independence. This dilemma is resolved by a somewhat arbitrary categorisation of topics as either ‘British’ or ‘Scottish’. Why, for example, is the Act of Union—which created a single state on the island of Britain—a ‘Scottish’ rather than a ‘British’ topic? Surely, there is no more distinctively ‘British’ event to study?

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Similarly, it was Britain as a nation—rather than Scotland—which went to war in 1914. Does it make sense, therefore, to treat World War I as a ‘Scottish’ topic? Put simply, both countries’ examinations must negotiate the changing relationships between Britain, Scotland and England after 1707, but they resolve this in different ways. In England, this is resolved by ignoring the other nations of the UK entirely and proffering a seamless ‘evolution’ between England and Britain as the legitimate object of national history. In Scotland, this is resolved by a notion that Britain and Scotland are both legitimate objects of study, but these two concepts mean very different things before and after the eighteenth century. We can see, therefore, that the categorisations of ‘British’, ‘Scottish’ and ‘English’ will always entail a degree of arbitrariness. It does not make sense to ask whether the English approach of ‘Britain superseding England’ makes more sense than the Scottish approach of Britain and Scotland existing in parallel as both are attempts to impose an organisational framework on a messy reality. As a further point, the place of imperial history in these two architectures/narratives can be analysed. Empire figures ambivalently in the Scottish curriculum architecture—it is both a British (Slave Trade) and a Scottish topic (Migration and Empire, World War I), but it appears to be a British one where the content is difficult history (the Slave Trade). In contrast, the English OCR syllabus makes no references to it in the titles of its British topics. Instead, OCR explores the British Empire in named thematic papers, that is, not as a core component of the national narrative. In-Depth Analysis We now turn to the analysis of the three theoretically salient episodes that we identified in the research design section above—the Reformation, Empire and the Twentieth Century and deal with each in turn before setting out our conclusions. The Reformation Despite the centuries of Europe-wide tumult conjured by the idea of The Reformation, the Scottish syllabus offers this as one of its ‘Scottish’ topics: ‘Part B—The Age of Reformation 1542–1603’. The syllabus is bounded by Scottish-specific dates (beginning with the accession of the infant Queen Mary and ending when Mary’s son James VI of Scotland ascended to the English throne) and makes just one mention of France and three mentions

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of England. The syllabus identifies four ‘Key issues’, the first of which is ‘The Reformation of 1560’. This reframing of The Reformation as a singular event—The Reformation Parliament of 1560 which abolished Papal jurisdiction in Scotland and adopted a new Calvinist confession of faith— unmoors The Scottish Reformation from events elsewhere in Britain and Europe. The strongest example of this is, perhaps, a vague reference to ‘relationships with France and England’ as ‘background’ to the 1560 parliament. These rather anodyne words gloss over the turmoil of the period to an almost comical degree. Between 1543 and 1551, England and Scotland were engaged in a brutal war which saw Edinburgh largely razed and many thousands killed. This war was religiously and territorially motivated: England under Henry VIII had renounced papal authority in 1536 and attacked Catholic Scotland to break its alliance with France and to secure a marriage between the infant Queen Mary of Scotland and Henry’s son, Edward VI. Had the English prevailed in this war, Protestantism would have been established as the official religion on the island of Britain. If we interpret ‘The Reformation’ in a European context, these wars were not ‘background’ to ‘the Reformation of 1560’ (as the syllabus has it) but a constituent part of a centuries-long European conflict called The Reformation. Indeed, The uniquely Scottish Reformation presented in the syllabus appears curiously unmoored from similar events elsewhere. In addition to incursions by Protestant England, the years before 1560 had seen different strands of Protestantism emerge in Scotland but struggle to take hold, including the executions for heresy of the Hussite Pavel Kravar, the Lutheran Patrick Hamilton and the Zwingli-influenced George Wishart. By centring the parliament of 1560, the syllabus makes ‘Protestantism’ synonymous with the brand of Calvinist Presbyterianism which eventually prevailed in Scotland. Such a framing makes it difficult to explain the ongoing religious conflict between England and Scotland in the seventeenth century, when both countries were notionally Protestant. In common with the other Scottish topics taught at Higher, students are expected to consider ‘The significance of the age of Reformation in the development of Scottish identity’. This phrasing assumes a singular national identity which is shared by all Scots and further implies that this identity draws on a shared Protestant heritage. However, since Catholic migration from Ireland, Italy and elsewhere in the mid-nineteenth century, Scotland has been home to sizeable Catholic populations which experienced

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considerable sectarian discrimination. Although changing attitudes and public policy have ameliorated these sectarian divisions somewhat in recent years, tensions remain, and the legacy of the Reformation remains contested. Despite their place in the syllabus, these issues of the ‘significance’ of the Reformation on ‘Scottish identity’ are not formally assessed in examinations, perhaps because they pose exactly these kinds of questions about what the past means for people today. In England, The Reformation is framed as both a period in British History and a transnational phenomenon. For example, the AQA examination board offers papers in ‘The Reformation in Europe, c1500–1564’ and ‘Religious conflict and the Church in England, c1529–c1570’. It is interesting to note, in these examples—and with the other two exam boards also—that the term ‘Reformation’ is Europeanised and not applied when naming the English sub-type of the wider European development— something that might, perhaps, strike the reader as connoting a certain English exceptionalism (Edgerton 2020). Scotland is not discussed in the course on ‘The Reformation in Europe’ and makes just one appearance in the latter course with a fleeting reference to ‘the threat posed by Mary, Queen of Scots’. Thus, Scotland and its Reformation largely disappear in the English curriculum—it is neither part of ‘England’ nor part of ‘Europe’. In a similar vein, Edexcel invites students to study the same issue—in this case Religion and the state in early modern Europe—from an English perspective and a European perspective. Students must study England, 1509–1603: authority, nation and religion alongside either the German Reformation or The Dutch Revolt. Scotland makes no appearance in either the English or European case studies. The OCR examination board takes a still different approach: students can study a depth study on The German Reformation and the rule of Charles V 1500–1559’, but they can also study a thematic study on ‘The Catholic Reformation 1492–1610’. This latter course has a specific focus on interpretations of history meaning that ‘learners should be aware of debates surrounding’ three topics: The Council of Trent, Phillip II of Spain and the St Bartholomew’s Massacre. Not only does this approach focus on three countries (Holy Roman Empire, Spain and France) but it also invites students to view these events as historiographical contested, quite a contrast with the singular conception of national identity which appears in Scotland. Two important differences are therefore apparent between the two countries. Firstly, in Scotland the Reformation is presented as largely a

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national episode, with passing references to England and France only where they relate to the Scottish experience. In contrast, the English curriculum presents opportunities to study a more European perspective on The Reformation alongside an English Tudor experience. The second difference relates to the contestability of these events. In Scotland, students are invited to consider ‘The significance of the age of Reformation in the development of Scottish identity’, whereas the English curriculum—and OCR in particular—emphasise the contested historiography of The Reformation. Empire For each topic it offers, the Scottish Higher syllabus identifies ‘Themes’ (such as authority, feudalism and conflict) which it believes to be crucial to an understanding of the topic. Across the whole syllabus, the theme of ‘Empire’ appears only once: in relation to a Scottish Topic on ‘Migration and Empire, 1830–1939’. This topic identifies four ‘Key Issues’ 1. The migration of Scots 2. The experience of immigrants in Scotland 3. The impact of Scots emigrants on the empire 4. The effects of migration and empire on Scotland, to 1939 There are, then, two stories here: one narrative of Scottish emigration to other countries (specifically Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India) and one of immigration to Scotland from elsewhere (specifically Irish, Jews, Lithuanians and Italians). Notably, both of these struggles conform to a familiar rags-to-riches narrative template (Jones 2014) and follow Todorov’s model of narrative as proceeding from equilibrium, through disruption and struggle to a new equilibrium (Todorov 1978). The emigrants’ story begins adversity and an interruption to equilibrium, in Key Issue 1, as the rural way of life is disrupted in the highland clearances and economic depression ravages cities. However, the Scots find salvation in their new homes and equilibrium is restored (Key Issue 3) as students are asked to study the impact of Scots emigrants on the growth and development of the empire with reference to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India in terms of: economy and enterprise; culture and religion; native societies.

