Abstract:

The state employs ideology and education in order to strengthen legitimacy over individuals of the nation. Ideology incorporates a substantial function in terms of the state’s establishment of system, protection of the status quo, and acceptance of state-driven values, political symbols, behavioral rules, and principles by the society. Educational institutions hold a critical function in order for the state’s dissemination of its ideological principles across all layers of society. Those principles, which are predetermined by the political authority in all phases of education, are allocated into collective memory of the society. In this realm, schools are also considered as centers of human programming in addition to being institutions of knowledge transmission. School textbooks transmit the state’s existent ideology into the individuals of the nation since early ages, and transform them into individuals who are congruent with the homeland. Textbooks, which emerge in line with the state control and observation, can be subject to direct intervention in the case of their inclusion of any information that would shake the state’s legitimacy or security of the existing political structure. Such an approach leads to think that education is not independent from politics. In this article, the relationship between political power and education were exemplified with the analysis of forbidden history textbooks in Greece. The ideological effects of dominant ruling class over the Greek education system was evaluated with a consideration of political and societal conditions of the period. This article aims at explaining how religious and nationalist codes are employed in the Greek historiography. İn this article examined, in Greece between 1918 and 2007, how the Greek state interfered school textbooks, which were conflicting with the state’s official ideology. It was also examined why three history textbooks were stopped being used with the changing political power in Greece with a consideration of the period’s political conjecture.

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