ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to identify some ways in which children's knowledge and feelings about their own country and others changes during the primary school years. The literature in this field is complex and sometimes contradictory. This is partly because the studies reviewed here extend over a period of fifty years in several different countries and against a background of greatly changing international affairs, during which time ideas of nationhood and patriotism have become more or less salient for each country concerned. But it is also because the subject matter itself is inherently difficult to study. There are, for example, great methodological problems in attempting to identify just what children know and feel about entities (such as countries) which are conceptually fairly difficult to handle.