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The immigrant’s story arc is superficially similar. Students should study the difficulties and hostility that new arrivals in Scotland faced (Key Issue 2) before their acceptance in Key Issue 4 as students learn ‘the contribution of immigrants to Scottish society, economy and culture’. Although these two stories (immigrant and emigrant) have narrative similarities, the two experiences differ greatly. While immigrants to Scotland faced suspicion and hostility, Scots arrived elsewhere in the Empire as colonisers. That is not to say that the experience of Scottish emigrants in Canada, Australia, India and New Zealand was universally positive, but that they were—formally or informally—part of an ongoing project to bring these territories under British control. The syllabus uses scrupulously neutral language to describe the colonisation process: imperial expansion is ‘the growth and development of empire’. Meanwhile, the impact on ‘native societies’ frames dispossession and genocide as an outcome of colonisation (perhaps even an inadvertent one), rather than a central plank of it. In common with other ‘Scottish’ topics in the syllabus, students are invited to consider ‘The significance of migration and empire in the development of Scottish identity’ but given that the date range of this topic concludes in 1939, the more relevant (and numerically more significant) story of post-war immigration to Britain from the former Empire is not explored. Although ‘Migration and Empire’ is the only topic which mentions ‘Empire’ as a theme, a further three Scottish topics deal directly with the British Empire (‘the Atlantic slave trade 1770–1807’, ‘The American Revolution 1763–1787’ and ‘Britain and Ireland 1900–85’), while others cover periods which are concurrent with the British Empire (e.g. ‘Britain 1851–1951’ and ‘The impact of the Great War, 1914–1928’) or where English/British colonial expansion provides an important backdrop (e.g. The Treaty of Union, 1689–1740). The Higher syllabus classifies these topics as either ‘Scottish’, ‘British’ or ‘World’ history according to apparently arbitrary—or, at least, invisible—criteria (Table 1). The decision about whether a topic is treated as ‘Scottish’ seems to be neither a spatial nor a temporal one—this is an important equivocation. The Treaty of Union—which dissolved the Scottish parliament and merged it with England’s—is treated as Scottish topic, despite it concerning constitutional reform on the entire island of Great Britain. In fact, The Act of Union has a strong case to be considered a ‘world’ topic given that it was motivated in large part by the clamour of Scottish elites to trade in English colonies, following the failure of their own imperial misadventure

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Table 1  Topics related to the British Empire and the geographical context to which they are allocated by SQA

Topic

Classified as

The Treaty of Union, 1689–1740 The American Revolution 1763–1787 The Atlantic Slave Trade 1770–1807 Migration and Empire, 1830–1939 Britain 1851–1951 The impact of the Great War, 1914–1928 Britain and Ireland 1900–1985

Scottish history World history British history Scottish history British history Scottish history British history

in the Darien region of Panama (Riding 2022). Similarly, the characterisation of World War I as a ‘Scottish’ topic seems curious. Although threequarters of the topic’s content focuses overwhelmingly on the impact of the war domestically, the insistence is  that students study ‘Scots on the Western Front’ exclusively, rather than the 3 million servicepeople from elsewhere in the British Commonwealth. Similarly, ‘The Atlantic Slave Trade’ is treated as a ‘British’ topic even though it covers three continents and could be seen as an archetypal study in global or transnational history. A ‘British’ framing also diminishes the significant role played by the slave trade in the history of Scotland and Scottish institutions (Mullen and Newman 2018). Mullen has coined the phrase ‘it wisnae us’ to capture what he sees as Scottish cultural denialism about its role in the slave trade which is seen as an ‘English’ trade (Mullen 2009; Devine 2015). Indeed, on some measures Scots played a disproportionately large role in the slave system (if not its trade): analysis of the compensation paid to slave owners on abolition in 1833 showed that around 15% of payments went to Scots, despite representing only around 10% of the British population as a whole (McClelland and Graham 2011). The treatment of Empire in the English syllabus varies by examination board. All three syllabuses offer longitudinal papers studying the evolution of the empire, while two of the three boards (OCR and Edexcel) permit students to study a colonised society in its own terms. We will examine these papers separately, but to look first at the longitudinal papers where three different narratives are present.

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• Edexcel’s ‘Britain: losing and gaining an Empire, 1763–1914’ offers a ‘fall and rise narrative’ beginning with American independence and terminating with the empire at its most hegemonic. • AQAs ‘The British Empire, c1857–1967’ represents a ‘rise and fall’ narrative, beginning with the creation of the Raj following the Indian Rebellion and terminating with African decolonisation. • OCR allows schools to choose between two rise and fall narratives— one looking at the First Empire in ‘The Origins and Growth of the British Empire 1558–1783’ and another looking at the second empire ‘From Colonialism to Independence: The British Empire 1857–1965’. Aside from these diverse narrative arcs, it is also instructive to look at language use from a systematic functional linguistics perspective (Halliday and Matthiessen 2013: 211–356; Toolan 2007). The key question here is ‘transitivity’—or, in other words, the question of ‘who’ is ‘doing what’ and ‘to whom’, in relation to Empire. We can consider AQA’s title first— ‘The British Empire, c1857–1967’—as scrupulously neutral, a neutrality it maintains by using as few words as possible. OCR, on the other hand, offers abstract nouns—growth, origins, colonialism and independence— to frame its narrative. These words imply a narrative structure but—by favouring the use of nouns over verbs—maintain a passivity which might be understood as sidestepping the question of agency or intention. Edexcel, meanwhile, clearly frames the empire from a coloniser perspective using verbs of ‘lose’ for American independence and ‘gain’ for the colonisation of the Asian and African Empire. Given the trauma and bloodshed involved in both these processes, the words ‘lose’ and ‘gain’ seem not just perspectively problematic, but unduly bland. Indeed, the banality of the words recalls the words of Victorian historian, Seeley (1883), who famously wrote that, ‘We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind’ (Seeley 1883). Given this framing, is it perhaps surprising that Edexcel is one of the two boards to offer a depth study from the perspective of the colonised— ‘India, c1914–48: the road to independence’—notice that India gains ‘independence’, it is not ‘lost’ as Edexcel holds the American colonies were. OCR is the other board to invite a study from the perspective of colonised peoples, with an optional depth study on ‘African Kingdoms c.1400–c.1800’.

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It is immediately apparent that the English syllabus engages more directly with the British Empire as a historical concept than does the Scottish. In Scotland, Empire more often forms an unspoken backdrop to historical events, whereas in England it is treated as a topic to be studied as a singular coherent whole. In Scotland, topics which are intimately linked to the colonisation and the empire—such as World War I or The Atlantic Slave Trade—are viewed through a national lens, while the process of colonisation is framed as two complementary migrations to and from Scotland. Moreover, except for highly atypical case studies of America and Ireland, there is no discussion in Scotland of decolonisation. In contrast, the perspective of the colonised become legitimate objects of study in two of the three English syllabuses, while decolonisation (variously termed ‘independence, (OCR)’ ‘losing an empire’ (Edexcel) and ‘imperial retreat’ (AQA)) is prominent. The contrast between the British and the Scottish treatment of slavery and the slave trade provides instructive contrasts—Scotland names and confronts Slavery, albeit through a British rather than a Scottish lens. The same cannot be said for the English case. Taking OCR as an example, it is striking that they are more referenced to slavery and slave trading in the syllabus sections on African kingdoms than there is in the sections on the British empire (where the word appears once or twice—in one case as a stand-alone word and in the other as an ‘impact’ on colonies), and in the case of both AQA and Edexcel, slavery and the slave trade are referenced most in the context of abolition or suppression by the British navy and is mentioned once in the context of the development of the Empire. Perhaps we can say, in both cases, that a difficult topic, central to the real history of both countries, ends up being ‘off-shored’ in their pre-university history exams—as something British not Scottish and as something done elsewhere and largely by others but abolished and constrained by the British.  he Twentieth Century T As with other parts of their content, the three English specifications and the Scottish Higher organise content in the twentieth century under geographical categories. In England topics are identified as either ‘British’ or ‘Not British’ for the purposes of ensuring schools study a statutory minimum of recognisably ‘British’ History. In Scotland, schools must choose three topics: one ‘Scottish’, one British and one ‘European and World’. The analysis that follows focuses on content identified as British or Scottish

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in the Higher and on content explicitly labelled British in the three English specifications. In the first instance, all the papers which addressed the history of Scotland/Britain in the Twentieth Century were identified and their chronological coverage was mapped. Only in the Higher and in one of the three English specifications do we find a topic that covers the entire time period. Two interesting features are revealed in the table above (Table 2). The first is the tendency for examination topics in most syllabuses to cluster around the early part of the century—of the five Twentieth Century topics offered by OCR, just three look at the period after 1929. The second interesting feature is the relative paucity of opportunities to study Britain after 1951—just 25% of Twentieth Century topics offered by Scotland and Edexcel allowed the study of such recent British History. The opportunity to study even more recent history (post-1985) is even more restricted still, with Scotland excluding this entirely and only a minority of English examinations allowing this. This clustering towards the early part of the century creates a focus on the high-water mark of British imperial power before the Second World War, with few opportunities to study decolonisation, the reorientation of Britain to Europe from the 1970s or the rise of independence movements in Scotland. The Scottish syllabus faces the challenge of defining a distinctively ‘Scottish history’ at a time when the United Kingdom was arguably at its most united. Two twentieth-century ‘Scottish’ topics are offered which are, more properly, explorations of how more transnational events affected Scotland specifically: the experience of World War I and Migration and Empire ending in 1939. For example, the ‘The Impact of the Great War, 1914–1928’ unit has four key issues, three of which focus on the domestic Table 2  The Twentieth Century coverage in all four specifications Board

