scholarly journals From Ottoman colonial rule to nation statehood: Schooling and national identity in the early Greek school

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Theodore G. Zervas

After Ottoman colonial rule, education in Greece became an important institution for the ideological construction of a Greek national identity. This paper looks at schooling in Greece just prior to the Greek Revolution and immediately after Greek Independence, and how the Greek national school system assisted in the construction of a Greek national identity. This paper is divided into several sections. The introductory section discusses how a newly independent Greek nation-state struggled to unite the Greek people under a collective national identity. While most people at the time identified with their families, communities, and Greek Orthodox Christian religion, after Greek independence people began to see themselves as members of a broader Greek nation. The section that follows provides a discussion of Greek education during Ottoman colonial rule, and how a type of Greek identity (centered around the Greek Orthodox Christian faith) was maintained through the Greek Orthodox mileu. The Greek Church ran schools, and taught Greek children how to read and write, as well as the virtues of the Orthodox Christian faith. Section three of the article looks at Greek education during the early years of the Greek nation-state. In this section the general contours of the Greek educational system are delineated. The section also discusses how the organization of the Greek national school system was borrowed from extant school models found in Western Europe. Section four describes the Greek national curriculum and how the national curriculum would help to teach future generations of Greek citizens what it meant to be Greek. This is further reinforced in the Greek school textbook, which is part of the discussion in section five. Section five concludes with the role of education and its implications in uniting nations from around the world. 

Author(s):  
Mary Youssef

This book examines questions of identity, nationalism, and marginalization in the contemporary Egyptian novel from a postcolonial lens. Under colonial rule, the Egyptian novel invoked a sovereign nation-state by basking in its perceived unity. After independence, the novel professed disenchantment with state practices and unequal class and gender relations, without disrupting the nation’s imagined racial and ethno-religious homogeneity. This book identifies a trend in the twenty-first-century Egyptian novel that shatters this singular view, with the rise of a new consciousness that presents Egypt as fundamentally heterogeneous. Through a robust analysis of “new-consciousness” novels by authors like Idris ᶜAli, Bahaᵓ Tahir, Miral al-Tahawi, and Yusuf Zaydan, the author argues that this new consciousness does not only respond to predominant discourses of difference and practices of differentiation along the axes of race, ethno-religion, class, and gender by bringing the experiences of Nubian, Amazigh, Bedouin, Coptic, Jewish, and women minorities to the fore of Egypt’s literary imaginary, but also heralds the cacophony of voices that collectively cried for social justice from Tahrir Square in Egypt’s 2011-uprising. This study responds to the changing iconographic, semiotic, and formal features of the Egyptian novel. It fulfills the critical task of identifying an emergent novelistic genre and develops historically reflexive methodologies that interpret new-consciousness novels and their mediatory role in formalizing and articulating their historical moment. By adopting this context-specific approach to studying novelistic evolution, this book locates some of the strands that have been missing from the complex whole of Egypt’s culture and literary history.


Author(s):  
Stein Erik Ohna

The Norwegian National Curriculum in 1997 introduced four subject curricula for deaf students as part of new legislation giving deaf students who have acquired sign language as their first language the right to instruction in the use of sign language and through the medium of sign language. A few years later, new hearing technologies contributed to substantial changes in the educational context. This situation has challenged the school system, schools, and teachers. The chapter is organized in three sections. First, the educational system and the process leading to the introduction of new legislation is presented. The second section deals with information about the use of curricula for deaf students. The last section discusses issues of students’ achievements, classroom processes, and national policies.


2002 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 495-517
Author(s):  
Irini Renieri

This article explores household formation among the Greek Orthodox population of a mixed village of Cappadocia inhabited by Muslims, as well. The village, Çukur, was located on the right bank of the river Kızılırmak, 49 kilometers north–northwest of Kayseri.1 I aim to show that complex forms of household formation were the main type of social organization and were especially durable over time, with a high average household membership. I attempt to clarify whether the predominance of extended households—which, as other studies have shown, is not that common in the Asian portion of the Ottoman Empire—was related to the Christian character of this section of the Çukur population, or whether the agricultural basis of the village economy played a more important role.


