Wither the Nation-State? A Comparative Analysis of Nationalism in Textbooks
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- What happens to the historic nationalizing purpose of schooling in an era of pervasive globalization? We address this question by examining patterns and predictors of nationalist emphases in 576 secondary school social science textbooks from 78 countries published between 1955 and 2011. Our descriptive and multilevel analyses show that nationalist narratives in textbooks persist into the recent globalization era and on average are not diminished in countries that are more economically, politically, or socially globalized. However, countries that occupy a dominant position in world society—either through Western cultural status or deeper embeddedness in international non-governmental organizations (INGOs)—tend to display lower levels of nationalism in their textbooks. Our examination contributes to the sociology of education by highlighting that the relationship between the global and the national is not a zero sum game: even in our globalized world, nationalist educational narratives are alive and well. We further contribute to the world society perspective by highlighting a tension between recent world cultural shifts toward individual rights and cosmopolitanism and the continued centrality of the nation-state model in world society. Our results suggest that attenuation of nationalist celebrations in schooling may be easiest for globally dominant countries whose legitimacy as nation-states is not in question.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | 2017 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Lerch, Julia C. |
|---|---|
| Author | Russell, S. Garnett |
| Author | Ramirez, Francisco O. |
Subjects
| Subject | Textbooks across countries |
|---|---|
| Subject | National emphasis |
| Subject | Globalization |
| Subject | HLM analysis |
| Genre | Article |
Bibliographic information
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- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY).
Collection
Graduate School of Education Open Archive
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- ramirez@stanford.edu
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