Scotland Edexcel AQA OCR

Number of British (and Scottish) topics covering 20C in some way

% 20C British (and Scottish) topics ending before 1929

% 20C British (and Scottish) topics covering post-1951

4 8 4 5

25% 38% 0% 40%

25% 25% 100% 40%

% 20C British (and Scottish) topics covering post-1985 0% 25% 25% 25%

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impact of war including war shortages, the changing role of women and the rise of political radicalism. Here the wisdom of specifically Scottish focus is valuable. The fourth key issue, meanwhile, focusing on ‘Scots on the Western Front’, seems to struggle to define an ineffable and uniquely Scottish experience of combat. As we have already seen, the ‘Migration and Empire’ unit faces similar problems—a specifically Scottish focus is more easily defined when focusing on the experience of immigrants into Scotland than it is when it demands an exclusive focus on the Scottish contribution to the imperial project. It is notable, however, in that case of the Scottish curriculum, that three is no Scottish History offered after World War Two, but there are British topics in this period Britain 1851–1951 and ‘Britain and Ireland’ takes developments through to 1985. It is, of course, worth pondering what this self-denying ordinance not to cover the period after 1951 excludes. On the one hand, it excludes the Keynesian trente glorieuses of the post-­ war decades—in which nationalised institutions like the National Health Service, the British Coal Board, British Steel flourished and in which, historians such as Edgerton have argued, Britishness came truly into being as a national, rather than imperial, construct (Anderson 2021; Edgerton 2019). However, it is also to exclude the period since the 1970s when, as historians such as Weight have argued, Thatcherite de-industrialisation and assaults on the post-war Keynesian consensus stoked revivals of nationalism in Wales and Scotland and tendencies driving towards devolution and the break-up of the United Kingdom (Weight 2002). Whilst many of the English exam boards papers stop early in the twentieth century, it is clear in all three specifications that significant coverage of the century is present in all and that wide themes are addressed, for example, in the following three paper titles: • Democracies in change: Britain and the USA in the twentieth century: Paper 1, Option 1H: Britain transformed, 1918–97 (Edexcel) • The Making of Modern Britain, 1951–2007 (AQA) • From Colonialism to Independence: The British Empire 1857–1965 (OCR) It is also the case that some British topics are often international topics—as was the case in the last bullet above. It is striking, nevertheless, that British coverage of ‘Britain’ in these papers does not make reference to the separate component jurisdictions of

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the ‘United Kingdom’—and entity whose ‘unity’ has increasing come under strain, or been fragmented politically, through devolution in the latter years of the periods covered. There is no indication in the Edexcel paper description that ‘Britain’ contains three distinct nations within it (Edexcel 2017: 72–73) and the same is true in the case of AQA who discuss various sources of tension in the period 1951–2007, including, for example, the Miner’s Strike of the early 1980s, but manage, despite coverage of Thatcher’s policies and their impacts and the period of devolution under Blair’s government, make no reference to Scotland or other component nations of the UK in their description of the period (AQA 2021: 62–63).

Discussion and Conclusions Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 3, lines 9–10

In MacBeth, English national poet excoriates equivocators as damned souls. Writing as known Catholic sympathiser in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, Shakespeare was compelled to use his ‘Scottish Play’ to position himself as a steadfast supporter of the Scottish Protestant James VI, installed as King of England after 1603. While equivocation was not a luxury available to a playwright in the royal court, it seems to be a feature of examination syllabi when negotiating the complex history of Britain and its constituent nations. The question of what, where or when Britain was appears not to be addressed by curriculum planners in either country. While the overall narration of the nation differs—an ‘split screen narrative’ in Scotland and a ‘continuity state’ narrative in England—the two countries share a vagueness about the nature of Britishness, Englishness and Scottishness. History curriculum makers are faced with an impossible task: the need to theorise a fluid and contested past as a concrete and coherent object of study. These two orders of reality—curriculum neatness and political messiness—are incompatible: one demands clarity and certainty, the other demands ambiguity. To be more precise, curriculum makers in England and Scotland must navigate three unstable facts:

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1. The island of Britain contains three distinct nations: England, Wales and Scotland.3 2. From 1707, the term ‘Britain’ was used constitutionally to refer to the UK, as well as geographically to refer to the island. Imperial expansion between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries contributed to a new ‘British national identity’. 3. England, Wales and Scotland retained geographic recognition and cultural identity even after their constitutional independence was diluted. These incompatibility and unstable facts are reconciled in different ways in the curricular narratives of England and Scotland, in both cases generating narratives that entail logical inconsistency. In England, the falling away of references to ‘England’ in favour of ‘Britain’ privileges a constitutional definition of the state and implies that Britain is merely a continuation of ‘the story of England’. Such a framing means asserting the distinctiveness (and hence irrelevance) of Scotland in the years before 1603, before asserting its relevance (and denying its distinctiveness) in the years after 1603. Conversely, the Scottish approach it to adopt two parallel lenses: to assert that there has always been a recognisable ‘Scottish History’ and that there has always been a recognisable ‘British History’. Such an approach is epistemologically defensible (‘history’ doesn’t know ‘where’ it is happening), but it necessarily entails an editorial decision about whether a particular phenomenon or set of events should properly be considered ‘British’ or ‘Scottish’. Hence, we have a ‘British’ Slave Trade, but a ‘Scottish’ Reformation; a ‘Scottish’ Act of Union preceded by a ‘British’ Century of Revolutions. None of these attributions is ‘wrong’, but nor are they in any sense logical. There are two possible explanations for this vagueness: accidental imprecision and intentional equivocation. An explanation from accidental imprecision suggests that questions of national identity simply do not occur to curriculum makers or that curriculum makers are confused by concepts such as ‘Britain’ and ‘England. As we have discussed, this is not as implausible as it may sound: while the term ‘Britain’ is most correctly used geographically to describe an island, its use as a synecdochic shorthand for the ‘The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’ 3  At least three, it might be added. Mention might be made of the Cornish nationalist movement, for example, Mebyon Kernow (2022).

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is widely accepted internationally. When AQA asks its students to study ‘Northern Ireland and the Good Friday Agreement’ in a unit entitled, ‘The Making of Modern Britain, 1951–2007’, the need for a short and catchy unit title has over-ridden the fact the Northern Ireland is not, geographically, on the island of Britain. In this more charitable explanation, the imprecision around the use of national terminology reflects, in part, a fluidity around the ways in which terms like ‘Britain’ feature in language-­ in-­use. A less charitable explanation implies intentional equivocation— that the conflations, elisions and subdivisions of Britain, Scotland and England reflect linguistic opportunism, rather than careless terminological inexactitude. In other words, the fact that these terms are so fluid (and that they are used carelessly and interchangeably in common language) offers a convenient cover for curriculum makers to avoid offering potentially controversial fixed definitions for these terms. It is always difficult to infer intention from action and so the question of whether these narratives reflect accidental imprecision or intentional equivocation will have to go unanswered. However, we can suggest that the two narrative forms reflect asymmetries of power between the countries. For its part, the English curriculum is, for all practical purposes, a single ‘English’ story in which the story of ‘Britain’ after 1707 is merely the continuation of the story of England before that. This narrative reflects England’s status as the largest and most populous nation in the UK—after 1707, England can lay claim to ‘Britain’s’ story, not merely its own, now defunct, ‘English’ one. The option of simply co-opting Britain’s story after 1707 is more difficult for the much smaller nation of Scotland. Instead, Scotland needs to preserve a national story in the face of lost constitutional authority after 1707. This need to read ‘Britain’ and ‘Scotland’ as two timeless lenses for viewing the past has two effects: the nationalisation of global events such as World War I and the Reformation as ‘Scottish History’ and dissociation from more problematic histories such as the Transatlantic Slave Trade as ‘British’. Ultimately, it was, perhaps, naïve to expect to find coherent national narratives in the syllabi of high-school curricula. The purpose of these documents is not to define the nation, but to identify and delimit relevant content to ensure students are adequately prepared for examinations. However, when considering the use of terms such as Scotland, Britain and England in these syllabuses, we cannot help but be reminded of Lewis Carroll, ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’

