Construction of School Knowledge in a Federal and Multilingual System: Is Switzerland a Historical Example for the European Union?

Author(s):

Anja Giudici(presenting / submitting)Giorgia Masoni(presenting)

Conference:

ECER 2014

Network:

23. Policy Studies and Politics of Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

23 SES 06 D, European Policies on the School Curriculum (Part 2)

Paper Session: continued from 23 SES 05 D

Time:

2014-09-03

15:30-17:00

Room:

B336 Sala de Aulas

Chair:

Antigone Sarakinioti

Contribution

The process of European integration poses a big challenge in education policy and research. As the lack of a ‘European identity’ is seen as one of the major problems in creating a common ‘demos’, the European Commission has attempted several times to introduce a stronger European perspective into the national curricula (Cederman 2001). However, despite the mobility-enhancing programs and harmonization attempts, education remains practically exclusively in the competence of the European member states, where leaders and the majority of citizens have a reluctant attitude towards harmonization (European Union 2010). Thus, the difficult questions education policy-makers are facing are: Should national policies be committed to a common project and how can this be done, without having a centralised state? The question for educational researchers on the other side is: What implications do such processes have on research in the field of school history?

The same questions were posed in Switzerland in the 19th century. The country, composed of several canton-states with different religions, different types of economy and speaking different languages, was seen as a federal project, where the cantons would maintain as much autonomy as possible (Linder 2010). As in the EU, this was true especially for education policy, where the concentration of powers to the federal centre was rejected several times by the people (Criblez 2011). Nonetheless curricula and textbooks were gradually oriented towards the construction of a common Swiss identity, with different rates of harmonization observed between different school subjects. In the field of history teaching, the cantons gradually harmonized the content, eventually leading to the development of a relatively homogeneous curricular canon (Criblez and Hofstetter 1998; Furrer 2004). Examples can be found in the various translations and adaptations of some history manuals, which we find prescribed in the different linguistic regions (e.g. Zschokke Heinrich Des Schweizerland Geschichte für das Schweizervolk; Histoire de la Suisse; Storia della Svizzera, pel popolo svizzero 1882). Another development can be seen in language education. Despite being part of a multilingual federation, the cantons did not homogenize language teaching and did not introduce the compulsory teaching of a second language until the 1970s.

Our intention is to show how the curricular contents changed from the beginning of the integration process (1848) up to today, focusing on the two, seemingly contradictory developments in the teaching of history and languages. We rest our analysis on the works in nationalism and democratic theory, where the centralisation of the education system is described as one of the main instruments for nation-building (Gellner 1983; Anderson 1983), used to construct a national history and tradition (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1992) and to create and homogenize the national language (Haugen 1973). History and language are seen as fundamental parts of a ‘national identity’ (Thiesse 1999) and therefore essential for the construction of a stable and legitimate democracy (Schnapper 1994). In this light, Switzerland takes in the role of a deviant case among the traditional monolingual and centralised nation-states, but is at the same time a predecessor of newer supranational governance models like the EU, characterized by decentralized federalism, multilingualism and a consociational style of policy making (Schimmelfennig 2014).

Drawing on the processes outlined above, we discuss our research methods in light of the implications of similar institutional settings. Basing our research on the Swiss case, we ask ourselves how comparative research in the field of history of education and schooling can be accomplished, without diminishing the complex and sometimes idiosyncratical aspects of these processes. And we discuss what methodological implications the research has in a multi-levelled policy context formed of sovereign and diverse, but at the same time politically bound entities.

Method

Following the lead of researchers who use process tracing to investigate the constitution and development of the EU (see Schimmelfennig 2013), we intend to focus less on the structures of the school systems and more on the processes. Specifically, we use a two-step comparative approach, for which we rely on the methodological work done in the field of comparative historical analysis (e.g. Mahoney and Rueschemeyer 2003). We use data from our Swiss National Science Foundation Project Transformation of School Knowledge in Swiss Cantons (1830-1990) regarding the curricula and textbooks of several Swiss cantons to show how school curricula with respect to history and foreign language teaching have changed over time and what developments are responsible for these changes. These data include the cantonal school curricula, policy documents regarding their formation, relevant articles from pedagogical journals and teachers' unions and the most used history textbooks. First we will empirically compare the development of the history and language teaching contents in two cantons, following a ‘diverse cases’ design: we analyse an economically prosperous protestant canton of the German linguistic majority, situated in the centre of the country and an economically poor catholic canton from the Italian linguistic minority, situated on the border. The comparison will serve to localize the salient factors in development and to create a phase model to systematize the historical development of the cantons regarding the national-cantonal orientation of the contents in the two aforementioned subjects. The second comparison, between the two outlined subjects, will be based on a more nuanced process description, which also takes into account differences between the dynamics in different subjects. In a second step we compare our findings with those from the EU literature (e.g. Cederman 2001; Grimm 1995) to localize differences and similarities in the two processes. According to the conclusions found, we assess whether Switzerland is to be seen as a ‘model’ for the EU in this field or not. Here we follow a less empirical and more speculative approach, as it is not clear how EU policy in education matters is going to change in the next years. But this reflection can help us to resolve the question about the implication of our findings and other relevant findings in this field for European research in educational history.

