In the past decade, right-wing populist parties have brought back nationalism and religion into European politics. While a growing literature explores the political strategies, style and success of these parties and the challenge they pose to the European project, less attention has been paid to how right-wing populist governing is done at…

Early childhood/educational environmental imaginations transmit national, global and planetary views of the world through texts, visual representations and material objects. These representations produce politics, including nationalism and globalism, and play a part in policy making as well as in how children learn to view and relate to the world.…

This paper focuses on the relationship between agency and knowledge within the context of rising nationalism and populism. The case is the Czech debate over the reintroduction of civil defence education (CDE). It was abandoned in 1989 but recently, many new and contradictory calls for its return have appeared. We aim to gain an understanding of…

Kindergartens are institutional arenas for raising the nation through educating children in an every-day setting. With the implementation of the Framework Plan of 2017 (FP), the notion of "Sàmi culture" became part of the mandatory curriculum in all Norwegian kindergartens for the first time. All kindergartens are now expected to ensure…

This paper was inspired by empirical encounters with students and teacher-administrators who engaged with an online European education initiative, which raised questions about whether and how their practices were situated as local, transnational, or national(ist) endeavors. The conceptual, theoretical, and methodological resources of social…

In this article, we provide a comparative analysis of public education in Germany and the US, focusing on historical and contemporary challenges to education, "Bildung," and citizenry in the modern nation state. In particular, we examine relations among nation building processes and education, transnational discourses, mutual influences,…

This article analyses discussions in the Russian media of the proposal to introduce the Unified State Exam (USE) in English as a mandatory test in the last year of (high) school education 2010s. The decision not to implement the mandatory USE in English was taken in August 2020. In the aftermath of the decision, we investigate the decade-long…

This article introduces the topic of the special issue, 'Public education at the crossroads', by pointing to some of the debates and controversies surrounding the topic of public education and by framing the theme, while explaining the context and some components of the educational systems of the countries under examination -- namely the USA and…

Despite growing European and global interconnectedness, questions of national identity have only gained in importance in recent years. Yet the role researchers play in perpetuating norms of national belonging has gone largely unexamined. Who is included in unmarked national group labels such as German, Dutch, or Danish, who is understood as Other,…

This article examines how the value of higher education (HE) is currently being (re)framed in two European countries: England and Portugal. HE has been central to a global discourse on the future of knowledge economy, whilst also being subject to the policy framework of New Public Management. Being so, the changing value of HE is related to the…

Public education systems in Europe were created in the course of the foundation of the 'classical' nation state in the 18th and 19th centuries. Historical analyses show that it was part of their destiny to contribute to the consolidation of the respective states' national self-design. In the 19th century, the myth developed that a nation state is…

Although it is generally acknowledged that the building of mass schooling systems must be considered in close relation to the emerging nation-states of the long 19th century, few published studies discuss the interrelation between the actual foundation of the (nation-) states and the introduction of the modern school. This article examines the…

Education systems are crucial social and cultural apparatuses. They are designed to homogenize at least to a large extent the discourses and praxis of the citizens of a nation by channelling them as much as possible through a unified educational system. However, in ethnically and culturally diversified societies, these homogenizing social…

This article problematizes the construction of youth as a "driving force" in the contemporary configuration of the European Union (EU) as an educational and political space. The study draws empirical nourishment out of documents that are central to the ongoing formation of the Union, be it White Papers, scripts or memos concerning…

This article discusses some perspectives on citizenship education in Turkey and Britain in the context of current contested discourses on the nature of European identity and of the European Union (EU). It is based on data collected during an EU-funded student teacher exchange programme between three universities in Turkey and Leicester University…