Cognitive and Ideological Aspects in School Textbooks

This volume reproduces, with one exception, the proceedings of the one-day seminar: ‘Reform of the education system and epistemological issues: The social sciences textbook’, organised at the Crasc on 30 June 2011 by the research team: Places of Knowledge, Places of Power. The aim was to analyse the problematic relationship between cognition and ideology without neglecting the socio-anthropological contribution in terms of theoretical and methodological perspective. We sought to discern, through the content of school textbooks, the pedagogical and ideological choices and orientations. Pedagogy and ideology are, after all, not unrelated. The official school system attempts to define the ‘terms of reference’ for the curricula that guide the work of textbook authors, but the latter always manage to influence the content and the pedagogical and ideological orientations, due to their professional, cultural and sociological backgrounds. In short, despite all the efforts the school system may make to ‘depersonalize’ school textbooks, these bear, to a significant extent, the mark of their authors.