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HISTORY OF EDUCATION, 2000, VOL. 29, NO.

1, 29± 47

`Poisoned history’: a comparative study of


nationalism, propaganda and the treatment of war
and peace in the late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century school curriculum

William E. Marsden
Department of Education, University of Liverpool,
19 Abercromby Square, Liverpool L69 7ZB, UK

Metaphors and de® nitions


The `poison’ metaphor has been widely applied to the content of history teaching
and textbooks. One early twentieth-century historian, for example, contended that
`perhaps the most virulent of all these poisons is the political bias’.1 An article
subtitled `Poisoning the wells of knowledge’, in The Schoolmaster journal of 1914, 2
condemned the negative stereotypes about the English it claimed were being disse-
minated in German schools. In 1918, Otto Kahn, a German emigrant in the United
States, entitled his pamphlet The Poison Growth of Prussianism. 3 Reporting on a
World Conference on Education in 1923, another Schoolmaster correspondent iden-
ti® ed as a key problem the `Poisoned History’ of the schoolbooks.4 In the United
States, a famous American geographer lamented his mind being `poisoned by the
stu€ called history’ (1929), 5 while an anti-British historian, C. G. Miller, entitled his
work, published by the National Historical Society in Chicago, The Poisoned L oving-
cup. 6 In Britain, there was H. G. Wells’s address to a League of Nations gathering in
London in 1938, the theme `The Poison called History’, which accused traditional
history of `decaying and becoming more and more poisonous’.7 There appeared
analogous metaphors in other texts, such as Mark Starr’s L ies and Hate in
Education, in which he wrote of the `poisoned blood and fevered vision’ which
had infected British textbook writers in the war years. `The tragic results of such
instruction’ were `written in the tens of millions of casualties of 1914± 18. . .’ 8.
Similarly, Viereck’s anti-propaganda text was entitled Spreading Germs of Hate.
`The microbes it scatters infect humanity like a plague.’ 9

1 J. W. Allen, The Place of History in Education (Edinburgh, 1909), 54.


2 T. H. W. Moore, `German school-books: Poisoning the wells of knowledge’, The Schoolmaster (12
September 1914), 392.
3 O. H. Kahn, The Poison Growth of Prussianism (Milwaukee, 1918).
4 Anon., `Poisoned history’, The Schoolmaster (24 August 1923), 268.
5 Quoted in B. Lasker, Race Attitudes in Children (New York, 1929), 154.
6 C. G. Miller, The Poisoned L oving-cup: United States School Histories Falsi® ed through Pro-British
Propaganda in the Sweet Name of Amity (Chicago, 1928).
7 H. G. Wells, `The poison called history’, Nineteenth Century and After, 123 (1938), 521± 34.
8 M. Starr, L ies and Hate in Education (London, 1929), 161.
9 G. S. Viereck, Spreading Germs of Hate (London, 1931), 12.

History of Education ISSN 0046± 760X print/ISSN 1464± 5130 online # 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd
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30 W. E. Marsden
The assertion that history and geography textbooks have exercised a negative
in¯ uence on attitudes towards other countries is of long standing. It manifestly
derives from conceptions of nationhood, national character and national identity,
which have in turn spilled over into aggressive forms of nationalism, and have
injected their `poisons’ into social and political attitudes, and thence into the educa-
tional system. The terms associated with national feeling tend to be used loosely and
interchangeably. As Smith has de® ned it, national identity embodies some concept of
political community, including common institutions, a single code of rights and
duties, and a social space and territory.10 The peculiar features and qualities ascribed
to people of di€ erent nationalities have long been subject to blatant stereotyping,
and categorized as national character. Hagendoorn and Linssen have pointed to the
`widespread and irresistible inclination to attribute personality traits to certain
nationalities’.11 Early de® nitions of geography covered not only situation and extent,
climate, soils and productions, government and commerce of nations, but also `the
genius and manners of the inhabitants’. 12 So geography textbooks included not only
the facts of physical and commercial geography, but also pronouncements on
national character, accepted as equally authoritative. In the post-independence
period in the United States conscious e€ orts were made to fashion a uni® ed set of
cultural standards for republican Americans, with a call to establish an `Association
of American Patriots’ geared to `forming a national character’. 13 Out of concepts of
nationhood, national identity and national character has sprung the frequently
malign force of nationalism, de® ned by Smith as `an ideological movement for
attaining and maintaining autonomy, unity and identity on behalf of a population
deemed by its members to constitute an actual or ``potential’’ nation’.14
Educational systems have often been charged with injecting the `poison’ of
aggressive nationalism and thus of provoking cross-national con¯ ict. An alternative
view would be that it is rather the nationalist spirit that has impregnated schooling
and the textbooks used.15 Schlesinger, however, squarely attached the blame to
education:
Among the possible causes of war, education holds a particular and signi® cant place . . . for in so far
as it embodies dangerous nationalistic prejudices, it is a means of disseminating them constantly to
all the people. It is the seed of international discord for both present and future generations.16

Another American writer, J. F. Scott, was equally critical of its e€ ects. `The noxious
weeds of racial egotism and racial antagonism grow easily in a soil thus fertilized. . . .
It may be that nationalistic education is the chief underlying cause of the war’,
though he also held the view that education could be used e€ ectively to promote
peace. 17 There is an extensive literature on the relative proportions of history texts

10 A. D. Smith, National Identity (London, 1991), 9± 11.


11 F. L. Hagendoorn and H. Linssen, `National characteristics and national stereotypes: A seven-nation
comparative study’, in Nationalism, Ethnicity and Identity: Cross National and Comparative
Perspectives, edited by R. Farnen (New Brunswick, 1994), 103± 26.
12 A. Downes, `The bibliographic dinosaurs of Georgian geography (1740± 1830)’, Geographical Journal,
137 (1971), 379± 87.
13 D. Tyack, `Forming the national character’, Harvard Educational Review, 36 (1966), 29± 31.
14 Smith, op. cit. (1991), 73.
15 D. Fleming, `The impact of nationalism on world geography textbooks in the United States’,
International Journal of Political Education, 4 (1981), 373.
16 A. M. Schlesinger, `Introduction’, in A. Walworth, School Histories at War: Study of the Treatment of
Wars in the Secondary School History Books of the United States and in those of its Former Enemies
(Cambridge, MA, 1938), xiii± xx.
17 J. F. Scott, The Menace of Nationalism in Education (London, 1926), 255± 8.
Nationalism, propaganda and war and peace 31
devoted to material on war and peace. Walker, a British historian, observed that
`textbooks are usually at their best . . . on warlike matters, and children react to the
stimulus that is provided’.18 Tales of war `have undoubtedly usurped an unwarran-
table position in our books and teaching’.19 The teacher must be freed `from the
unsubstantiated assertion that his pupils require wars, battles, and bloodshed if they
are not to consider history as one of the dullest of subjects’. 20 An American counter-
part, Arthur Walworth, wrote a book on similar lines entitled School Histories at
War, a study of the `drum and trumpet’ style of history textbooks, and revealed
rampant nationalistic bias in American history textbooks and those of `its former
enemies’. 21 As Lasker alleged: `Practically all history teaching is propaganda’, some
open, some `slyly insinuated’. 22

