PRIMARY SCHOOL RADICALS: Nationalism’s Role in Driving Political Narratives in Spain’s History Textbooks

Abstract

Textbooks have long been researched as a preview into the “official” narrative which the ruling party of a region propagates. As a result, textbooks have often been used as a tool to promote a nationalist agenda, accomplished using censored content, political images, and emotional appeals with figurative language. While these areas of research expose the subliminal messaging of nationalist policy and the mechanisms that enable such messaging, there is a lack of focus on how the subtext of nationalism in textbooks is connected to substantive political opinions that change the framing of historical events in order to advance those political views. Consequently, this missing perspective fails to establish a relationship between the biases injected in children’s education and the political beliefs they eventually adopt. If this connection exists, then a nationalist agenda within textbooks not only inspires a patriotic view of history and loyalty to the nation, but it also imbues children with long term political beliefs that secure the ruling party’s political agenda for generations.

The primary goal of this project is to determine how a rise in nationalism influences the changes to content in textbooks as these changes relate to dominating political beliefs. Using a mixed methods approach of content analysis, this thesis will compare how the rise in nationalism during the Franco regime in Spain has altered the presentation of outgroups in history textbooks and thus informs long term policy views on immigration. Six textbooks are sampled from the years 1928-1955, a range showcasing political movements before and during the height of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1975). From this sample, I will focus on Spain’s exercise of internal control, specifically through historical presentations of the Arabic (Moorish) people, and Spain’s external interactions, specifically through presentations on the discovery and colonization of the Americas. These themes distinctly underscore how empire building and the role of interventionism are framed at the time of publication. In the textbooks studied, we will see how the rise in nationalism through the years corresponds to a shift away from humanitarian descriptions and just war criteria related to foreign engagement and towards claims of religiously ordained rights to defend the ideals of Spain both within its borders and abroad. Using modern opinion polls, the study will then provide direction for future investigations, drawing a comparison between age demographics that received textbooks before and during the Franco regime and these cohorts’ opinions on immigration and border issues.