In the Name of Progress and National Autarchy: The Importance of Innovation for the Manufacturing of Citizens in 19th- and 20th-Century Luxembourg

• In Event: Roundtable Session 2
  In Roundtable Session: Rethinking Educational Change: Cultural-Historical Analyses of Educational Reforms Across and Beyond National Boundaries

Abstract

Tom Nairn named the nation-state as „ the modern Janus“, with one face gazing back into the past („primordialism“), the other one into a the future („modernism“) (Nairn,1977), which can be applied even the more to schooling, as the erection of the modern mass schools was based to a large extent on promotion of national progress. It was not only the invention of tradition (Hobsbawm / Ranger 1992) that held the nation and its citizens together, but also the consciousness to have shared aims for the future available. Such notions of a shared future and progress brought an increasing European trend to foster innovation in Education, a trend with a twofold character:
On one side, it is considered as an equalizing and unifying measure by promoting creative and innovative potential of deprived students (e.g. of lower social status, rural populations, migrants). Following this logic, scientification policies have spread over Europe since the 1960s that claim to be of more social justice and overcome social and cultural bias. On the other side, the very same innovation scientification policies can include a local and social differentiation. National progress thus was not only understood as a technology to achieve social cohesion and national, but also as a technology of stratification and differentiation within the nation.
The twofold character will be object of this historical study of the 19th and 20th century Luxembourgian Curriculum. Set up on the basis of a small territory in 1839 and situated between two big neighbours Germany and France, Luxembourg was continuously anxious about its existence as independent nation-state: innovation therefore was important part of the construction of citizenship. It were foremost the industrial innovations that provided the former agrarian country with internationally competitive economic branches (like an influential steel industry):
“Everyday there are new inventions made in industry. [...] A state can only exist as long as its sources of income last for everybody’s aliment. [....] This will be facilitated if it has an army of workers […] at once able to put inventions and improvements into practice” (Luxembourgian textbook 1916).
Differentiation in this context was an essential part of citizenship education, since every student was educated to function in his later position, determined after regional aspects, professional needs and social classes. Scientification debates in Luxembourg didn’t erase this differentiation, as shows the distinction of “science education” for the higher and “technology instruction” for the lower branches of secondary education (“Sciences result from the thirst for knowledge[…], technics serve to satisfy human needs”; Commission d’Instruction 1986).
Three phases (1878-1896, 1916-1929, 1960-1974) will be analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively, based on sources like official gazettes, conference reports, drafts of syllabi, school programs, teachers’ journals and newspapers, drawing for example on the Foucauldian notion of governmentality, theories of cultural nationalism and sociosemiotic theory.

Author

• Catherina Schreiber, The University of Luxembourg