Victorian and Edwardian background


There was indeed a general assumption in Victorian times that battles would loom
large in the history textbooks. In the boys’ public schools, where it was presumed
many pupils would be considering the armed forces as a career, military and political
history was granted some priority. For this purpose, the key subjects were geogra-
phy, history, `forti® cation’, and also, of course, team games and religion, generating
the ideal of the noble and courageous Christian soldier.23
The generation of nationalist and imperialist attitudes in geography and history
textbooks intensi® ed in the late nineteenth century. 24 Much of the earlier prejudice in
such books had had a religious basis, antipathetic to Catholics on the one hand, and
the heathen on the other. The social and political climate in the nation-states of
Europe in the later period `provided a sort of hothouse atmosphere for nationalistic
writings of the most fervent kind’.25 While some minority concern was also expressed
over the militaristic nature of textbooks, George Pitt’s English History with the Wars
L eft Out! (1893),26 with the disarmingly contradictory sub-title England’s Greatness
and Power Among Nations, Traced from its Origin, through its Gradual Progress, up to
its Present Pinnacle of Glory, and Accounted for without the Help, and in Spite of, its
Military Element; or, A Scamper through English History, was a rarity, as was, in the
United States, Leeds’s Against the Teaching of War,27 published in 1896, which
Beales identi® ed as one of the ® rst popular pleas for textbook revision, and as a
landmark in uncovering examples of biased nationalist history in textbooks.28

18 E. C. Walker, History Teaching for Today (London, 1935), 50.


19 Ibid., 39.
20 Ibid., 51.
21 Walworth, op. cit. (1938), viii.
22 Lasker, op. cit. (1929), 373.
23 T. Hearl, `Military education and the school curriculum 1800± 1870’, History of Education, 5 (1976),
261.
24 V. R. Berghahn and H. Schissler, `Introduction: History textbooks and perceptions of the past’,
Perceptions of History: International Textbook Research in Britain, Germany and the United States,
edited by V. R. Berghahn and H. Schissler (Oxford, 1987), 1± 16,
25 P. M. Kennedy, `The decline of nationalistic history in the west, 1900± 1970’, Journal of Contemporary
History, 8 (1973) 88.
26 G. Pitt, English History with the Wars L eft Out!: England’s Greatness and Power Among Nations,
Traced from its Origin, through its Gradual Progress, up to its Present Pinnacle of Glory, and
Accounted for without the Help, and in Spite of, its Military Element; or, A Scamper through English
History (London, 1893).
27 J. W. Leeds, Against the Teaching of War (Philadelphia, 1896).
28 A. C. F. Beales, The Teaching of History in Schools (London, 1937), 72.
32 W. E. Marsden
Its usefulness for military purposes was advanced as one of the major justi® ca-
tions for late nineteenth-century geography. `What did the old Duke of Wellington
say? ``That he best carried on a war who guessed what the other fellow was doing
over the hill’’.’ 29 The German victory in the Franco-Prussian War was cited as
testimony to the superiority of geography teaching in the schools of the German
states. 30 Wars were being won not on the playing ® elds but in the geography rooms:
`if the fate of the nation may depend on a battle, a battle may depend on a knowl-
edge of geography’.31 Geography also contributed vicariously to the interests of the
public, making it better able to follow intelligently the news from the ubiquitous
foreign fronts. The cultural impoverishment of the uninitiated was driven home:
. . . for how can such a man follow the fortunes of our troops . . . with the keen intelligence of one
whose geographical knowledge enables him, as it were, to go side by side with them from one
battle® eld to another.32

In the 40 years between the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War, British
opinion adjusted itself to the temper of the times in respect of its attitudes towards
German education. For many years Germany had been lauded as a fountainhead of
progressive ideas, such as the kindergarten movement, and the Prussian system
extolled as a model of e ciency, helped by a more favourable allocation of national
resources to education. The priority it gave to technical education was seen as a
threat to British industry. 33 In textbooks and children’s literature, our common
Teuton inheritance was stressed. As diplomatic relations cooled, however, so too
did textbook support. The spirit of admiration, kinship and emulation was inevitably
terminated by the outbreak of the First World War.34 By then, British commentators
were writing scathingly of the war-mongering alleged to be taking place in German
schools. Yet nationalistic textbook material had equally long been present in British
materials. Starr, for example, identi® ed `the Kipling attitude’ as the prevailing tone
of most traditional history textbook writing in Britain, exempli® ed in the Kipling
and Fletcher School History of England, which identi® ed the British as God’s chosen
people, and romanticized war. `To serve King and country in the Army is the second
best profession for Englishmen of all classes; to serve in the navy I suppose we all
admit is the best.’ 35
Smarting from defeat and loss of territory as a result of the Franco-Prussian
War, attitudes towards Germany in French textbooks were generally much more
intemperate than those of the British, no hesitation being evident about instilling in
children a spirit of hatred and revenge against the former enemy. Scott, although
overtly antipathetic to nationalism in education, nevertheless justi® ed France’s incul-
cation of hostility towards her `adamantine foe’ on the `rational’ ground of its loss of

29 F. R. Burrows, The New Science (London, 1916), 3± 5.


30 Anon., `The neglect of geography in our higher schools, and the remedy’, School Board Chronicle (26
August 1871), 51.
31 Royal Geographical Society, Report of the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society in Reference
to the Improvement in Geographical Education (Keltie Report) (London, 1886), 36.
32 M. K. Sturgeon, `The teaching of elementary geographyÐ a practical lesson, with models’, Journal of
the Manchester Geographical Society, 3 (1887), 85.
33 N. Daglish, ```Over by Christmas’’: the First World War, education reform and the economy’, History
of Education, 27 (1998), 318.
34 D. Blamires, `How and what Victorian and Edwardian children learnt about German history’,
Paradigm, 22 (1997), 31, 36.
35 Quoted in Starr, op. cit. (1929), 34± 5, 75.
Nationalism, propaganda and war and peace 33
its eastern provinces. Children had to continue to learn about the geography of
Alsace and Lorraine, as of `a sister momentarily absent’.36 Scott in turn dated the
comparable German preoccupation with nationalistic instruction from the later
Prussian rulers. The dominating emphasis of textbooks was `national self-glori® ca-
tion and national egoism’.37 They generally disparaged other countries pointing, for
example, to British `craftiness and cruelty’ in the conquest of India and, more par-
ticularly, to the French, referred to, among other things, as `voracious ravens . . . full
of envy and trickery’ .38
In the case of Britain, the Queen’s Jubilee and the Boer War triggered fervent
outbreaks of patriotic feeling. The relief of Ladysmith brought school timetables to a
halt, the children being assembled in ¯ ag-bedecked halls to sing the National
Anthem and o€ er thanks to the winning generals. Schools held concerts and enter-
tainments to raise money for the war. Lord Meath’s movement to establish an
annual Empire Day in the schools was a bene® ciary of the war. There was, however,
some opposition to the patriotic movement from the early 1890s by bodies such as
the London School Board and the International Arbitration and Peace Association,
o€ ended by the militarism associated with patriotic teaching. Indeed, the
Government itself was unenthusiastic about the Empire Day concept, and it was
not until 1916 that this annual celebration was o cially sanctioned.39

The First World War


Like the Boer War, the First World War further boosted patriotic consciousness and
commitment to the British Empire among all social classes. The League of Young
Patriots was formed, its mission to bring together children desiring to serve their
country in its hour of need.40 The war became the focus of the tales of bravery and
hardihood which made up the core of material in children’s magazines such as Boy’s
Own and Young England. In Britain fresh claims were made that British soldiers held
the advantage over German on the battle® elds largely because of the greater personal
initiative instilled by a generous schooling, contrasting with the mechanical drill of
the German system which inhibited its troops from taking individual initiatives.41
Easing the transition from school benches to the trenches became a point of discus-
sion on how educational systems could best prepare youth for war service. As a
correspondent of The Schoolmaster put it: `A trench is a kind of school itself . . . a
place of education in living, ® ghtingÐ and dying’. 42
The First World War was claimed both in Britain and America as of bene® t to
subjects such as geography and history. It encouraged topical teaching about other
countries, and recent history. In order to understand the geography of the First
World War, it was necessary `to make some study of Germany’.43 Despite these
claims for individual subjects, in general the view in the teachers’ press was that

