Original scientific paper
(RE)CONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITY IN TEXTBOOK PRODUCTION: ANALYSIS OF THE FIRST FOUR GRADES OF ELEMENTARY SCHOOL TEXTBOOK CONTENT FROM 1945 TO THE PRESENT DAY
Jelena Marković
orcid.org/0000-0002-7436-6190
; Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The article deals with teaching material for the first four grades of elementary school, from 1945 to the present day. The author first monitors reading-books whose content covers several of today's subjects, followed by reading-books for language teaching and, from the middle of the 1960s when they started to come out on a regular basis, only reading-books for teaching of the subject of Nature and Society.
The specific nature of the selected material can be seen in the fact that these are the first textbooks (and, in the past, also the first publications) which children encounter, and that these are textbooks that present the microcosm of the society in which we live, which is emphasised by the concept of widening the concentric circle from the private to the public universe of the individual spread over the first four grades: home and family, immediate native place, broader native place, and the homeland. The simplification of textbook content in keeping with the children's age emphasises their ideological determinacy, particularly at times of social crisis. The variability in content is a consequence of complex inter-relations between economic, demographic, cultural, technological and ideological factors that exert influence on all levels (family, local, regional, national and global). Although textbook output cannot be regarded as a reflection of the reality in which we live, it cannot be denied that it has considerable power, both from the subversive aspect and in the maintenance of social relations. The author endeavours to point to textbook production as a place in which social memory and social «oblivion» are co-created and/or to observe them as a dimension of political power and the place of co-creation of individual and collective identity and the social construction of childhood and reality overall.
Keywords
school textbooks; identity; childhood
Hrčak ID:
23194
URI
Publication date:
16.12.2006.
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