Abstracts History

Σχολικά εγχειρίδια βυζαντινής ιστορίας στην ελληνική δευτεροβάθμια εκπαίδευση (από το 1864 έως και τον 20ο αιώνα): συγκριτική μελέτη της ιδεολογίας τους στο πλαίσιο των κοινωνικοπολιτικών μεταβολών

by Ioanna Sofianopoulou

Every educational system reflects a certain social structure and expresses the national character and the intellectual tradition of the people who have established it. The same applies to the Greek educational system and especially to the subject of History. For this reason, the purpose of this dissertation is to study the content of the school textbooks related to Byzantine history in Greek secondary education of the 19th and 20th centuries, in the light of the political and social conditions framing in each period.The characteristics of the two studied centuries are presented in the Introduction of the dissertation, which consists of two sections with two subsections each. The first lists the most important historical events that took place from 1864 to 1900. Subsequently, the second subsection describes the way in which secondary education was organised during those years and the way in which the subject of History was taught. Undoubtedly, those were the years of formation and organisation of the Greek educational system. 1864 was thus chosen as the starting year of our research, as it was the year when the systematic development of the Greek educational system, reflected also in the relevant legislation of that time. During the period under study, a strong tendency to imitate books written by Western European historians was observed. Therefore, the adolescent students of the 19th century were taught and acquainted with Byzantine history as captured and estimated by historians from other countries, especially from Germany. The same tendency continues at the beginning of the 20th century, when the first school textbooks written by Greek historians, and not only, are compilations of foreign work. When textbooks no longer depend on the historical books of Western Europeans, then the Greek reality is reflected in them. This reality is mentioned in the second section of the Introduction. As for the narration of the most important watersheds in the history of the Byzantine Empire, we opted in favour of Iconoclasm, the Crusades, the foundation of the Latin and Greek states after 1204 and the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. Τhere are certainly many other equally important events, but those were chosen due to the fact that they were turning points in the process of understanding the perspective of the authors when dealing with Byzantine history. First of all, the concept of Iconoclasm, as a political-religious controversy that affected the whole empire for a period of more than a century, is an issue that could not be absent from the present dissertation. This event is of particular interest for another reason, as the textbooks of the 19th and early 20th century which were based first on the narrations of foreign historians and later on those of C. Paparrigopoulos, describe Iconoclasm as an attempt to reform the Byzantine state, which - according to the authors-unfortunately, failed. The impression in the textbooks of the 20th century was gradually reversed, as for the same event historians follow the same view as today…