Journal of Educational Memory, Media, and Society

School history textbooks provide an important source of information for learners of history. Textbook narratives of a nation's past often present a limited frame of reference, which impedes the aim of teaching history from multiple perspectives. This article examines the representation of the Dutch Revolt in two Dutch and two Flemish history textbooks. By taking sentences as our unit of analysis, we analyzed narrative elements and metaphors, which informed us about the level of multiperspectivity in these narratives. We found that Dutch textbooks, in contrast to Flemish textbooks, create their emplotment of the narrative of the Dutch Revolt by focusing on the first ten years of the conflict and mostly lack multiperspectivity. We hope that the insights generated by this analysis may inform textbook authors who seek to do justice to multiple perspectives.

This article demonstrates how educational film in interwar China served the dual purpose of mass recreation and political indoctrination. It places educational film in China in the context of Chinese tradition and the predominance of utilitarian scholarship. On the one hand, China has a long history of using mass-recreational tools in order to influence and control society. On the other hand, foreign educational films available in the early twentieth century were not attractive to Chinese audiences. Hence, the boundary between recreational and educational film at the time was ambivalent and the combination of recreation, education, and propaganda was reflected both in the phenomenon of showing educational films and in the contents of the films themselves.

Recent surveys and reports document a growing phenomenon of “Hitlermania” in some parts of India. This article investigates whether the way in which National Socialism is presented in school education has encouraged this development or, on the contrary, has discouraged a positive valuation of the Nazis, including their leader. It analyzes curricula and a sample of school history textbooks published by state and central education boards, which have been used in Indian schools over the last two decades, focusing on their treatment of National Socialism and the Holocaust. While the results can be partly attributed to government interference in the school history curricula and in textbook writing, there appear to have been other factors at play, such as the social environment.

In the 1960s, facing a series of transformations within Spanish society, the Franco regime modified its self-legitimation strategy and with it its portrayal of the Spanish Civil War. Based on the analysis of nine history textbooks for various levels published between 1954 and 1970, this article demonstrates that, by aiming to neutralize increasing demands for democracy, reconciliation and peace, the Franco regime incorporated elements of the corresponding discourses into its own memory discourse. The later the year of publication and the higher the age of the intended readership, the more signs of this process of incorporation appear in the textbooks. Examples of such traces can be found in the terms used to denote the Spanish Civil War, in the textbooks’ characterizations of the two opposing sides, and in their presentation of both the Francoist governmental system and the development of Spain under Francoism.

This article examines the extent to and the ways in which the Holocaust is presented in Albanian secondary school history textbooks. It offers a quantitative analysis of the space devoted to the Holocaust in proportion to the textbooks’ overall content and a qualitative content analysis based on the narrative patterns outlined in the UNESCO report The International Status of Education about the Holocaust: A Global Mapping of Textbooks and Curricula. It demonstrates that Albanian textbooks offer scant coverage of the Holocaust, but that some changes regarding the conceptualization, contextualization, and narrative of the Holocaust have been implemented since the curricular reform of 2004.

During the Allied occupation of the Axis countries, education and the revision of educational materials were seen as a means of ensuring future peace in Europe. Most scholarly literature on this topic has focused on the German case or has engaged in a German-Japanese comparison, neglecting the country in which the textbook revision process was first pioneered: Italy. Drawing primarily on the papers of the Allied occupying military governments, this article explores the parallels between the textbook revision processes in Allied-occupied Italy and Germany. It argues that, for the Allied occupiers involved in reeducation in Italy and Germany, the reeducation processes in these countries were inextricably linked. Furthermore, the institutional learning process that occurred in occupied Italy enabled the more thorough approach later applied in Germany.