2001 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 557-584 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wendy Webster

“In Malaya,” theDaily Mailnoted in 1953, “three and a half years of danger have given the planters time to convert their previously pleasant homes into miniature fortresses, with sandbag parapets, wire entanglements, and searchlights.” The image of the home as fortress and a juxtaposition of the domestic with menace and terror were central to British media representations of colonial wars in Malaya and Kenya in the 1950s. The repertoire of imagery deployed in theDaily Mailfor the “miniature fortress” in Malaya was extended to Kenya, where the newspaper noted wire over domestic windows, guns beside wine glasses, the charming hostess in her black silk dress with “an automatic pistol hanging at her hip.” Such images of English domesticity threatened by an alien other were also central to immigration discourse in the 1950s and 1960s. In the context of the decline of British colonial rule after 1945, representations of the empire and its legacy—resistance to colonial rule in empire and “immigrants” in the metropolis—increasingly converged on a common theme: the violation of domestic sanctuaries.Colonial wars of the late 1940s and 1950s have received little attention in literatures on national identity in early postwar Britain, but the articulation of racial difference through immigration discourse, and its significance in redefining the postimperial British national community has been widely recognized. As Chris Waters has suggested in his work on discourses of race and nation between 1947 and 1963, these years saw questions of race become central to questions of national belonging.


1990 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 485-502 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Avis

JohnPolkinghorne FRS (b.1930), the Cambridge Professor of Mathematical Physics turned Anglican parson enjoys unrivalled opportunities as an apologist for the Christian faith to those with a general scientific education. Without reading a word of his writings, many Christians will be encouraged to know that a distinguished professional scientist is so firmly persuaded of the truth of the Christian faith as to resign a prestigious professional position and embrace the far from prestigious calling of a Christian minister in the secular environment of today. Some who embark on his books may not understand all the scientific allusions, but they will be impressed by his testimony that orthodox Christian belief can exist in harmony with the scientific worldview and vocation.


2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (5) ◽  
pp. 713-730
Author(s):  
Anastasiya Astapova

Tackling the role of state symbols in negotiating national identity and political development, this research focuses on Belarus where the alternative white-red-white flag became instrumental in protests against the dominant political discourse. Since 1995, oppositional mass media have been reporting about cases of this tricolor being erected in hard-to-reach and/or politically sensitive places. These actions were mainly attributed to some “Miron,” whose identity remained concealed and served as a simulacrum of a national superhero in non-conformist discourse. The image of Miron immediately acquired multiple functions: condemning the Soviet colonial past, struggling for the European future, and creating a nation-state rather than the Russian-speaking civil-state of Belarus. Yet, first and foremost, Miron became a means for contesting the authority of the president who has been in power since 1994. Concentrating on the methods employed for the construction of the counter-hegemonic fakelore project of Miron and its aims, this article explores the vernacular response to its creation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (Esp.) ◽  
pp. 11-28
Author(s):  
Eliane Mauerberg de Castro ◽  
Gabriella Andreetta Figueiredo ◽  
Debra Frances Campbell

Our purpose in this article was threefold. First, we attempted to analyze evidences of inclusion in the Brazilian school, and we argued that inclusion still is a long road ahead, particularly, in the field of physical education. In relation to inclusion, we used data provided by the Brazilian government itself to demonstrate several issues of concern, including some with educational governing bodies. Second, we examined how the Brazilian physical education national curriculum parameters have been tailored in their pedagogical recommendations to accommodate the “movement culture” approach. Although physical educators endorsed the new curricular directives, their practice in school with inclusion revealed troublesome situations. Overall, they admitted that they did not feel prepared to work with students with disability in their classes, and they feel that they need continuing education, as well as actual administrative/government investments. Third, we introduced concepts from dynamic systems theory to our adapted physical education practice while working with people with disabilities in inclusive settings. We illustrated the theory in its application to the physical education practices by reporting a lifetime of work in outreach programs in the field of adapted physical activity (APA), at São Paulo State University at Rio Claro. The complexities in the practice of inclusive school physical education require a holistic approach, which we feel can be accomplished through the employment of dynamic systems concepts. Whether epistemological directions include the movement culture approach or dynamic systems theory, or a hybrid, these efforts must be sustained by committed teachers, the school system, government leaders, families, and the entire community.


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