Expected Outcomes

We show that the cantons, according to their position as linguistic majority or minority cantons, adopted a different pace in adapting their curricula to the national contents in history and in reference to the selection of second languages to teach at school. In the case of history it was the linguistic and religious majority that first stressed the national dimension in their curricula, while in the case of language teaching the minorities had to adapt their curricula first, inserting the majority language as compulsory subject. Moreover the first harmonisation took place rapidly, while the harmonization of foreign language education has still not been reached today. It is not language, but history that can be adapted to form a narrative which can integrate all parts of the newly-built society. The adaptation of language teaching follows a different logic, as here, to orientate more to a multilingual federation, one cannot adapt a narrative but has to add new languages, a much more difficult and costly process. Thus, in analysing the development of school contents in federal systems, which is possible only on the sub-federal entity level, researchers have to take into account the dynamics of both the school subject and the political fields and process in which the subnational entity is entangled. The comparison with the EU process shows that the structural challenges posed are essentially the same as in Switzerland, although on a much bigger and more complex scale. However the different timing and sequencing of Switzerland and the EU’s development may lead to different solutions. Following this conclusion, we advocate a process-based approach in the study of multi-levelled education systems with cross cutting boundaries, which can account for more than structural differences and similarities.

References

Anderson, B. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Cederman, L.-E. 2001. Nationalism and Bounded Integration: What it Would Take to Construct a European Demos, European Journal of International Relations 7(2): 139-174. Criblez, L. 2011. Vox populi – Zur Herausforderung der Bildungspolitik durch die halbdirekte Demokratie, Zeitschrift für Pädagogik 57(4): 471-483. Criblez, L. und Hofstetter, R. 1998. Erziehung zur Nation. Nationale gesinnungsbildung in der Schule des 19. Jahrhunderts, in U. Altermatt, C. Bosshart-Pfluger und A. Tanner (Hrsg.): Die Konstruktion einer Nation. Nation und Nationalisierung in der Schweiz 18.-20. Jahrhundert. Zürich: Chronos, 167-187. European Union. 2010. Eurobarometer. URL: http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/index_en.htm (accessed 22 January 2014). Furrer, M. 2004. Die Nation im Schulbuch – zwischen Überhöhung und Verdrängung. Leitbildung der Schweizer Nationalgeschichte in Schweizer Geschichtslehrmittel der Nachkriegszeit und Gegenwart. Hannover: Verlag Hahnsche Buchhandlung. Gellner, E. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. London: Blackwell Publishing. Grimm, D. 1995. Does Europe Need a Constitution? European Law Journal 1(3): 282-302. Haugen, E. 1973. The curse of Babel, Deadalus 102(3): 47-57. Hobsbawm, E. and T.O. Ranger. 1992. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: CUP. Linder, W. 2010. Swiss Democracy. Possible Solutions to Conflict in Multicultural Societies. Hondmills: Palgrave. Mahoney, J. and D. Rueschemeyer. 2003. Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences. Cambridge: CUP. Schimmelfennig, F. 2013. Efficient Process Tracing. Analyzing the Causal Mechanisms of European Integration, Revised chapter for A. Bennet and J. Checkel (eds) Process Tracing in the Social Sciences: From Metaphor to Analytical Tool. Cambridge: CUP. URL: www.eup.ethz.ch/people/schimmelfennig (accessed 22 January 2014). Schimmlefennig, F. 2014 (forh.). Democratization in the EU and Switzerland: A Comparison, in D. Kübler and N. Stojanovic (eds): Democracy in the European Union. A Contribution from the Swiss Perspective. Zurich: Schulthess, 87-100. Schnapper, D. (1994). La communauté des citoyens. Sur l’idée moderne de nation. Paris: Gallimard. Thiesse, A.-M. 1999. La création des identités nationales, Europe XVIIIe-XXe siècle. Paris : L’Harmattan.

Author Information

Anja Giudici (presenting / submitting)

University of Zurich

Institute of Education

Zurich

Giorgia Masoni (presenting)

SUPSI

Rivera

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