Beyond patriotic education: Locating the place of nationalism in the public school curriculum

Abstract

The main thesis we want to defend in this article is that learning about nationalism from a historical, sociological, and normative point of view constitutes one important, but rather neglected, dimension of a good citizenship education. Although the debate about nationalism and education has received considerable attention from political and educational philosophers in recent years, the dispute has mainly focused on the question of whether public schools can legitimately promote nationalist sentiments, that is, patriotism. However, in this article, we wish to shift the focus away from the question of promoting patriotism and toward the question of the role that teaching about the phenomenon of nationalism and about specific nationalist movements can play in reinforcing liberal and democratic civic values and principles. We argue that such teaching can indeed play an important role and that this is true regardless of whether one views patriotism as a civic virtue or not and regardless of whether the aim of promoting patriotism in schools is legitimate or not.