Special Issue: Textbooks in Periods of Political Transition after the Second World War

The Origin of this Special Issue The MANES Research Center of the Spanish National University of Distance Education (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, UNED) (Madrid, Spain) and the Center for Documentation and Research on the History of Schoolbooks and Children’s Literature (Centro di documentazione e ricerca sulla storia del libro scolastico e della letteratura per l’infanzia, CESCO) of the University of Macerata (Italy) organized an international symposium titled “Education in Periods of Political Transition,” which took place at the International Center of School Culture (Centro Internacional de la Cultura Escolar, CEINCE) in Berlanga de Duero (Soria, Spain) from 13 to 15 April 2015. The symposium addressed two main themes of education in times of transition between dictatorship and democratic society: political socialization and civic education. Scholars from Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Spain presented and discussed national case studies, two of which (Paolo Bianchini and Maria Cristina Morandini’s examination of civic education in Italy and Kira Mahamud and Yovana Hernandez’s analysis of economic knowledge in textbooks), appear in this issue. As Anna Ascenzi, one of the organizers of the symposium, explained in her opening remarks, the in-depth investigation of a topic such as education in periods of political transition necessarily implies a reflection on the special role that education has played historically in the civil and political evolution of countries, thanks to its extraordinary potential to further (among other things) the construction of national identity and the promotion of democratic citizenship, but also because of the historical tendency, especially evidenced by the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, of governments to instrumentalize it for ideological and political purposes. Many of the participants responded to the challenge of analyzing the role of education in tumultuous political contexts by grounding their studies in the historiographical materials that best demonstrate the knowledge actually being conveyed to schoolchildren in a given historical moment. By moving away from the focus on southern Europe and offering a wider vision of the evolution of certain topics in the textbooks of countries belonging to what Samuel Huntington has called the “third wave transitions to democracy” after the Second World War, this volume combines contributions from the symposium with other papers that extend the study of the topic to other countries. In these articles, researchers from Albania, Indonesia, Italy, and Spain analyze the transformation that textbook information underwent during the dismantling of regimes or governments in their respective countries during their transition to a democratic political system, and during the early days of their nascent democracies that were marked by the construction or consolidation of democracy. In these analyses, we encounter an inevitable methodological convergence since no area of research is isolated, and because the authors conduct their studies within a broader historical context. The selection of textbooks followed certain fixed criteria, outweighing the repute or relevance of the author and the prestige or relevance of the publisher. In their analyses, the authors give precedence to texts over images, and employ both content and discourse analysis