ABSTRACT
It has long been recognised that a person’s identification with nation begins to take root in childhood. Childhood experience is commonly taken to be the bedrock upon which self-identity is built, and national consciousness is regarded by many as a key foundation of a modern person’s identity. Childhood is conventionally seen as a time of ‘structured becoming’, a time defined as preparatory to the values and preoccupations of the adult world which take root within a child self that is still malleable and ‘different’ (Jenks 2005: 11). National feeling, too, is often seen as something barely conscious that seeps into one’s core being as one grows and develops. Ernst Gellner, arguably the most influential theorist of nationalism as fundamental to the modern conception of self, asserts that ‘the culture in which one has been taught to communicate becomes the core of one’s identity’ (1983: 61; italics in original). Such a view defines childhood as the primal ground in which national cultures take root. In turn, this reflects the idea that national feeling is not natural or instinctive in children but is consciously cultivated in them (by adults), hence, the assumption that a nation’s schools are places where dominant discourses of national identity and history are promulgated. As has been pointed out by historians, some of the consequences of the emergence of a national system of education were the increasing separation between the child self and the adult self and the birth of the idea of child development (Aries 1962; see Walkerdine 1984). And, as Gellner argues of Britain, among the major functions of the emerging school system of the late nineteenth century was that of instilling national consciousness into children. The idea of a national curriculum presupposes, indeed, that children living in the same geopolitical entity should be educated into a similar pool of knowledge-content.
