State-compelled national history teaching risks becoming ideological indoctrination rather than self-knowledge.
Evidence
The establishment of the State of Israel created a new situation, because for the first time Jewish history is compulsorily taught in schools to a young gen eration under the authority of the State or of some agency within the State. This creates a new challenge, new problems and also, I would venture to suggest, new dangers. … In one country it will be taught in order to strengthen religious belief and to reaffirm the control of the state by the senior members of the religious hierarchy. I am referring of course to Iran. In another country, according to a circular by the Ministry of Education, the purpose of teaching history in the schools is to strengthen national pride and to reinforce patriotic loyalty. The country in question is Syria. Is that where you would like to look for examples, for guidance to follow as to the nature of historical teaching? I would rather think that the purpose of teaching history should be critical and accurate self-knowledge, self-awareness, conscious ness of one’s place in history, personal and communal, without which we are all blundering amnesiacs. It is quite impossible to understand Jewish history with out at the same time understanding the societies of which Jews in every aspect of their lives, including their religious life, were a part. What is needed in this is binocular not monocular vision. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 342
Categorization
- SEED: Angle: Israeli state-mandated Jewish history teaching as a case study in how a national narrative gets institutionalized — parallels how other regional powers (Iran, Syria) deploy history education for legitimation.
- XREF: Connects to Said-adjacent critiques of nationalist historiography and to Anderson’s imagined communities work on education as state apparatus. — connects to: Taxpayer-funded Arizona charter schools teach a biblical nationalist version of American history — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the…, 99