European Educational Research Journal

In late 19th- and early 20th-century Denmark along with the emerging decolonization, colonial imaginaries became an inspiration for the social cohesion strategies pursued through education. This formed part of developing Denmark from an absolutist and colonial power into a modern Nordic nation- and welfare state governed by parliamentary democracy. The endeavor called for frameworks for becoming a citizen, and for narratives of citizenry across social difference while still maintaining difference. Among the creators of pedagogical narratives that draw on colonial imaginaries were missionaries and civil servants who had served in the colonial terrain. Also, public intellectuals with no social history tied to the colonial terrain were among the actors who dispersed colonial figures as curricular content and inspiration for pedagogical methods when aiming at educating the “homely” masses to the new state and society. Drawing on Stoler’s conceptualization of how colonial experience was put to work in the metropolitan terrain, and based on sources such as textbooks, handbooks and public enlightenment publications, the article explores how colonial figures were used in pedagogical narratives and discusses how this can be understood in light of the social and educational challenges in the early and preconditional years of the Danish nation welfare state.

This paper explores the interplay between citizenship education and the promotion of national consciousness in Belgium’s teacher training institutions from 1918 to 1950, with particular attention to the aftermaths of the First and Second World Wars. Analyzing archival materials from two Flemish teacher training colleges—the Episcopal Normal School Saint-Joseph in Torhout and the State Normal School in Lier—this study investigates how post-war educational discourses and practices in Belgium were shaped by —at times conflicting—impulses toward national patriotism, regional nationalism and international solidarity. Specifically, the paper examines the tensions in citizenship education arising from divergent historical perspectives, including patriotic fervor, regional Flemish identity, and post-war internationalism, which influenced the training of teachers as agents of civic and moral formation. Findings reveal that teacher training curricula were not only mechanisms for instilling patriotic values but also sites of ideological contestation, reflecting the ambiguities surrounding national consciousness and identity in a linguistically and ideologically divided country. The study contributes to international scholarship on the role of education in shaping national identity and post-conflict civic recovery, shedding light on the uniqueness of Belgium in the political project of nation-building through the mediation of its schooling system.

Our work aims to reconstruct the development of civic/citizenship education (CE) in a non-democratic society and political system. Socialist citizenship seemed to contrast with the common sense of understanding that current papers and EU policies collect under the umbrella term of CE at first sight. We can question this simple statement, which poses the challenge of defining and redefining that concept historically related to the Eastern Bloc and especially to Hungary. The language about socialist citizenship incorporated numerous contradictions, like socialist democracy, which is not a real democracy, pluralist values versus “real” values monopolized and appropriated by an omnipotent ideology, and socialist patriotism in the context of internationalist brotherhood. The paper will focus on the specific vision of the CE in the existing socialism, which was based on the close relationship between the ultimate political ideology of Marxism-Leninism and the education sciences/the profession of pedagogy. This heritage has cast a long shadow on Hungarian education: the roughly missing analysis of the democratic citizenship’s past clearly shows this. This topic is a blind spot in the mainstream discourses 35 years after the regimes changed and Hungary joined European and Western structures again.

Many voluntary associations during the interwar years promoted international understanding in the hope of avoiding another global war. The League of Nations Unions in Britain lobbied the government to advocate for the newly founded League of Nations, whilst also seeking to convince and educate a wider public, promoting a ‘world citizenship’ that crossed national boundaries. Children and young people were a key constituency for the LNU’s promotional efforts as they would be the ones to take its agenda forward in the future. To create world citizenship among this younger generation, the LNU argued that ‘new knowledge’ alone was insufficient; a ‘change of feeling and purpose’ was also required. This article focuses on the ‘change of feeling and purpose’, the emotional terrain of the LNU’s vision of world citizenship, with an emphasis on international friendship, hope and fear. Drawing on selected exemplars from the LNU’s Education Committee publications, school magazines, and memoirs and oral histories, it explores ways in this emotional terrain was envisaged by adults in the LNU, and was experienced and articulated by young people themselves.

In the light of recent initiatives to establish one shared European space and vision for citizenship education (CE), this paper addresses the long history of European CE efforts as a tectonic enterprise: one of slow and imperceptible change and preconditioned by unpredictability, complexity and contestation. By shining a critical light on the normative commonalities, tensions and contradictions underlying past and present initiatives of CE, this contribution aims to refute the commonplace assumption that more or better citizenship education can produce better citizens and a better democratic society. Rather, I argue that, – as shown by the articles in this special issue – CE unavoidably operates in the tensions and contestations between past and future, established and emerging worldviews and values. It is precisely this element of moving and struggling between past and future that holds potential for helping young people to take on their rights and responsibilities as (future) citizens and offers a lead for rethinking CE efforts in Europe as an ambitious and transformative enterprise. This, however, requires commitment to creating spaces for debates, contestations and negotiations, rather than handing down assumed shared visions and common values to young and future generations through frameworks and regulations.