36 J. F. Scott, Patriots in the Making: What America can learn from France and Germany (New York,
1916), 72± 5.
37 Ibid., 173± 4.
38 Ibid., 186± 8.
39 R. S. Betts, `A campaign for patriotism in the elementary school curriculum: Lord Meath 1892± 1916’,
History of Education Society Bulletin, 46 (1990), 40± 4.
40 Anon., `The League of Young Patriots’, Teacher’s World (19 August 1914), 447.
41 J. W. Adamson, `Education and the war’, School World (May 1915), 161± 2.
42 Anon., `Our schools and the trenches’, The Schoolmaster (2 September 1916), 261.
43 F. M. McMurry, The Geography of the War and the Peace Treaties (New York, 1920).
34 W. E. Marsden
the importance of the war merited its pervasion as a cross-curricular theme. Teachers
World in August 1914 initiated a series of informative articles on `The Great War’
which, designed to meet the national crisis now faced, was billed as `of the highest
educational importance’. Sub-topics ranged from `What can the Children do for
Britain’, to `Why Belgium had to Fight’, and `Economic Dishes for Wartime’.44
The Times produced a supplement on `War and Education’ in 1916, which suggested
that the topic of war, on the successful conclusion of which the future of the race
depended, should be approached through the whole curriculum, and not through
individual subjects.45

Inter-war imperialism
The prewar concept of a benign British imperial type, asserted as being based on `ties
of a€ ection’, and `free from the weakness of the military empires of old’, 46 was
maintained both during and after the Great War by, for example, the Boy Scout
Movement, the British Association, and various imperial lobbies. A British
Association committee, for example, which included among its members Baden-
Powell, produced a report on citizenship education in which the British Empire
was de® ned as `the greatest secular organization on earth’, and the British type of
patriotism as the surest route to promoting international citizenship. 47
Empire worship was reinforced by the British Empire exhibition at Wembley in
1924, and nourished by recurring textual, pictorial and cartographic exempli® cation
in the teachers’ press, one topical event covered being the Prince of Wales’s current
voyage round the sea-girt countries of the Empire. As in the 1890s, however, the
implicit xenophobia of imperial zealots came under attack. Bertrand Russell, for
example, was critical of the handling of the case of a Coventry teacher who had
been disciplined because he refused to salute the ¯ ag on Empire Day, on the grounds
that glori® cation of country was not conducive to international goodwill. 48 Another
writer deplored the frequent use of military men to give the main address on school
speech days. As one progressive head teacher noted, on occasions there was nothing
in the address to indicate that anything of merit existed outside the British Empire.49
Children were informed that if they followed in the footsteps of the older generation
who had made sacri® ces in the war, there would be `no need to worry about red and
yellow perils’. 50
Following the Great War, the Board of Education was guarded about the trend
that had been generated towards greater foreign coverage in history lessons, insisting
that `our ® rst concern will be with those conditions which immediately surround
us’. 51 The Historical Association also agreed that it remained important to empha-
size imperial history and knowledge of the national past, at the same time paying
more attention than hitherto to recent European history.52 History teachers in the
44 Anon., `The Great War’, Teacher’s World (12 August 1914), frontispiece. See also `Education and the
war’, The School World, 16 (October 1914), 361± 2, and similar articles in other teachers’ journals.
45 Anon., `The war from the school-room window’, Supplement to The Times (14 January 1916), 2.
46 F. H. Hayward, Day and Evening Schools: Their Management and Organisation, London, 1910), 368.
47 British Association, Interim Report of the Committee on Training in Citizenship (London, 1920).
48 B. Russell, Education and the Social Order (London, 1932), 136.
49 W. B. Curry, Education in a Changing World (New York, 1935), 114.
50 W. E. Marsden, An Anglo-Welsh Teaching Dynasty: The Adams Family from the 1840s to the 1930s
(London, 1997), 252.
51 Board of Education, Report on the Teaching of History: Educational Pamphlets, No.37 (London, 1923),
17.
52 K. Robbins, `History, the Historical Association and the national past’, History, 66 (1981), 423.
Nationalism, propaganda and war and peace 35
public schools generally continued to champion British history. Countering the
traditionalists was H. G. Wells, a well-known protagonist for world history and
League of Nations teaching, commenting derisively that while professional teachers
had been successful in keeping his Outline of History, which covered the whole of
mankind, out of the schools it was enormously popular with the general public. 53

Education for peace


There had been lobbies for peace education well before the First World War. As the
threat of war approached, a prophetic statement in a School Peace League publica-
tion anticipated the concept of the global village, citing air travel and the telegraph,
capital becoming international in its rami® cations, and an international brotherhood
of labour coming into being. International professional conferences were also abol-
ishing national boundaries.54 At the same time, the Friends’ Guild of Teachers
exposed the eugenic basis of some education for patriotism, pointing out that sur-
vival-of-the-® ttest doctrines were inevitably associated with the spirit of war.55
Following the war, the League of Nations led the way in the promotion of
education for peace, among other things outlining procedures for evaluating text-
books, with the object of eliminating material that might cause mutual hatred. More
generally, it sought to further `instruction’ in the nature, work and ideals of the
League. 56 The function of geography teaching should be to help to train `citizens
of the world’, and that of history to implant, in the hearts and minds of the young,
ideals of humanity and peace.57 British supporters of the League of Nations Union
condemned education for patriotism as merely a means of engendering suspicion,
hatred, greed and fear.58 Green’s early study of racial prejudice in schoolchildren was
another example of waving the `Geneva ¯ ag’,59 as were the writings of the moral
educationist F. J. Gould, who conceived of a `vast educational cathedral’ devoted to
League of Nations teaching, though accepting that `long years must be passed before
the dome is touched by the sun’.60
The rise of Fascism made it very di cult for the League’s supporters to escape
the charge of whitewashing aggression. Already by the 1930s the credibility of the
Union had been signi® cantly undermined by the opposition of members of the
inspectorate, the Historical Association, and elements in the Conservative Party.
League of Nations teaching was accused of bringing bias, sentimentalism and
sheer propaganda into state schools. In her study of history teaching in Britain,
Shropshire quoted a report at a Historical Association meeting in 1934 that the
League of Nations as an institution was `quietly ignored ` in many schools and
`openly attacked’ in a few. One public school head teacher dismissed it as `a mis-
chievous delusion’. 61 At ill-attended conferences, teachers informed the peace cam-
paigners that parents disliked the Union and thought it was anti-government. 62
53 H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, vol. II (London, 1934; 1969 edition), 720.
54 A. Rowntree, Education in Relation to Internationalism (London, 1911), 1± 2.
55 F. E. Pollard, Education and International Duty (London, 1910), 14, 19, 33± 4.
56 League of Nations, Teachers and World Peace (London, 1929).
57 O. Benda, `League ideas in the teaching of history and geography’, Bulletin of L eague of Nations
Teaching, 3 (1936), 16.
58 R. Jones and S. S. Sherman, The L eague of Nations School Book (London, 1929), 111.
59 G. H. Green,`Racial prejudice among school children’, Geography, 16 (1931), 51± 3.
60 F. J. Gould, The L eague of Nations Spirit in the Schools (London, 1927), 2.
61 O. E. Shropshire, The Teaching of History in English Schools (New York, 1936), 85.
62 B. J. Elliott, `The League of Nations Union and history teaching in England: a study in benevolent
bias’, History of Education, 6 (1977), 137± 40.
36 W. E. Marsden
While the United States was not to join the League of Nations, there was a wide
range of uno cial support in America for teaching for international understanding.
At least 40 organizations promoting peace were formed in the aftermath of the First
World War, among them a National Council for the Prevention of War which,
among other things, researched history textbooks and found much more space
devoted to war than peace, military exploits rather than humanitarian deeds, a
situation replicated in Britain. `When schools celebrate the birthdays only of the
military and the political heroes of their own country, they are suggesting that it
is these men who have really counted in the world.’ 63
During the 1930s, Part 1 of the National Society for the Study of Education’s
36th Y earbook (1937)64 was devoted to education for international understanding,
as American educationists recognized the high level of insularity in their
country’s history teaching. There was no o cial support for League teaching,
however. Indeed there was greater hostility towards it than in Britain. In some
cities and states the topic of the League of Nations was banned as `a controversial
subject . . . out of place in a school history’. 65 McClure found there had been
de® ciencies in the treatment of international agencies in school textbooks in the
United States. In a national study o cially prepared in 1951 for UNESCO, however,
the writer o€ ered a more rosy view of the interwar situation, making the special
point that even though her country had not joined the League of Nations, it was
active in international cooperation after 1918, and had proceeded to take on even
greater responsibilities after the Second World War, which increasingly ® gured in the
history textbooks. 66

