Journal of Educational Memory, Media, and Society

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, at a time when administrations in various countries set up new school systems or considered reforming existing ones, world exhibitions offered the ideal opportunity for the transnational exchange of knowledge and ideas. This article demonstrates both the impact of ideological views and individual actors on the circulation, adaptation, and dismissal of cross-border ideas and the impact of innovations on their views and actions. As such, it contributes both to our understanding of world exhibitions as mediators of educational reform and to the existing scholarship on the history of educational technology.

The Japanese occupation of Malaysia during the Second World War has occupied a significant space in national history textbooks in Malaysia. The period has been associated with nationalist movements and independence from colonial rule. However, narratives of the Japanese occupation in school history textbooks have changed in terms of the importance given to the experiences of the three major ethnic groups in Malaysia (the Malay, Chinese, and Indian ethnic groups). This article presents an analysis of the Japanese occupation as portrayed in Malaysian national history textbooks from 1978 to 2020. It demonstrates a link between ideology and the state curriculum in Malaysia, which shows how cultural and ideological factors (namely, the political ideology of Malay dominance, or ketuanan Melayu) explain the changes made to the narratives in history textbooks.

This article analyzes how the Bharatiya Janata Party crafts a narrative of history in line with its ideology of Hindutva by decontextualizing and omitting information. Using school history textbooks prescribed by its state government in Rajasthan from 2013 to 2018, it uncovers how historical events and personalities are reinterpreted to craft a master narrative of belonging and exclusion. It examines how figures such as the Mauryan emperor Ashoka and the twentieth-century Dalit political leader Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar are “Hinduized” in order to ensure their appropriation into the Hindutva narrative. Further, looking at the 1576 Battle of Haldighati it assesses how antagonistic identities of the “local hero” and “external villain” are created by evoking the religious homogenization of communities and ignoring contradictions. This ensures that belonging to and the defence of the “Indian” nation is a privilege of the unified “Hindu” community, which fights “Muslim” aggression.

This article addresses the connection between education, educational media and memory, taking as a starting point the (from a social-theoretical perspective) elementary and inherent recursiveness of all communication. To this end, it reconstructs, from a systems theory-inspired perspective, the social framing of textbooks and educational media as well as the specific role of memory in education. The latter is perceived as a social institution to which various functions are attributed. These include (canonical) knowledge transmission, social selection as part of the reproduction and legitimation of social order and (cultural) integration via the transmission and practice of norms and values. Finally, the author discusses to what extent education and school educational media can therefore be understood as a constitutive, institutionalized “memory of society”.