History Education and Civic Education: The Bulgarian Case

Abstract

This text looks at the developments in the relationship between history education and civic education in the Bulgarian educational tradition in the 1878-1944 period and tends to finally refer to the present state of affairs. It examines the political contexts of the methods and writing of textbooks which have ensured the political longevity of the conservative nationalist model in the worldview of both school subjects. The observations are based upon more than eighty textbooks on history and civic education published since 1878 (of which only those that are typical and representative of the dominant trends in the Bulgarian educational tradition are cited here) as well as upon some works in didactics. The main features in the texture of the conservative model are identified on the basis of a discourse analysis of history and civic education textbooks, and they concern the disciplinary, spatio-temporal, and conceptual homologies found in them.