Education for another war


For forty years German schoolchildren and university students sat in the thickening fumes that
exhaled from Berlin. . . . Any professor or editor who dared speak anything not dictated by
Prussia. . . was dealt with as a heretic. . . . Out of the fumes emerged three colossal shapesÐ the
Super-man, the Super-race and the Super-state: the new Trinity of German worship. 67
The after-shock of the First World War brie¯ y e€ ected a positive change in German
textbooks. The ® rst postwar Prussian Minister of Education issued a decree forbid-
ding the teaching of hatred and glori® cation of war.68 By the early 1920s, however,
reaction had set in. To read German textbooks, claimed Scott, was to suppose that
`Germany was a lamb among wolves’. Germany deemed itself to have a life-neces-
sity, a moral right, to try to seek colonies in the European expansion of empire, while
the actions of other nations were `nefariously imperialistic’. 69 Through the 1920s
there was a build-up of chauvinistic nationalism and, under Hitler, draconian
National Socialist edicts guaranteed that education was dominated solely by the
interests of the German people.70
63 Curry, op. cit. (1935), 125.
64 National Society for the Study of Education, International Understanding through the Public-School
Curriculum, 36th Y earbook, Part II (Chicago, 1937).
65 B. L. Pierce, Public Opinion and the Teaching of History in the United States (New York, 1926 (1970
reprint)), 128 and 265.
66 D. McClure, The Treatment of International Agencies in School History Textbooks in the United States
(Washington, DC, 1951), 10.
67 O. Wister, The Pentecost of Calamity (London, 1915), 74.
68 Scott, op. cit. (1926), 97.
69 Ibid., 121± 3.
70 W. Rowlinson, `German education in a European context’, in History of Education in Europe, edited by
T. G. Cook (London, 1974), 21± 35.
Nationalism, propaganda and war and peace 37
Education was to be functionalized through an emphasis on subjects relating to racial and nation-
alistic ideas . . . [with] an emphasis on physical training, hostility towards the intellect and the
signi® cance of race. 71
The political socialization was particularly evident in primary school readers and in
geography and history textbooks. British educational writers almost universally
agreed that German teaching materials had become in essence guidebooks to
war.72 Unconcerned about notions of civil liberty and human rights, thousands of
censors were used to screen books. Negative censorship identi® ed books to be black-
listed. Liberal, democratic and international ideas were expunged. `Folk alien’ and
`decadent’ texts were regularly burned at Nazi rallies. Positive censorship equally
involved scrutiny of books, designed to ® ll the shelves with those o€ ering a positive
image of the German past and the National Socialist present. 73
Drawing on Hitler’s writings, Erika Mann emphasized his `strong and sincere’
aversion to knowledge. Like progressive educationists, he contended that `the youth-
ful brain must not be burdened with subjects’. There was a compelling popular logic
in his argument that:
. . . faith is harder to shake than knowledge. . . the impetus towards the most powerful upheavals on
this earth has rested at all times less in a scienti® c knowledge ruling the masses than in a fanaticism
blessing them, and often in a hysteria that drove them forwards. 74
Progress was therefore made `through collective belief rather than through individ-
ual painstaking e€ ort’.75 Low priority was given to improving the mind, still less to
independence of thought. The focus was on developing the healthy body and incul-
cating unquestioning political commitment. Children must not emerge from their
schooling `half paci® st, democrat, or what you will, but a complete German’. 76 The
geopolitical focus of education was exempli® ed in The Nazi Primer, the o cial
handbook for the schooling of Hitler Youth, intent on saving German civilization
from Jews, Communists and democracy. Based on the dogma of the `Leader’ and the
interests of the German people always being right, with `Jesuitical thoroughness’
children were caught young and `drilled to become fanatical preachers of the gos-
pel’.77 Many of the topics were war orientated, and indeed the pervasion principle
was writ large. `Education in relation to weapons, then, is no special branch of
general education; rather it is, in point of fact, the very core of our entire educa-
tion.’ 78

Product, process and propaganda : implementation


The evidence of a wide range of methodological articles, textbooks and other cur-
riculum materials, whether in Britain, France, Germany or the USA, suggests that a
pandemic feature was similarity in the approaches advocated, whether in criteria for
choice of content, or in pedagogical approach, or in achieving overriding aims. The

71 L. Pine, `The dissemination of Nazi ideology and family values through school textbooks’, History of
Education, 25 (1996), 93.
72 P. Hartig, `YouthÐ master of Germany: even school journeys have a ``national-political’’ importance’,
Teacher’s World (12 June 1935), 411.
73 C. Kamenetsky, Children’s L iterature in Hitler’s Germany (Athens, OH, 1984), xiii± xiv.
74 E. Mann, School for Barbarians: Education under the Nazis (London, 1939), 40.
75 W. H. G. Armytage, The German In¯ uence on English Education (London, 1969), 87.
76 Mann, op. cit. (1939), 39± 41.
77 Translated by H. L. Childs, The Nazi Primer: O cial Handbook for Schooling the Hitler Y outh (New
York, 1938), xxxiii.
78 Mann, op. cit. (1939), 46.
38 W. E. Marsden
matter and the method were comparable, whether the mission was nationalist or
internationalist, the promotion of war or peace. While proponents of peace educa-
tion might be more reticent about using propaganda techniques than those of
nationalist instruction, in practice, if not in the rhetoric, the di€ erence was of degree
rather than of kind. As Hayward discerned, the indoctrination taking place in
Fascist countries was their version of `Education for Citizenship’, though he
accepted that this version was an `exaggerated’ one. 79
In time of war, or preparation for war, it was not easy for those preaching
tolerance towards other nations to justify their case publicly. In these circumstances,
educational scruples were conveniently forgotten. `In days of national propaganda
and agitation we are tempted to cut the Gordion knot with little hesitation; in our
zeal for the ``national purpose’’ we have no inclination to avoid even the most
negative form of ``national animosity’’.’ 80 Part and parcel of allied propaganda,
which seeped into the educational literature, were oft-repeated and mostly bogus
stories of German atrocities, including the mutilation of children, cruci® xion of
soldiers, and even of the Kaiser using the dead bodies of his soldiers for soap making
in an `Establishment for the Utilization of Corpses’, the latter an o cial invention
widely believed at the time in Britain and the United States.81
In school textbooks, especially those of France, a campaign of vili® cation of
things German followed both the Franco-Prussian and First World Wars, counter-
pointing German `atrocities’ and French `heroism’. 82 A ¯ avour of the in¯ ammatory
material prevalent is exempli® ed in this extract from a postwar French history
primer:
Remember, little French children, that it was Germany which attacked France and forced her to
wage the Great War. Remember that, for more than four years, Belgium and northern France were
occupied by the Germans. Our enemies behaved like barbarians. . . . Cities were destroyed by them,
and villages razed. . . . The Germans committed atrocious crimes, mutilating or killing children,
shooting women and old men. With their airplanes they bombarded our cities, causing numerous
deaths. Their submarines sank merchant-ships and even hospital-ships. Conquered, the Germans
asked for peace. Our soldiers went into their country to occupy it, but they behaved humanely,
respecting the inhabitants and their goods. Eternal shame to Germany! Eternal glory to sweet
France and her Allies!83