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Appendix (Table 3) Table 3  Timeline of England and Scotland’s constitutional relationship c. 1066-1286—Separate King of Scotland and King of England, although there is considerable migration between the two countries and intermarriage between the nobility of the two countries meaning that it was common for Scottish nobles to hold land in England and vice versa. 1286-1314—Death of Scotland’s Alexander III without an heir led to a succession crisis which gave England’s Edward I an opportunity to assert control over Scotland. Resistance to Edward’s demands on the Scottish nobility led to a series of conflicts known in Scotland as ‘The Wars of Independence’. Victory at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314 ended English attempts to control Scotland. 1314-1603—Relationship between the two countries is fractious as English claims over Scotland are periodically restated and Scotland is drawn into closer alliances with France. 1603—After England’s Elizabeth I dies without an heir in 1603, King James VI of Scotland (the grandson of Margaret Tudor and James IV) becomes King James I of England in the ‘Union of the Crowns’. Both countries retain independent parliaments and churches. 1706/7—Economic pressure from the English parliament (included threats to embargo trade with Scotland) leads to The Scottish Parliament voting to dissolve itself. The Union was supported by the Scottish elites who stood to gain from access to English colonial markets but faced considerable popular opposition. 1997—Referendum in Scotland shows support for devolution and, in 1999, The Scottish Parliament is recreated allowing limited self-government. 2014—A referendum in Scotland for independence leads to 55%–45% in favour of the continuation of Scotland in the United Kingdom.

References Addley, E., and Muir, H. 2007. Marching to London to Hear a Single Word … Sorry. [Online]. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/mar/24/britishidentity.race. Accessed 6 1 2022. Anderson, R. 2018. ‘Historical Perspectives.’ In T. G. K. Bryce, W. M. Humes & D. Gillies, et al., (Eds.) Scottish Education, 99–107. Edinburgh University Press. Anderson, P. 2021. Edgerton’s Britain. New Left Review 132: 41–53. AQA. 2021. AS and A-Level History AS (7041) A-Level (7042). AQA. https:// filestore.aqa.org.uk/resources/history/specifications/AQA-­7 041-­7 042-­ SP-­2015.PDF. Blakemore, E. 2016. What’s the Difference Between England, Britain and the U.K.? Smithsonian Magazine, June 24. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/ smart-­news/whats-­difference-­between-­england-­britain-­and-­uk-­180959558/. Colley, L. 1994. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. Pimlico.

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Devine, T. 2015. Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Edexcel. 2017. A Level History: Specification, Pearson Edexcel Level 3 Advanced GCE in History (9HI0). Pearson/Edexcel. https://qualifications.pearson. com/content/dam/pdf/A%20Level/Histor y/2015/Specification%20 and%20sample%20assessments/9781446914366_GCE_2015_A_HIST.pdf. Edgerton, D. 2019. The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History. Penguin Books. ———. 2020, May 3. British Exceptionalism: Where Brexit and Our Coronavirus Response Collide. The New European. https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/ brexit-­news-­where-­brexit-­and-­coronavirus-­collide-­76324/. Hall, C. 2018. Doing Reparatory History: Bringing ‘race’ and Slavery Home. Race & Class 60 (1): 3–21. Halliday, M.A.K., and C. Matthiessen. 2013. Halliday’s Introduction to Functional Grammar. Routledge. Hansard. 2007. Scotland and the Union: Volume 459: Debated on Tuesday 1 May 2007. [Online]. https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2007-­05-­01/ debates/07050143000002/ScotlandAndTheUnion?highlight=act%20 union#contribution-­07050143000277. Accessed 6 1 2022. Jones, J. 2014. The Shapes of Stories by Kurt Vonnegut. Open Culture. http:// www.openculture.com/2014/02/kurt-­vonnegut-­masters-­thesis-­rejected-­by-­ u-­chicago.html. McClelland, K., and Graham, E. 2011. Compensating Scotland’s Slave Owners. Scottish Local History Forum 81. Mebyon Kernow. 2022. Mebyon Kernow  – The Party for Cornwall. https:// www.mebyonkernow.org/. Mullen, S. 2009. It Wisnae Us: The Truth About Glasgow and Slavery. Glasgow: The Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland. Mullen, S., and S. Newman. 2018. Slavery, Abolition and the University of Glasgow: Report and recommendations of the University of Glasgow History of Slavery Steering Committee. University of Glasgow. https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/ Media_607547_smxx.pdf. Nairn, T. 1981. The Break-up of Britain. 2nd ed. Verso Books. OCR. 2021. A Level Specification: History A, H505. OCR. https://www.ocr.org. uk/Images/170128-­specification-­accredited-­a-­level-­gce-­history-­a-­h505.pdf. Oldfield, J., and M. Wills. 2020. Remembering 1807: Lessons from the Archives. History Workshop Journal 90: 253–272. Reynolds, D. 2008. New Labour, Education and Wales: The Devolution Decade. Oxford Review of Education 34 (6): 753–765. Riding, T. 2022. The Darien Scheme and Global Hisotry in the Classroom. In SATH Yearbook 2022, ed. J. Smith, 3-8. Scottish Association for the Teaching of History. http://www.sath.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/RidingDarien.pdf.

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Schreier, M. 2014. Qualitative Content Analysis. In The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Data Analysis, ed. U.  Flick, 170–183. SAGE Publications, Inc. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446282243.n12. Scott, D., and M. Morrison. 2006. Key Ideas in Educational Research. Continuum. Seeley, John Robert. 1883. The Expansion of England, 12. London: Macmillan. Senned. n.d. History of Devolution. https://senedd.wales/how-­we-­work/history-­ of-­devolution/. Accessed September 1 2022. SQA. 2019. Higher Course Specification: Higher History. Scottish Qualifications Authority. https://www.sqa.org.uk/files_ccc/HigherCourseSpecHistory.pdf. Todorov, T. 1978. The Poetics of Prose. Cornell University Press. Toolan, M.J. 2007. Language. In The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, ed. D. Herman, 231–244. Routledge. UK Parliament. 2007. EDM 1221: Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act 1807. [Online]. https://edm.parliament.uk/early-­day-­motion/32987#tab-­ supporters. Accessed 6 1 2022. Walvin, J. 2009. The Slave Trade, Abolition and Public Memory. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 19: 139–149. Weight, R. 2002. Patriots: National Identity in Britain, 1940–2000. Pan Books.

Regional Language and Culture Teaching in Alsace from 1982 to 2022: To What Extent Can Language Education and History Education Be Synonyms? Pascale Erhart, Dominique Huck, and Sarah Ochsenbein

Introduction The collective term Alsatian began to circulate at the end of the nineteenth century, at a time when Alsace was part of the German Empire, as a means of differentiation from other German-speaking areas (Irvine and Gal 2000). Since then, it has been used by the general public as well as politicians and scientists to refer to those German dialects that are still used by a fairly large part of the population in Alsace alongside French,

P. Erhart (*) • D. Huck University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] S. Ochsenbein Académie de Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 P. S. Colla, A. Di Michele (eds.), History Education at the Edge of the Nation, Global Histories of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27246-2_12

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which has been the official and legitimate language for all inhabitants since the country last changed hands in 1945 (Huck and Erhart 2019). The fact that this language, though still in use and spoken in different areas and situations, is increasingly less transmitted in the private sphere (family, friends) points to a demand to which society in general, and the educational sector in particular, has to respond. Generally, the educational system has chosen to respond by teaching and learning German. Whether for one language (Alsatian) or the other (German), most learners, whatever their linguistic skills, wonder firstly how it is possible that there are languages other than French in the Alsatian area and also (above all) about the nature of dialects and their connection with (standard) German, on the other hand. In all cases, they are obliged to merely cobble together answers to the question of why these varieties are present in the Alsatian area (Fig. 1), due to lack of factual knowledge. Yet, the teaching and learning of a language (or a language-culture) must be set within human history and, as a result, is supposed to provide keys to distance the learners from stereotypes, incongruities circulating in society or, more simply, untruths. In this sense, the supplementary teaching of history alongside a language is not an option but a necessity, insofar

Fig. 1  Bilingual street sign in Strasbourg

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as it allows us to shed light on the complex developments of languages, including their representations. Dialectology and sociolinguistics researchers and teachers at the University of Strasbourg are regularly confronted with a real lack of knowledge on the part of their students regarding the history of the region where most of them grew up and went to school. Students often discover the history of Alsace by attending the Bachelor degree optional courses in Alsatian and dialectology offered by the Department of Dialectology.1 These courses are therefore the place where the part of regional history transmitted (or not) by the educational system can be observed, as well as occasionally stereotyped, sometimes even fictional, representations of this history transmitted by society and reproduced by students. Since regional history is barely touched upon in schools, these observations can only be made and questionned a posteriori. The aim of this chapter is to provide some answers to the question of how this ‘historical knowledge void’ has arisen historically, by questioning, in particular, the status of the ‘regional language and culture’ teaching in Alsace, which could theoretically be the appropriate place for transmission of historical knowledge, but is not so in practice. In the first section of this chapter, we show to what extent languages and history are inherently linked and why a knowledge of history is essential in order to understand the complex sociolinguistic situation of Alsace; this is why our language lessons often become history lessons, aimed at filling the gap in our students’ historical knowledge. In the second section, we discuss the way public authorities, society in general, and ourselves at the University of Strasbourg, respond to the practical problem of managing and implementing two, sometimes diverging, national and regional language and culture teaching projects within the same social context. In the end, we will try to show that the teaching of regional language and culture in schools only partially helps the transmission of regional history, insofar as it remains optional and is considered a low priority both by the school institution and by the pupils and their parents, even at regional level.

