When the English Began to Hate: The Manufacture of German Demonisation in British School History Textbooks 1900-1930 (Report‪)‬

Introduction There are a significant number of studies that argue that since the rise of mass education school textbooks have become essential instructional tools for curriculum delivery and that the school textbook holds a unique and significant social function: to represent to each generation of students an officially sanctioned, authorised version of human knowledge and culture' (original emphasis). (1) Constructed by real people with real interests school textbooks are products of ideological and political conflicts and compromises. (2) As instruments of socialisation and sites of ideological discourse history textbooks are designed to introduce young people to a particular, and historically located, cultural and socio-economic order with its relations of power and domination, textbooks represent the focal element in the process of cultural transmission'. (3)