During the First World War, British teachers’ journals periodically reproduced anti-
German horror stories that appeared in national newspapers and other sources,
under such headings as `Hate Training in German Schools’ 84 and `Hate’s
Kindergarten’.85 A letter from a German schoolboy to his father, serving in
Flanders, was obtained by the Daily Express, and in turn printed in The
Schoolmaster. He had been given an essay entitled `How Can Germany Get
Mastery of the Seas and Lay Down the Law to England’, and had won a prize
for his scheme of blockading enemy coasts with Zeppelins. The boy informed his
father that every incident of the war would be remembered and our enemies made to
su€ er for it. England had been at the root of the war, he had been told, and `hatred

79 F. H. Hayward, `Education for citizenship: instruction or inspiration?’, Times Educational Supplement


(14 December 1935), 438.
80 Walker, op. cit. (1935), 74± 5.
81 Viereck, op. cit. (1931), 148± 9.
82 C. J. F. Hayes, France: A Nation of Patriots (New York, 1930), 54± 5.
83 Quoted in ibid., 346.
84 A. Willis, `Hate training in German schools’, The Schoolmaster (11 November 1916), 590.
85 J. Saunders, `Hate’s kindergarten’, The Schoolmaster (10 July 1915), 60.
Nationalism, propaganda and war and peace 39
for England will extend over the coming generations. That is what our grand Kaiser
wants’.86
While the theory was that such rampant prejudice was indoctrinated only in
enemy schools, samples of children’s work in this country demonstrated similarly
one-sided attitudes. In their responses in a Navy League essay competition in 1918
on the submarine menace, for example, equally strong emotions were re¯ ected by
Liverpool children, one boy contending that the U-boats had `brought out
Germany’s true character as a crew of dirty, rotten funks, who can’t use such a
brilliant invention on the square’. Another regarded the Germans as trying to win
the war like burglars getting into homes and stealing. `Never again will the hand of
friendship be extended to the sea tyrant of that infamous country’ was another
opinion. The Schoolmaster columnist was none the less impressed by what it
regarded as the well-informed quality of the essays, the ability `to enumerate both
moral and material elements of the struggle’, and an awareness that `triumph can
come only through trial and pain’. 87
A feature of the early nineteenth-century pervasion principle in religious instruc-
tion was the in® ltration of biblical material into all areas of the curriculum, as in the
content of arithmetical problems, for example. A similar process was evident in
wartime curricula in di€ erent countries. During the First World War, for example,
The Schoolmistress printed a model framework which involved studying the relative
numbers of British warships in di€ erent categories against the equivalent German
complement, as a basis of lessons in mathematics and handwork.88 In 1918, The
Schoolmaster published a set of arithmetical questions on war savings, designed to
intensify children’s interest in the subject. War Savings Certi® cates cost 15/6 each,
and one of the simpler questions ran: `A boy saves 6d a week. In how many weeks
will he save enough to buy a War Savings certi® cate?89 As with the religious instruc-
tion of old, a moral addendum was attached. `People’s Arithmetic’ in Nazi Germany
included analogous examples. `An aeroplane ¯ ies at the rate of 240 kilometres per
hour to a place at a distance of 210 kilometres in order to drop bombs. When may it
be expected to return if the dropping of bombs takes 7.5 minutes?’ Other texts named
the urban targets.90
A longstanding feature of bodies anxious to seize the minds of children has been
to start the process young, whatever the righteousness or otherwise of the cause.
The `di cult question’ of whether young children should be introduced to the
horrors of war was raised in the Boer War period by the Froebelian journal Child
L ife. Its columnist concluded that the stronger, more warlike and less imaginative
boys and girls might be all the better for some insight, while for the more tender
hearted it might have `disastrous consequences’. Above all, children should not be
incited to glori® cation of strife, but should be encouraged to sacri® ce their pennies as
contributions to the war e€ ort. There was a xenophobic undertone in the appended
advice to make use of an extended piece of patriotic verse, which it printed, extolling
the bravery of the postmistress of a South African settlement in protecting the Union
Jack, at the same time disdaining `the parti-coloured washing’ of the Orange River

86 Anon., `In German schools today `, The Schoolmaster (2 January 1915), 16.
87 Anon., `Liverpool scholars on naval warfare’, The Schoolmaster (2 February 1918), 147.
88 Anon., `Handwork and the war’, The Schoolmistress (26 November 1914), 154.
89 Anon., `War Savings Associations in schools’, The Schoolmaster (7 September 1918), 228.
90 Mann, op. cit. (1939), 62.
40 W. E. Marsden
Flag, hung out by the `niggers’ to dry, and for which the heroine showed her con-
tempt by attempting to haul it down to bleach. 91
Progressive pedagogy also approved the use of action songs and games based on
Froebelian principles which, as much as didactic textbooks, included much patriotic
material. A well-known contemporary writer of such songs, Louisa Walker, noted
that it caused much merriment if a tiny boy was called a Major and put in front of a
class with a pail for a helmet and a poker for a gun. She included in one of her
collections at the time of the Boer War a song entitled `O€ to the War’, in which an
infant boy and girl played mother and son in a sentimental farewell scene, as he
obeyed `duty’s call’ to go o€ `to ® ght the foreign foe’.92 During the First World War,
children of all ages participated in increasingly jingoistic Empire Day celebrations.
The various teachers’ journals o€ ered suitably graded support. Even the babies’ class
had a contribution to make in setting an example, as illustrated in verse, song and
play:
If I tumbled do you think I’d cry
Like a baby?
No, not I.
Are you wond’ring what I’d do?
Just jump up
And smile at you.
If `twas bleeding, what care I?
Wounded soldiers
Do not cry!
They’re the bravest men of all
And I’ll be like them
When I fall.
In another instance, infant participants showed a brave de® ance, be® tting a future
war hero:
I want to be a soldier,
With bayonet and gun,
I want to cross the Channel,
And ® ght this cruel Hun.
I’m much too old for playthings,
Like whips and tops and bricks,
I want to be a soldier,
For, listen! I am six!93
Mothers were encouraged to support the spirit of the occasion, in some cases making
detailed replicas of soldiers’, or John Bull’s or nurses’ uniforms for their toddlers to
dress up in.94 The peacetime Empire Day type of celebration was modi® ed. It was
still centred on pageant and play, but now, instead of children simulating their
counterparts from other parts of the Empire, the performers might be required to

