How to use the sources

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Since the last decades of the 20th century, History of Education has adopted approaches related to the new Cultural History and the so-called Culture of the School. The latter conceives the educational institution not only as a product of external regulations, but also as social construction which produces and transmits certain cultural guide lines, a group of practices and actions, a specific structure of knowledge, specific products or internal creations, and a particular configuration of roles and agents with which students and teachers familiarize.

This methodological shift, in which the outlook of the historian preferably focuses on the interior of the scholar institutions to learn how they work and the extent to which ideological (cultural, social, and pedagogical) tendencies have been appropriated, has called for the access to new sources for the analysis of the School Culture.

School textbooks, as one of the most specific and characteristic products of any educational institution, have become since then an object of study of great interest and value. They have become testimonies which may reveal information on a number of aspects previously ignored or simply somehow opaque, difficult to analyse.

This could apply to any aspect related to the internal life of the educational institution, to ideological influences, or to political motivations which influenced academic disciplines and curricular contents. Pedagogical theories and methodological principles can be rescued through school textbooks.

Not only predominant and largely disseminated ones, but also innovative, reformist and even individual pedadogical experiences belonging to a minority of tendencies from a variety of countries and in different periods of times, can be detected in a school textbook.

The type of analysis which is mostly applied to the study of school textbooks focuses on the influence of ideological currents and therefore employs the analysis of contents. As a product of the society which creates them, school textbooks emerge as rich material and sources which reveal the different social and political conceptions affecting their elaboration.

They respond to the national state curriculum, the prescribed curriculum, and therefore they preserve the traces of the different ideologies and currents of thought which existed during a certain period of time, but mostly, they contain the expressions of the fundamental dominant ideas of each historical period. They constitute neither a “description” nor a “photographical” register of a given society or culture.

They express an idealized horizon of knowledge, aims and values, a group of interpretations and positions which show subjective visions of the social world. The analysis of these interpretations and positions helps in the understanding of the history of the school and the processes of cultural transmission.

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