1  Though the dialectology department does not offer a specific curriculum nor deliver a BA or MA diploma, a Diplôme universitaire d’alsacien can be obtained by students who graduate in a combination of the language and civilisation courses offered by the Département de dialectologie alsacienne et mosellane.

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Why Do Pupils/Students/Other Learners Have Little or No Real Knowledge of the Sociolinguistic Situation of Alsace? Regional History Is Not Taught in Schools The teaching of history in the educational system in Alsace is regulated by the French state education system (Éducation nationale), in which the teaching of regional history is not envisaged. Even though “patriotism is largely absent from recent official texts and school books” in recent decades (Bozec 2018: 4, our translation), teachers have little scope for teaching regional history since it is limited to the local environment. In fact, the question of adaptation to the teaching of history has not been raised for regions with a strong identity located in metropolitan France. The Ministry justifies this by the desire to respect the indivisible nature of the Republic. […] It has little tolerance for regional and local differences. (Legris 2015: 139, our translation)

Actually, the only possibility for this teaching is an optional teaching of “regional language and culture” in secondary education, but there is very little material available to evaluate the part of history teaching it contains. This transmission also seems to depend on the goodwill of teachers (assuming that such goodwill exists) (cf. section “Regional History Is Not Taught in Schools”). As a consequence, in Alsace, the in-depth study of regional history must await the students’ arrival at university, where specialised courses are offered by the Faculty of Historical Sciences and its Institute for the History of Alsace (Institut d’histoire de l’Alsace) and, to a lesser extent, by our courses in Alsatian dialectology (cf. section “Alsatian Teaching/Teaching Alsatian”). How “History” and “Languages” Are Articulated in Alsace  lobal Evolution of Language Uses in Alsace G The Germanic dialects nowadays called Alsatian were introduced to the area by the Franks and more importantly by the Alemanni in the fourth and fifth centuries. The Alemanni and Franks quickly asserted their

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dialects, so that the (present-day) strip between the Rhine and the Vosges passed linguistically from Celtic and Gallo-Roman into Germanic in a relatively short time. Until the seventeenth century, Alsace shared the political fate of the German Empire founded in the tenth century (Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation) and continued to belong to the German cultural and linguistic area. It is therefore only during the periods of modern and contemporary history that Alsace shares a common destiny with France, excluding almost half a century of attachment to the newly created German Empire (1871–1918) and the de facto annexation to Hitler’s Germany (1940–1945) (Huck 2015, 2022). After the capitulation of Germany (May 1945), Alsace was returned to France. A linguistic policy exclusively in favour of French was introduced, (standard) German having been completely discredited due to its Nazi speakers. French became the one and only language of education, and, for the first time in the school history of Alsace, German classes in elementary education were suspended (until 1952). As early as September 1945, a resolution was passed, banning the autochthonous press published only in German (the principle language for press publications until 1939): the regional press was now to be published in French, with the possibility of keeping a portion of the paper in German in so-called bilingual editions. Regional audio-visual media (first radio, then television from 1953 onwards) were broadcast only in French and Alsatian. Discourses on Languages/Discourses on Nation(alism)s Before 1945 The emergence of the national and republican idea of unity and equality, through the French Revolution, had direct linguistic consequences: as the bearer of these ideas, French was to become the only acceptable language. Patois, dialects and other language varieties were to be fought and eradicated as possible sources of discord and obstacles to the learning of French. French became the emblematic language of political loyalty and the epitome of patriotism. Whatever the attitude of Alsatians at the time towards the Revolution, it was the impetus for a more personal and subjective attachment to France. By learning French, citizens were supposed to symbolically express their political sentiments. In the short term, however, this language policy was not successful: French only gained weight in the course of the nineteenth century and even then only in some particular domains (Huck 2015).

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The roles of the languages were reversed by the 1870 war: the former official language, French, was declared a foreign language while German became the official language. In schools, lessons were taught (from 1874 at the latest) exclusively in German. From a practical point of view, this change did not involve any major difficulty, as the vast majority of speakers already used a German dialect in daily and domestic life and were able to comply with the new policy of written German language very quickly, but the transition from a household language to the scholastic domain was not so easy or instinctive. Around the turn of the century, a cultural movement developed that sought to highlight the idiosyncrasies in traditional customs, clothing and tools, as well as in language. A literary dialect poetry was particularly new and influential, as well as a more sophisticated dialect theatre, which went on to record more and more success, year after year (Huck and Erhart 2019). One of the decisive consequences of this high status of the dialects was that they gradually took on a political-cultural role: “[The dialect] became the means of expression of the Alsatian who did not belong to the French-­ speaking upper class, but who was also not turned towards standard German, thus emphasising his own character and cultural independence” (Rimmele 1996: 21). This began a gradual process that decoupled the dialects from the written language form of standard German. “At the same time, a glottonymic change was initiated: although up until then, Alsatian dialect speech-forms were characterised generically under the umbrella term ‘German’ (Ditsch, Deitsch), little by little, the glottonym became Elsasserditsch (= ‘Alsatian German’) before being ‘Alsatian’ (Elsassisch), the glottonym still in use today”2 (Huck 2022). It is also remarkable that a spoken form of standard German did not emerge during this period—despite strong immigration of ‘Old Germans’ (= Germans from other areas of the Reich)—so that no ‘regional’ (more or less standard) German colloquial language developed. The contact between the dialects and spoken German produced borrowings and other linguistic contact phenomena, but no linguistic intermediate variety. Nevertheless, the generations that had only attended German school

2  Nowadays, ‘German’/‘Ditsch’ refers to exogenous written and spoken German, used in the neighbour state (Federal Republic of Germany) and rarely to Alsatian dialect speechforms. Dialect speech is generally called ‘the dialect’ or ‘Alsatian’ (‘Elsässisch’; sometimes ‘Elsässerditsch’ = German Alsatian).

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could speak standard German comparably as well or as badly as in other southern German regions. After 1945 Due to a sharply implemented language policy in favour of French in all possible areas, and a public and institutional discourse on the harmful effect of bilingualism and dialect in the process of learning French, the language situation changed more and more rapidly in a pro-French direction from the mid-1960s onwards. All these processes affected, above all, linguistic behaviour in verbal interaction and the language attitudes and assessments of the people concerned: French gained more and more weight, the use of dialects gradually declined in all domains of use, the German standard language—where it still played a role—was gradually replaced by French, taking on the role of an ‘extra’ on the linguistic stage. At the same time, a long-term pro-French language policy was pursued, deliberately disadvantaging the dialects and German. However, until the mid-1960s, both the dialects and the German standard retained strong positions. As the everyday language of the middle and lower classes, dialects remained the means of communication used by the majority; the German standard, which had indeed been forcefully removed from many political and social functions, was still to be found 20 years after the war in church services, in autochthonous periodicals (many were still bilingual) and partly in official forms. Parish libraries (and some public libraries) also still stocked a considerable number of books in German. German was thus clearly associated with written language. Moreover, this must also be correlated with age: German publications were mainly addressed to citizens who had been enrolled in school before the war or who attended school during the war. For the younger generations today, German belongs to a bygone, outdated era, since their experience of written work has been entirely in French, even though they still have a good passive knowledge of German. All this is part of a process of ‘francization’ carried out by the state and various institutions, aimed at making citizens ‘forget’ dialectal languages and, if possible, German. This has contributed (along with all the discourses of the social elite and state representatives) to rewriting the political history of the presence of languages and, in turn, the political history of contemporary Alsace. The actual linguistic turn seems to have begun in the 1970s. The children of the post-war baby boom grew up in a French-influenced and