91 Anon., `Children and the war’, Child L ife, 1 (1900), 50± 1.


92 W. E. Marsden, Educating the Respectable: A Study of Fleet Road Board School, Hampstead, 1879±
1903 (London, 1991), 151.
93 Anon., `For the babies’, Supplement to The Schoolmistress (3 May 1917), viii.
94 Marsden, op. cit. (1991), 151± 2.
Nationalism, propaganda and war and peace 41
act as soldiers and sailors, ® shermen, miners and munitions workers. In the plays for
juniors the mud and blood of the trenches were only hinted at, as in one Empire Day
play of 1917, in which the boy playing the soldier concluded:
Through the cold and wet and danger,
smart, alert and ever ® t,
With a jest for all his troubles, doggedly he
does his bit;
Not a murmur e’er escapes him, death can
come but once, `tis true;
This is warÐ `red war’Ð he knows it,
Grits his teeth and sees things through.95
In the secondary school, some of the race hatred and glori® cation of war was to be
learned formally as, for example, using the `intense signi® cances’ of the war to alert
pupils’ curiosities to the central European region and its changing frontiers.96 But
again, `child-centred methods’ were also espoused in order to incite interest in the
war. Children were invited to ask relatives to tell them stories about the war, and to
bring in military artefacts, or letters from troops at the front. These were intended to
be followed up by them writing accounts of a day in the trenches, the burial of a
brave soldier, and so on. Trenches were one of many war-focused topics in Britain,
with handwork lessons based on realistic hardware models.97 For the infants, toy-
making of objects associated with the war was held to be highly motivating. Based
on the Froebelian pedagogy of using gifts and varied occupations, a wartime adap-
tation was to have the children make models of a fort, a Red Cross ambulance,
cannon balls, sandbags, marching soldiers, horses, nurses and `poor wounded
warriors’. 98
Similarly, after the war, Jean Piaget, an ardent exponent of League of Nations
teaching, argued that progressive methods must be used, and the interests of children
caught while young. The procedure should be to relate international issues to their
own lives and environments, and involve them through participation in discussions,
at the same time avoiding abstraction and drab methods such as lectures. 99 This
approach was exempli® ed in an article on `Di cult Lessons’ in 1928 in Teachers
World , teaching for peace being regarded as a tricky subject. Children were asked if
they had brothers and sisters, and whether or not they quarrelled with them. In true
concentric fashion, they were in turn quizzed about broader family relationships,
moving on to the level of neighbourhood attitudes, problems associated with their
own town, followed by the countries of the United Kingdom, and ® nally those of the
world. The children were told that their counterparts in other countries loved their
homelands as much as those in Britain did. But `do the members of the great World
Family of Nations ever quarrel?’, was the rhetorical question. The predetermined
answer was `Yes, it had been very quarrelsome over 3000 years, and nations had
tried to settle disputes by ® ghting’. The domestic level of violence was taken as the
95 Anon., `The last rally’, Supplement to The Schoolmistress (3 May 1917), vi± viii.
96 Anon., `War lessons: The synthetic method in geography’, Supplement to the Times Educational
Supplement (2 March 1915), 36.
97 Anon., `How to model trenches’, Teacher’s World (15 March 1916), 660.
98 Anon., `Toy-making and the war’, and `Sand table model’, Supplement to the Schoolmistress (24 June
1915), vii.
99 J. Piaget, `Some suggestions concerning League teaching’, Bulletin of L eague of Nations Teaching, 2
(1935), 187± 92.
42 W. E. Marsden
starting point for imagining how soldiers in armies wanted to kill and maim. From
discussion of the horrors of war, the lesson turned to the work of the League of
Nations, aiming to stop the disease of war. The children were left with the important
moral lesson that the League was protecting weaker nations. `A more friendly
brotherly feeling has come into the World Family. Isn’t that a good thing?’ 100
But catching the children young was predictably just as central to National
Socialist strategy in Germany, where it was made clear from the start that war
could be a good thing. Mann, for example, quoted a ditty in a text entitled
Rhineland Primer for infant classes, translated as:
Listen to the drums, boom, boom, boomÐ
Listen to the trumpets, tateratata!
Come on, clear the camp!101
There is an uncanny similarity in the woodcuts included with the Mothers’ Songs of
Froebel, and analogous visual materials found in the National Socialist literature for
children and youth, examples of the latter being conveniently reproduced in
Kamenetsky’s study of Children’s L iterature in Hitler’s Germany.102 Froebel’s
songs included a series of maxims for mothers as to how they should direct the
moral and social education of their children. Among the approved values were,
above all, the celebration of the virtues of a stable family life, the moral primacy
of the good mother, and the traditional patterns of rural and small-town society,
including the inculcation of obedience to the prevailing social and religious mores.
The prints included in National Socialist texts celebrated the same traditional roots
and codes of German country life. Prescription was of an equivalent intensity,
though obviously directed towards political rather than religious ends.
The character of schemes of work and syllabuses in Nazi schooling were tech-
nically not at all di€ erent from those practised in curriculum planning in Britain and
the United States. Mann quotes such a planning matrix, in which in one column
topics from twentieth-century German history were listed, while the second outlined
parallel topics under the heading `Relations to the Jews’. Thus three weeks were
spent on `National Socialism at Grips with Crime and the Underworld’, matched in
the next column by `Jewish Instigators of Murder’.103 Similarly, Reich Education
Minister Rust’s concept of interdisciplinary studies used a familiar concentric frame-
work to that long advocated in postwar progressive educational circles in Britain. In
Rust’s case, the central theme was `German Folklore and Nordic Heroism’, and
round this core the contributions of various subjects, here prehistory, history, lan-
guage, geopolitics and racial theory, and religion (the latter with reference to `biblical
myths’ ), were catalogued.104
Patriotic themes were as evident in the integrated progressive project as in the
Kipling-type textbook. For decades the topic most frequently advocated in the
British teachers’ press, usually for timetabling in the period around Empire Day,
was `The Flag’, one readily permeated into geography, history, drama, needlework,
handwork, and religious instruction. As early as 1899 Dexter and Garlick had

