University of Manchester - Citizenship primers

School textbooks are used to mould loyal citizens, according to a new study. Matthias vom Hau, a researcher at the Brooks World Poverty Institute at the University of Manchester, studied hundreds of books to reveal another side of the fixtures of schools worldwide. Concentrating on three Latin American countries but also surveying the UK, Germany and the US, he looked at books used to teach national history, citizenship and English literature. "Schools of course educate us and make us literate. But what you learn about national identity and history is highly regulated by government and expert panels, and thus they are an outcome of a complex political process," he said.