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France-oriented world. Social advancement could also only be achieved through the French language. The written language they learned at school was French, their everyday and colloquial languages were French and the dialect. German became a (familiar) foreign language. The socio-political and social context of the 1970s created a new linguistic-political and cultural era: the rebellion against consumerism, against triumphant capitalism that crushed people, the struggle for environmental protection, and so on, were closely linked to a rediscovery of one’s own being, which was closely associated with the ‘ancestral’ language, the dialect. The dialect became the banner of an awareness, of a cosmopolitan protest against disempowerment of the people, of the little man, against the dispossession of one’s own language (i.e., the dialect) but this lasted only for a short while, until the generation of teachers to whom this phenomenon ‘spoke’ went into retirement.  anguage Practices in Alsace Since 1945 L The decline of the dialects and their use is slow but ceaseless, as they tend to be associated with the past and tradition, in contrast to French, which represents innovation and modernity. This was evidenced by various government and private surveys led between 1946 and 1999 on self-declared speakers of French, German and the dialect (% of the population):3

1946 1962 1979 1986 1998 1999/2002

Dialect

French

German

90.8% 84.7% 74.7% 71.7% 62% 39%

66.5% 80.7% – – – –

approx. 84% 80.29% 79.7% – – 16.2%

In a survey carried out at regional level in 2012,4 43% of the respondents declared that they “could speak Alsatian well”, but three quarters of these 500,000 speakers were over 60  years old. Moreover, when asked about their practices, only 34% of the declared ‘dialect speakers’ said they spoke Alsatian systematically, while the vast majority (58%) said they spoke  Huck (2015): 212 et passim.  EDinstitut, 2012, Etude sur le dialecte alsacien. URL: https://olcalsace.org/sites/ default/files/documents/etude_linguistique_olca_edinstitut.pdf [Accessed 20 April 2022]. 3 4

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it ‘when it is appropriate’. A more recent survey held on a larger scale in 2022 confirms a still relatively high number of dialect speakers (46% claiming to speak Alsatian very well or well) and the fact that most of them are over 55.5 Both surveys indicate that less than 3% of children aged between 3 and 17 were declared ‘dialect speakers’ by their parents, which indicates a virtual stop to the intergenerational transmission. Thus, Alsatian is losing the function of an intergenerational link that it held until the 1980s. While recent surveys have tended to focus only on the variety that is really perceived as ‘regional’, that is, Alsatian, it is interesting to notice that this latter survey also included the knowledge of standard German, which is supposedly spoken very well or well by 54% of respondents. This survey also shows that while Alsatian is transmitted by, and used essentially, with family and friends, standard German is transmitted by school teaching and used mainly outside the private sphere. Alsatian Teaching/Teaching Alsatian The question of teaching Alsatian is a relatively recent one as, for a very long time, Alsatian was the main language of socialisation for inhabitants, regardless of what was spoken in domestic settings, so there was no need for it to be formally included in the curriculum. Also, there is a standard language already (German and/or French) that is taught and learnt in schools (cf. infra). Since the 2000s, there seems to be a new trend in the demand for teaching Alsatian, which may go hand in hand with a clear decline in its transmission: in addition to requests from people not born in the region (from the 1970s on), there are now requests from people wishing to reconnect with a linguistic heritage that has not been transmitted to them either by their family or by the educational system (Huck and Erhart 2020). However, only universities have responded to this demand, especially the University of Strasbourg by offering systematic teaching of Alsatian from 2012 onwards,6 while standard German has continued to be

5  Decryptis, 2022, Etude sociolinguistique sur l’alsacien et l’allemand. Rapport de présentation. URL: https://www.alsace.eu/media/5491/cea-etude-alsacien-allemand-2022.pdf [Accessed 29 June 2022]. 6  Optional teaching of Alsatian is also offered by the University de Haute-Alsace in Mulhouse.

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taught as the ‘regional language’ in Alsatian primary and secondary schools (cf. section “Regional History Is Not Taught in Schools”). The question quickly arose of whether Alsatian could be considered and taught the same way as other foreign languages taught at the University since, firstly, it is not standardised (Huck and Erhart 2020) and, secondly, it has a very complex subjective status in the Alsatian society. While there are languages for which contextualisation is not important (because their learning is primarily utilitarian), the method of teaching Alsatian depends mainly on the reasons why the language is learned. In their Bachelor’s or Master’s degree at the University, students choose to learn German or Alsatian for many different reasons: some of them select Alsatian as a language like any other from the wide range available at the university (sometimes also by default, due to time constraints) without any reflection on the use they will make of it, while others want to reconnect with a part of their heritage that they feel is missing. For the latter, it seems impossible to ignore the history of the region and of its languages, but it is difficult to make them understand those specific features and to make the link between language and history comprehensible for them, since they have generally very little knowledge of this historic background (cf. supra). In any case, the teachers and researchers who teach Alsatian and the learners who follow these courses are also a part of the “history”/“language” articulation we described before and are concerned by the factual knowledge or lack of it as well as by the subjectivities that have developed and the representations that have been elaborated by the discourses on languages. For example, students are often astonished when teachers explain to them the origins of Alsatian, which is a language dating back over 1500  years, since many of them believe that it “is a mixture between French and German”, that is, the national languages they learnt at school. In a certain way, the existence of an educational programme and the presence of learners constitute a historical fact, marking a fundamental change in the place of Alsatian in the sociolinguistic space, wherein the language has become a “real language” and teaching becomes a means of functional transmission of Alsatian to enable subjects to interact with other subjects for whom it is the preferred language, something that was unthinkable even 20 years ago. Thus, the existence of such teaching is part of a socio-historical logic and represents a response to changes in linguistic practices (cf. section “How ‘History’ and ‘Languages’ Are Articulated in Alsace”).

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Positions in Alsatian Society Towards Language-­Culture Teaching at School Due to its four changes of state affiliation between 1870 and 1945, a singular history of Alsace was written in parallel and, in fact, simultaneously and differently from the French and German national narratives, but it is clear that this ‘regional’ history remains largely absent from national education programmes, whether French or German, which can pose problems for citizens whose feelings of belonging (national, regional, linguistic, cultural, etc.) can be multiple (Maalouf 1998; Morin 2021: 9–28). In addition to this ‘different’ history, to these ‘different’ languages, the fact that, in contemporary times, Alsace has been subject to an attachment (1871–1918) and a forced annexation (1940–1944) to Germany, a geopolitical space with which France was at war, led to substantial changes in the perception of the languages. And in these cases, those languages were considered, in France as well as in Germany, as markers of the political loyalty of the inhabitants of Alsace. The question remains as to the extent to which the Alsatian society, in its various components, is concerned with knowledge of this history and its part in their expectations in terms of school education as well as in the construction of their own identity narratives. Institutional Positions: Public Authorities and the Educational System All the elected representatives are generally in favour of ‘bilingualism’ and promotion of the ‘regional language’, but although there is an Office pour la langue et les cultures d’Alsace et de Moselle (OLCA), no real society-wide language policy has been implemented7 and public authorities intervene only in the educational field, where all the efforts are focused on the learning of (standard) German (Huck and Geiger-Jaillet 2020). The current policy in favour of bilingualism and the teaching of the ‘regional language and culture’ in the Académie de Strasbourg can only be understood by focusing on the history of the status and teaching of 7  The fact that in the newly created Collectivité Européenne d’Alsace, the ‘bilingualism’ portfolio has been entrusted to the 13th Vice-President (who speaks neither Alsatian nor German) and mixed in with the ‘youth’, ‘sport’ and ‘educational success’ portfolios, gives an indication of the very relative importance that is attached to this issue by elected representatives.