100 A. K. Lockington, `Di cult lessons’, Teachers World (9 February 1928), 950.
101 Mann, op. cit. (1939), 50.
102 Kamenetsky, op. cit. (1984).
103 Mann, op. cit. (1939), 55.
104 Kamenetsky, op. cit. (1984), 250.
Nationalism, propaganda and war and peace 43
anticipated its e€ ectiveness as a cross-curricular theme. 105 Scores of songs celebrat-
ing the ¯ ag were printed, such as `The Flag of Old England’ and `Three Cheers for
the Red White and Blue’. Not all approved. Bertrand Russell, for example,
complained that emphasis on the ¯ ag generated xenophobia. It was a symbol of
the nation in its martial capacity, suggesting `battle, war, con¯ ict, and deeds of
heroism’.106
For internationalist League of Nations teaching, a favoured integrated topic was
`Flags’. Similar teaching techniques were advocated. In one junior school project, for
example, children were asked to paint small ¯ ags of cigarette-card size, and then pin
them on a large map they had drawn or modelled. They also had to draw ¯ ags in an
exercise book, and leave space into which they could write information heard on the
wireless news. Then each child had to take on a country, go to the public library and
pick up information about it, in preparation for giving a little speech to the class.
Interest in the ¯ ags was expected to turn into interest to learn about the geography
and history of countries, and to contribute to a sympathetic interest in them.107
After the war, attempts were made to emulate the popularity of Empire Day by
formally observing Armistice Day. In the ® rst place this was designed in memory of
those who had been killed in the First World War, but League of Nations supporters
also regarded the idea as a valuable opportunity to promote the cause of peace. As
with Empire Day, appropriate songs and recitations, cantatas and plays were used,
often specially written for the occasion. In Empire Day plays, the key ® gure was
usually an imperious but benign Britannia, and the nations of the Empire were
represented in native costume. Britannia welcomed all, then each extolled their
common and bene® cent imperial heritage, and ® nally all in turn declared their
allegiance to the Crown. Similar plays were written for League of Nations purposes,
including Armistice Day services. Among the authors was Enid Blyton. The leading
® gure, replicating Britannia in the Empire Day plays, was characteristically called
`The Spirit of Peace’ or `The Queen of Peace’ or, in one case, `Mister World’.
One award-winning play for Armistice Day included a War King as well as a
Queen of Peace. Thirteen children represented European countries. The War King
declared he would continue to reign, `though men die and women weep’. The Queen
of Peace a rmed that the armistice had ended his reign, and there must be no more
war. In a scowling retreat, the War King indicated he would return again. The
di€ erent countries were invited to sign up to the League of Nations, and made
appropriate responses. Germany was the last to be called and confessed: `I thought
to bring the whole world to my feet, but I have learned that love is stronger than
hate, and right shall triumph over wrong’. Germany was gladly accepted into the
League by the Queen of Peace, and all cheered as the War King fell down dead.108
In an account of history teaching in English schools an American writer drew
attention to attempts to inculcate internationalism through League of Nations teach-
ing, giving an example of a Streatham school which ran a `League of Nations Week’,
during which the girls engaged in competitions, treasure hunts and fancy-dress
parties in which costumes representing other nations were worn. Other schools
simulated model council meetings and assemblies of the League. What today

105 T. F. G. Dexter and A. H. Garlick, Object L essons in Geography for Standard II (London, 1899), 198±
200.
106 Russell, op. cit. (1932), 136.
107 J. Kenwrick, `Flags of the nations’, Teachers World (7 December 1932), 356.
108 E. S. Butterworth, `The reign of peace’, Teachers’ Times (24 October 1924), 261.
44 W. E. Marsden
would be termed `twinning’ arrangements with European schools were organized,
either through actual visits or correspondence. She commented, however, that there
was more enthusiasm for such work in girls’ than in boys’ schools. 109 A similar
initiative was Rosalind Escott’s implementation of an international exchange of
children’s pictures.110 Ease of travel had made visits to Europe more feasible and
indeed the mission of the School Journey Association, formed in 1911, included not
only the promotion of ® eld study in the home country, but also, from the 1920s,
overseas excursions to Europe. The establishment of personal contacts between
young people was held to contribute to harmonious international relations. The
SJA excursions were popular ventures for nearly two decades, brought to an unfor-
tunate end by the outbreak of the Second World War. 111

Conclusion
The historical evidence therefore suggests that where there is a strong commitment to
threatening economic, political or social (and more recently environmental) circum-
stances, the good causes of the day, there is a cry for education to accept the
poisoned chalice of saving the world, in the cyclically repeated expectation that
this can realistically be achieved by educational means. A critical if inconvenient
question is whether or not the momentous ends in view might not more e€ ectively
be accomplished through propaganda and indoctrination rather than, as often
assumed, more liberal and enquiry-based educational approaches, which provoke
a linked question about the curricular arrangements to be followed. It has, for ex-
ample, been argued that, in a non-totalitarian system at least, the academic and more
dispassionate subjects of the curriculum are a degree less likely to be corralled for
indoctrinatory purposes than mission-oriented curriculum integration arrangements,
such as religious or imperial instruction, or education for war and peace and, dare
one say, citizenship and environmental education.112
A striking example in the immediate post-First World War period of a mission
striving to be scrupulous was John Hargrave’s Woodcraft Movement mutation, `The
Covenant of the Kibbo Kift’. This was a breakaway group from the mainstream,
hostile to what it perceived as the warlike values of the Boy Scouts. Hargrave’s
ambition was, however, neither more nor less than that of the hard-line eugenicist,
stressing the need for establishing a new blood line or caste of hardihood, whose
members would think twice before marrying `less improved’ types. The objectives of
the outdoor and health education programme he advocated were essentially as racist
in nature as those of National Socialism. But radically dissimilar was Hargrave’s
insistence on evolution rather than revolution, on what he saw as education rather
than indoctrination. His principles were to be disseminated in voluntary ways, with-
out `political wirepulling’.113 His venture failed.

109 Shropshire, op. cit. (1936), 84± 5.


110 R. Escott, `International exchange of children’s pictures’, Junior Teachers World (15 August 1934),
701 and 722.
111 W. E. Marsden, `The school journey movement to 1940’, Journal of Educational Administration and
History, 30 (1998), 85± 7.
112 W. E. Marsden, ```All in a good cause’’: geography, history and the politicisation of the curriculum in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 21(1989), 509± 26; and
`Recycling religious instruction? historical perspectives on contemporary cross-curricular issues’,
History of Education, 22 (1993), 321± 33.
113 J. Hargrave, The Great War Brings it Home (London, 1919).
Nationalism, propaganda and war and peace 45
Among interwar historical educationists, A.C.F. Beales was a notable cam-
paigner for peace education. But he drew attention to a proviso of the Historical
Association that, in any such teaching, the emphasis must be on the impartial selec-
tion, presentation and interpretation of facts as means of preparing pupils to form
independent judgements. 114 Similarly, Frederic Evans, a chief education o cer
involved with League of Nations teaching, condemned `fundamentalist’ teaching
and demanded an `objective’ approach based on geographical and historical under-
standing. At the same time, Evans was haunted by the possibility that nearly two
decades of the peaceful psychology of League teaching might have softened the will
of the people to ® ght Fascism.115 In general, the proponents of teaching for peace
were much more sensitive to the propaganda issue than their opponents. But the task
was di cult, for the good cause was of too overriding importance for it, in practice,
to be free from special pleading. Indeed, Elliott sub-titled his account of the League
of Nations Union’s educational activity `a study in benevolent bias’.116
The politician Eleanor Rathbone was much less inhibited than the educationists,
arguing forcefully that the success of Fascist and Nazi propaganda was the way in
which it seized upon the very young. Democracy had to be defended in similar ways,
not least through making:
. . . our propaganda as all-pervasive and e€ ective as that of those who hold opposite beliefs. There is
current today an absurd prejudice against the very word propagandaÐ as though propaganda must
necessarily be unfair and exaggerated if not mendacious.

Beliefs of liberty and justice, humanitarian conduct and Christian ethics must be
consciously propagated, Rathbone insisted.117
In the United States William Biddle attacked the increasing infusion of propa-
ganda into schools, arguing that education’s central purpose was the development of
`critical thinking’, `skepticism’, and `discriminating minds’ as counter to the `emo-
tional gullibility’ associated with propaganda.118 Similarly, Viereck viewed his book
Spreading Germs of Hate as an `antidote or serum against this scourge by inculcating
propaganda resistance’. 119 The National Council for the Social Studies was su -
ciently exercised by the issue as to devote its 1937 Y earbook to the subject. A Faculty
member of Teachers College, Columbia University, in the same year organized an
Institute for Propaganda Analysis in New York City. 120 Of course, much of the
American concern had been raised not so much by events in Europe, as by continu-
ing di€ erences between North and South, and also by the increasing intervention in
schooling of home-grown right-wing nationalist pressure groups, in particular the
American Legion and `ancestor worshippers’ such as The Daughters of the
American Revolution,121 strongly implicated in the censorship of textbooks.

