Journal of Educational Memory, Media, and Society

This article investigates representations of East Asia in the geography textbooks of the Wilhelmine Empire. This region was of central importance for the imagination of the Empire and for its position in the international balance of power. China and Japan were oft-mentioned regions,¹ and were most frequently included in textbooks as a result of political crises and armed conflicts. As a result, the subject of geography repeatedly aired debates and trends from both colonial and scientific fields, and textbooks reflected the broader social positions of the day.

This article explores how geography textbooks and missionary stories were used to persuade Dutch primary schoolchildren of the moral righteousness of the Ethical Policy for the Dutch East Indies between 1890 and 1910. Educative discourses targeting Dutch children were instrumentalized in order to recruit the next generation of missionaries, colonial administrators, and overseas entrepreneurs. To achieve this aim, they dwelt at length on the opportunities for and constraints on uplifting indigenous children in the Indies. These narratives all convey the message that Indies children, though certainly capable of improvement, would never attain the same level of civilization and moral integrity as their Dutch counterparts.

This article addresses the interrelated changes taking place in education during the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which schools altered their approach to space, time, and economic priorities in order to align themselves with the shifting conditions of the period. It proceeds by examining a series of tensions between the desiderata of state and society, the collective and the individual, the secular and the religious, the national and the supranational, before assessing the diverse range of responses they elicited.

This article examines perceptions of colonial modernity as experienced by middle-class Bengali children in Calcutta at the turn of the twentieth century. This was the time in which the foundations of modern Calcutta and modern Bengali childhood were laid, and in which urban cultures of education and entertainment gradually replaced precolonial patterns of childhood. This article examines these transformations and assesses their role in the formation of new social norms that were to define middle-class Bengali childhood until the end of the twentieth century.

Die Raumvorstellung in den elementaren Geographieschulbüchern des Japanischen Kaiserreichs (1868–1945) änderte sich mit dem politischen Klima. In der liberalen Phase der 1870er Jahre behandelten die Geographieschulbücher alle Erdräume. In der revisionistischen Phase der 1880er Jahre wurde den unteren Grundschülern zur Wahrung der nationalen Identität kein Wissen über die Erdräume außerhalb Japans vermittelt. In der kolonialen Expansionsphase ab den 1890er Jahren fanden die Erdräume außerhalb Japans wieder Eingang in die Geographieschulbücher, wobei die Neuordnung Ostasiens immer stärker betont wurde. Auf der vormodernen Mythologie basierend dienten die elementaren Geographieschulbücher der Festigung des japanischen Reichsgedankens nach Maßgabe der jeweiligen politischen Lage.

The swift and profound transformations in technology and industry that the United States began to experience in the late 1800s manifested themselves in school textbooks, which presented different patterns of race, ethnicity, and otherness. They also displayed concepts like national identity, exceptionalism, and the superiority of Euro-American civilization. This article aims to demonstrate, via an analysis of two textbooks, how world geography was taught to children in primary schools in nineteenth century America. It shows that the development of American identity coincided with the emergence of the realm of the “other,” that is, with the intensification of racial attitudes and prejudices, some of which were to persist well into the twentieth century.