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German in Alsace (Huck 2006). After the temporary suspension in 1945 (for the first time in the region’s history) of the teaching of German in primary schools, all efforts were concentrated on the gradual reintegration of German—during this period in which a large part of the population still used dialects, the question of teaching Alsatian did not arise. It was only from 1982 on, when a teaching of ‘regional languages and cultures’ was made possible by the national educational framework, that a debate emerged about what would be taught as the ‘regional language’, or more precisely, about the question of whether Alsatian should be taught alongside the existing teaching of German. In other words, the question of what is meant by language and culture was newly asked: was there a ‘specific’ Alsatian language and culture? In what way? Was the existing teaching of German (not) enough? How could it be articulated in the French national educational framework, in which German was perceived as the language of a foreign country? Rector Pierre Deyon tried to overcome these definitional difficulties in a speech given in 1985, in which he presented the following as the only “scientifically correct” version: the regional language of Alsace consists in “the Alsatian dialects whose written expression is German”.8 This formula made it possible to bring together under the same designation two varieties that are indeed linguistically related but have neither the same functions nor the same subjective status: while Alsatian is the language of daily interactions and intergenerational transmission, Standard German is above all a written language, present essentially in reception through the press and religious services (Huck and Erhart 2019). It was a primarily political vision (based on a diglossic view), which no longer corresponded to actual language practices (Erhart and Putsche 2023). This vision centred on the idea that only standard languages can be taught in schools; Rector Pierre Deyon thus defined ‘German’ and not ‘Alsatian’ as the ‘regional language’, while ‘Breton’, ‘Basque’, ‘Occitan’ and even ‘Corsican’ began to be taught as ‘regional languages’ in other French regions. For proponents and defenders of this definition, which is still in force today, the history of the written language and the value of standard language prevail on the sociolinguistic history of language practices and uses.

8  “Il n’existe en effet qu’une seule définition scientifiquement correcte de la langue régionale en Alsace, ce sont les dialectes alsaciens dont l’expression écrite est l’allemand” (Deyon 1985: 9–10).

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Nowadays, standard German is taught in primary elementary education as early as the third year of kindergarten (five-year-old children) for up to three hours a week and is used as a teaching language in bilingual curricula (French/German) in elementary schools, in which 15% of the pupils are enrolled voluntarily (12 hours in French, 12 hours in German), thanks to the possibility given by the French state education of teaching in a ‘regional language’ for 50% of school time. However, in reality, most of the teaching is provided in standard German and the teaching of dialects is limited to a minimum (Huck and Geiger-Jaillet 2020). The question of the place of history in this context also remains open, insofar as the link established between language and history is always treated implicitly, so that it is very difficult to document. The implementation of the ‘Regional Language and Culture’ programme by the Minister of National Education, Alain Savary, in 1982 provided a framework for the teaching of regional history as part of the teaching of ‘regional language and culture’ that was created at the same time in secondary schools. In 1995, a ‘renovation’ of this programme was undertaken through a rectoral circular in which the objectives of this teaching were specified: it should “enable young people from the region to discover their roots and encourage the integration of young people from other backgrounds” (De Gaudemar 1996: 150, our translation). The circular also foresaw “the transmission of knowledge of the origins of the Alsatian dialect, the relationship between Alsatian and German, the past and present linguistic situation in Alsace, its evolution and its challenges” (ibid.). However, the monitoring of implementation of this teaching is very random and seems to depend on the interest shown in it by subsequent rectors in the Academy. The reports available for the period of the 1990s generally devote only a short section to assessment of this non-­compulsory content, with priority being given to teaching of the ‘regional language’ (i.e., standard German). When the elective option is mentioned, the reports show that regional history is an important part of this course, but without specifying the periods or aspects covered. The reports also point out the practical difficulties of implementation (time constraints, teacher training needs, etc.), which are often linked to the fact that the course is optional and suffers from a lack of consideration. The specific training created for teachers (Diplôme Supérieur de Langue et Culture Régionales) does not seem to have met their expectations, so that a gradual disinterest was observed until its disappearance in the early 2000s. Nevertheless, a whole process of didactic transposition of the knowledge on regional

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history has been carried out by the school authorities to make it teachable (Salaün 2018: 38), so that specific history textbooks (Vogler 1995) as well as pedagogical resources such as the “digital heritage database of Alsace”9 are available for teachers. There is, however, no way of knowing how many of them really use these materials, nor in what way. In recent years, this optional course has been maintained (Académie de Strasbourg 2018) but is followed by increasingly fewer students, especially since the last reform of the Baccalaureat in 2018 which rendered the grades obtained insignificant, and after which the number of high-school (lycée) students registered was divided by 3 (1458 in 2017–2018: 574 in 2021–2022, i.e., 1.33% of the students10). The situation is only slightly better in secondary schools (collège), where the proportion of pupils taking this course is less than 5%. In fact, an implicit link is established between the teaching of German and the teaching of regional history, but the question of the sense of teaching German in Alsace must be asked: if pupils and students learn German as a foreign language, if German is taught like any other language, which seems to be increasingly the case, they do not necessarily have an interest in the history that justifies this teaching. A recent survey (Schneider 2022) among parents of students enrolled in bilingual courses in secondary schools shows the paradox between their asserted attachment to the regional language and culture, with most parents stressing the importance of this option (“yes, from a civilizational point of view, it is important that it continues”), and the reality of practices, insofar as most give up enrolling their children in this option because there are already too many courses in the students’ timetable (“you can’t keep adding to it all the time”). One parent even makes the following contradictory statement: “it may not be essential […] but for me it is fundamental to understand our culture” (Schneider 2022: 38). These examples show that interest in this ‘regional language and culture teaching’ is very relative and does not seem to have any priority over the other subjects taught in schools. All parties agree that regional language and culture is worth teaching, but the fact that this course remains optional seems to suit both teachers and parents. Yet it is the optional

9   Base numérique du patrimoine d’Alsace: http://www.crdp-strasbourg.fr/bnpa/ rubrique/histoire/ [Accessed 20 April 2022]. 10  Académie de Strasbourg (2022) “Enseignement de la culture régionale en collège et lycée”, Bilan de la convention opérationnelle, 2018–2022.

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nature of this teaching that is one of the conditions for the ignorance of regional history discussed in this chapter. Positions Towards History Education in the Alsatian Society in General Until recently, in a time when the greatest part of the population still spoke the dialects, the teaching of German in school, the existence of bilingual curricula or the Germanic cultural heritage in Alsace were not issues since they were considered as a given, through a kind of transmitted consciousness. Nowadays, all these features seem to be taken for granted by almost everyone in the Alsatian society but the gap between factual historical knowledge and a kind of fantasy that circulates in the general discourse on history and languages seems to be increasing. In fact, it has almost become a stereotype that bilingualism in Alsace is “due to its history”: “Alsace was once German”, and “Alsatian was created during the war”, are common answers given by our students when we ask them about their knowledge of the linguistic heritage, as well as by users of digital social networks in their comments on Facebook-Posts on regional topics or on Alsatian specificities (e.g., on why Good Friday is a public holiday in Alsace and Moselle, contrary to the rest of France). Even Germanic toponyms, which are the majority in Alsace, became objects of jokes since they are considered as non-pronounceable (from a non-German-speaking perspective),11 or even sometimes objects of investigations about what could be “hidden” behind those Germanic names:12 in this case, the absence of knowledge leads to a kind of rediscovery of regional history. In the worst case, the lack of regional history teaching in schools is denounced or criticised and leads to publications aiming at compensating for this perceived shortcoming and offering a reconstructed and often biased version of the “hidden history of Alsace and Moselle”13 addressed to “those who ask themselves questions”, 11  “Top 15 des villes alsaciennes imprononçables, pour bien se déboîter la mâchoire”: https://www.topito.com/top-ville-alsace-nom-imprononcable-region-france [Accessed 20 April 2022]. 12  “Ce que cache (sic) les noms des villages d’Alsace”: https://gehts-in.com/villagesalsace-pas-du-chinois/costumes-alsaciens/ [Accessed 20 April 2022]. 13  “Histoire cachée de l’Alsace et de la Moselle”, Facebook publication, 15.04.22, shared over 3000 times: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=3044202592470441&se t=a.1447048865519163 [Accessed 20 April 2022].

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without any scientific reference or quotation. Some of these publications even accuse the French state of using schools and teaching materials to censor regional narratives in favour of the national version,14 thus pointing to the central role played by schools in the transmission and construction of national narratives. Of course, those examples cannot be considered as representative of the general opinion, but they offer hints as to how the absence of teaching of regional history in schools leads to real difficulties and may become a serious problem for at least part of the society. However, whether it is a concern of the whole society or not remains an open question. The specific articulation between history and language in Alsace has necessarily had an impact on the feelings of belonging for speakers and may lead to hierarchies or even conflicts among them. In the perpetual in-between status, between France and Germany, the question arises as to how the national narrative is constructed alongside the regional narrative for the (bilingual) people living in the region, how it is told and how it is taught, if at all. Conflicts between national narratives and a ‘regional’ narrative appear in particular in the debates about the various territorial reforms (creation of the Grand Est region in 2016 and of the Collectivité Européenne d’Alsace in 2021) or about ‘bilingualism’ and the definition of the ‘regional language’ in Alsace, in connection, for example, with the absence of ratification of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages by France. The multiple reissues and the regular sales of a work such as Psychanalyse de l’Alsace by F. Hoffet, the first publication of which dates from 1951, and which seeks to analyse the dual French and Germanic culture of the Alsatians, also seem to testify to a need to fill a gap. Associations or politicians regularly call for the compulsory teaching of regional history, the latest call being that of the representative Yves Hemedinger, who proposed an act on the generalisation of teaching of regional histories, cultures and languages15 in which he clearly established a link between history and languages. The fact that this law proposition was commented in the regional newspaper under the heading of 14  Ibid.: “The French Republic takes great care to censor this reality, as well as many dark pages of French history, by not including it in its school textbooks or by including it very little” (our translation). 15  Proposition de loi n°4637 relative à la généralisation de l’enseignement des histoires, cultures et langues régionales, déposée à l’Assemblée nationale le 03 novembre 2021. URL: https://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/dyn/15/textes/l15b4637_proposition-loi# [Accessed 22 March 2022].