114 A. C. F. Beales, `History teaching and world peace’, The New Ploughshare, 1 (1938), 7.
115 F. Evans, `The crisis in the teaching of the League of Nations’, Teachers’ World and Schoolmistress
(8 December 1937), 5.
116 Elliott, op. cit. (1977), 134.
117 E. Rathbone, `On the necessity for propaganda’, The New Ploughshare, 1 (1938), 2.
118 W. W. Biddle, Propaganda and Education (New York, 1932), 69.
119 Viereck, op. cit. (1931), 12.
120 C. R. Miller, `Propaganda: The crucial problem of the modern world’, in C. R. Miller, `Propaganda:
The crucial problem of the modern world’, Educating for Peace: A Report of the Committee on
International Relations of the National Council of Teachers of English, edited by I. T. Jacobs and
J. J. DeBoer (New York, 1940), 51.
121 H. K. Beale, `Propaganda in¯ uences within the school’, in National Council for the Social Studies,
Education against Propaganda, 7th Yearbook (Washington?, 1937), 100.
46 W. E. Marsden
But opinions varied. It was rightly observed that the problem of education versus
indoctrination had no clear-cut solution. Viereck warned that propaganda `hides its
paternity and dissembles its motives. Propaganda may insidiously disguise itself as
education’. 122 Countering this argument, C. J. H. Hayes, a Professor of History at
Columbia University, argued the presence of a propaganda for truth as well as a
propaganda of falsehood. He regarded education as form of propaganda, emphasiz-
ing `the pouring-in, the pumping-in, which is the actual method, if not the theory, of
education’. Propaganda was in his view a neutral, if not wholly respectable word. He
agreed that nationalist education had seized more on the powerful agencies of
propaganda, but appeared to see the di€ erences between the various lobbies more
as matters of degree than of kind.123
Such blurring of the edges has become more evident in recent decades. History
itself can be put to `strange uses’.124 As Anyon insists, all textbook material re¯ ects
an underlying ideology, an ideology being seen as `an explanation or interpretation
of social reality which, although presented as objective, is demonstrably partial in
that it expresses the social priorities of certain political, economic or other
groups’. 125 Equally of concern, these interests are hidden. Thus, apart from overtly
o€ ensive material, bias is introduced by omission and di€ erences of emphasis, or by
a deliberate or inadvertent selective choice of illustration. Teachers (and textbook
authors) have also equally been accused of being part of a dominant pattern of
classroom communication that is indoctrinational, in that the material transmitted
`is structured so as to exclude, repress and prevent exploration of questions regarding
the validity of the facts and simple generalizations which make up the bulk of
information transmitted in classrooms’, even though teachers in general would
claim to be opposed to indoctrination.126 It would seem fair, however, to insist
that a distinction needs to be made between the gross distortions often accompany-
ing `hard-core’ propaganda material, and the more evidently `soft-core’ subjectivity
and selectivity which are inevitably present in textbooks.
Two particularly striking features therefore emerge from this comparative con-
sideration of the treatment of war and peace in the schools of the contesting nations
of early twentieth-century Europe. The ® rst is the similarity in the methods practised,
whatever good cause was avowed. The second is the sheer unreality of the expecta-
tions of what the di€ erent groups thought they might attain through `education’, as
distinct from propaganda accompanied by draconian social and political control.
The Times Educational Supplement judged that while League of Nations teaching
had helped to reduce jingoistic statements in British textbooks, and to promote a
more internationalist point of view, on the broader scale it had been unable to
restrain the aggressor or to tackle in practice the fundamental causes of war. 127
While the illustrative material of National Socialism was down to earth, unequivocal
and accessible to the uncomplicated mind, characteristic of the peace campaigners

122 Viereck, op. cit. (1931), 22.


123 C. J. H. Hayes, `Education and nationalism’, in Chicago League of Women Voters Forum/
Department of Education and Philosophy of the Chicago Woman’s Club/Association of Peace
Education, Conference on `The Teaching of History’ (Chicago, 1925), 12.
124 R. Lowe, `History as propaganda: the strange uses of the history of education’, in Trends in the Study
and Teaching of the History of Education, edited by R. Lowe (Leicester, 1983), 48± 60.
125 J. Anyon, `Ideology and United States history textbooks’, Harvard Educational Review, 44 (1979) 363.
126 R. E. Young, `Teaching equals indoctrination: the dominant epistemic practices in our schools’,
British Journal of Educational Studies, 32 (1984), 236.
127 Anon., `Has the League failed?’, Times Educational Supplement (17 September 1938), 353.
Nationalism, propaganda and war and peace 47
was a high level of rhetoric, concentrating on broad visions of a common brother-
hood of nations, with liberally educated children moving out as the model world
citizens of tomorrow, from house and home, to the school neighbourhood, the city,
the region, the nation, and the global community. The following verse, entitled `The
Geography Teacher’, appeared in the American National Education Association’s
Journal, and was reprinted in Teachers World and Schoolmistress in Britain in1940,
poignant testimony, coming when it did, to the powerlessness of education in itself in
a democratic societyÐ however high-minded the vision of teaching for a better
worldÐ to a€ ect materially the nationalistic drift of history:
Day after day, upon my classroom walls
I spread these maps and pictures; with these tools,
With books and globes, striving to build a world
Within the understanding of a child.
While I teach them may I have the power
To clear away the mists that still arise,
Born of old ignorance and prejudice,
Around these children! May my soul and mind
Become so broad, so all encompassing,
That, building on the old foundation stonesÐ
Location, surface, crops, cities, tradeÐ
I rear, ® rm, steadfast, clear in each child mind,
A world of other people like himself,
Swayed by the selfsame longings, high and low,
Loving their homelands, as we love our own.
May I feel that I have failed, unless
I teach each child to seek in every race
The common traits of brotherhood; to feel
Within his breast the heartbeats of the world.128
Predictably, similar ideals were reintroduced after the Second World War by the
United Nations and others. In a 1950 review, for example, UNESCO de® ned text-
books as the `binoculars’ through which children looked at the world. If good, they
were a step towards international understanding of people and places. But if bad, the
e€ ect upon the observer was harmful and sometimes disastrous, the resulting atti-
tudes and actions often contributing to world misunderstanding and helping to
provoke international hostilities’.129 Bearing in mind that the `poisoned history’
notion implies that education, properly conducted, is e€ ective, whether in promoting
war or peace, in an alternative compelling metaphor, the editor of a 1919 edition of
The Schoolmaster o€ ered a more sceptical standpoint, critical of the social determin-
ism that suggested that 40 years of education had done this or that for Germany (or
for England), of the idea that teaching kindness to animals would curb `the disease of
bull-® ghting in Spain’, or that lessons in temperance would remove drunkenness in
this country. He concluded: `There are no educational pills for the earthquake,
whether at home or abroad.’ 130

128 Anon., `The geography teacher’, Teacher’s World and Schoolmistress (20 March 1940), 3.
129 UNESCO, L ooking at the World through Textbooks (Paris, 1950), 1.
130 Anon., `Pills and earthquakes’, The Schoolmaster (19 April 1919), 579.

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