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“bilingualism”16 reveals the constant but implicit link that is established between regional history and regional language teaching in the general discourse on regional languages and cultures. The Role of University Teaching The Département de dialectologie alsacienne et mosellane of the University of Strasbourg is the only institutional area where a systematic teaching of Alsatian is offered, among other dialectology and sociolinguistic courses, which is taken by about 75 students per year for all levels of introductory and practice courses. Our students are mainly Bachelor degree students (about 300/semester) from different sections of the University. To teach them language, literature and Alsatian civilisation, we must provide them with sufficient elements relating to national and European history (in particular of relations between France and Germany) and the singular history of Alsace, to help them contextualise the Alsatian dialect speeches they study in these interwoven histories, in order to deconstruct representations that are often largely stereotypical (such as “Alsatian, it comes from wars” or “it’s a mixture of French and German”). Our main goal is to clarify for them the complex sociolinguistic situation of Alsace today, in particular the status and representations of the dialects in connection with those of the two major standard languages taught in schools, French and German, and the effects of this language contact on the spoken language (loanwords, code-switching, etc.). For example, the reason why there is a large number of French lexical elements in Alsatian is not linguistic but sociolinguistic, since it is the result of a predilection of the speakers for the language of prestige (e.g., formulas of politeness, greetings). However, it turns out to be difficult to persuade students to adopt a diachronic approach, to make them understand that dialects have developed along with society and that the forms currently in use do not necessarily correspond to those of the past. For some students, it is even difficult to accept the fact that German dialects are spoken in Alsace given that it is a French region, because they are not aware that Alsace was part of the Germanic geopolitical area for a much longer time. A number of the students intend to become primary school teachers in Alsace or language teachers. Part of our courses are indeed compulsory for 16  Steinhauser Julien (2021) “Bilinguisme—Yves Hemedinger veut une loi pour enseigner l’histoire régionale”, Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace, 05 octobre 2021.

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students enrolled in a Bachelor’s programme preparing them for the teaching profession in Alsace, insofar as at least three hours of ‘regional language’ teaching is compulsory for all primary school teachers in the Académie de Strasbourg (Académie de Strasbourg 2018: 7). We have noticed that it is sometimes difficult for some of them to accept the institutional definition of the ‘regional language’ in Alsace, which offers teaching of both standard German and Alsatian dialects (cf. supra). In fact, those students who have been educated in Alsace have almost never had contact with Alsatian as a language of instruction or teaching in language classes (except for a minority who have taken the optional course of LCR), but at the same time they consider that German cannot take on the role of the regional language, since it has almost disappeared from actual linguistic practices in Alsace. It is therefore necessary to deconstruct the students’ own representations and experience as a pupil in order to hope that they will consider, when they become teachers themselves, taking their dialectal skills into account and using them in their teaching of the ‘regional language’. In the Master’s curriculum preparing for the CAPES competitive exam to become a German teacher, the University of Strasbourg offers preparation for the optional qualification for Alsatian. Holders of this qualification may be asked to take part in the regional language and culture (‘LCR’) courses offered in secondary schools (cf. supra). Since they may be required to teach regional history in this context, we have to ensure that the articulation between language and history, which is both factual and mental, representational, “imaginary” and experienced as real construction, can be mobilised and transmitted, that is, taught, within the framework of the ‘official’ programme of national education, by our future former students once they are recruited as teachers. Since we are regularly surprised by students who enrol on our language or civilisation courses without any reflection on the historic background of the learnt language or by the lack of interest in historical issues that many students show (one student preparing for primary school teaching asked, e.g., “What is the point of learning about the literature of the 9th century?”), we decided to ask them directly through online feedback surveys at the end of the semester. Students in an introductory course of Alsatian, who were asked about the image they had of the language before taking the course, gave answers such as: “the Alsatian language is like French but in fact it is more like German”; “a funny dialect only used by old people”; “a regional language, which is dying, unlike what we can see in Bretagne

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for example, where the whole school curricula can be supplied in Breton. Here, only old people use Alsatian”. The majority of the students who had such a negative image of the language indicated that this image changed after a semester of Alsatian lessons, but the section of the course pertaining to grammar teaching seems to have played as important a role as the teaching of historical aspects. Nevertheless, more than half of the students found that the historical aspects were sufficiently developed and more than a third stated that historical aspects helped them to change their point of view during the semester, possibly because they better understood the link between the presence of Alsatian dialect nowadays and the history of Alsace. In the end, our biggest challenge is to convince students to think about what a language is and what use people and society make of it, but when they arrive at university, they already have their own representations or patterns of thinking on that matter. This brings us to the limitations of the teachers’ approach: whatever they (try to) teach, the students will interpret it mostly according to these patterns and understand only what these patterns allow them to understand. The positive answers obtained to our surveys show that our work is not in vain but other more negative reactions as well as the poor quality results by some students also remind us that the difficulty of teaching the different possible meanings of categories such as ‘language’, ‘dialect’, ‘regional language’, in our very specific context, must not be underestimated.

Conclusion Since the end of the seventeenth century, Alsace has been caught between the construction processes of two nation-states, both of which imposed standard languages in the education system (French and German, alternately). The possibility of teaching ‘regional languages and cultures’ offered by the French educational framework from the 1980s onwards raised a question that is still unsolved today: what is actually meant by ‘regional’ in Alsace and to what extent can it be synonymous with ‘bilingual’ or even with ‘German’? Without any doubt, the ambiguous answer provided by public authorities is related to the problem of articulating a specific regional narrative, (mostly linked to the Germanic area) with the national French narrative, which does not take into account such specificities, even more so when they are linked to the former national (hereditary) enemy.

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Over the last 40  years, this ambiguity has engendered a continuous debate on what is meant by ‘regional’ and how both varieties should/could be taught, though public and educational authorities claim complementarity between both varieties. But when it comes to actually teaching those varieties, the differences between the linguistic forms and sociolinguistic uses of standard German and Alsatian cannot be ignored, and the reasons why pupils or students attend these courses must be taken into account. While the teaching of standard German is mandatory for every child in Alsatian schools, the teaching of regional history, which may explain the reason for teaching German, is quasi absent, so much so that German is nowadays taught in schools almost like any other foreign language and pupils often do not understand why they have to study German instead of another language. The three areas (institutions, society and University) studied in section “Why Do Pupils/Students/Other Learners Have Little or No Real Knowledge of the Sociolinguistic Situation of Alsace?” seem to constitute three different worlds, in which ‘regional language and culture’ do not necessarily have the same meanings and are not understood in the same way. Our role as researchers and teachers should be to ensure that our students and society in general have access to the knowledge about languages we develop in our research, as well as the means to understand it, but when we are confronted with a general lack of knowledge about language and history among our students or among the general public, we see how difficult it is. We have the impression of rowing not necessarily against the tide, but certainly in coastal fashion. As for the teaching of Alsatian, its sense must also be questioned: Why (not) teach and why (not) learn Alsatian today? Obviously, the fact that the possibility of teaching this language in schools was never really implemented tends to show that public authorities are not ready to take actions to reverse (or at least to stop) the ongoing language shift from Alsatian to French (Fishman 1991; Huck 2015). But from the point of view of speakers or learners, the teaching of Alsatian can also be seen as a means for ‘normalisation’ of the Alsatian situation (Huck 2015: 318), in which the dominated variety (i.e., Alsatian) would regain its rights. The following answer given by a student in our survey reflected this perspective: he/she changed his/her mind about Alsatian after “seeing that so many people wanted to learn this language (I honestly thought that there would only be 4 or 5 of us)”. So, the fact that Alsatian has become both an object of research and of teaching at the University of Strasbourg may be a way to contribute to this “normalisation” process. Only time will tell if this has also been a way to change history.

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