Engaging with national literacies in education

Abstract

Although traditional philosophy of science is mostly individualistic, in this introductory chapter Stephanie Fox and Lukas Boser argue that science in its core is a social endeavor. To prove their claim, they refer to their own book in which eminent educational scientists and up-and-coming young researchers discuss the concept of ‘national literacies’. This concept was proposed by Viennese professor of education Daniel Tröhler in 2018. It derives from Tröhler’s methodological suggestion to analyze ideological languages in order to get empirically sound knowledge about how educational systems all over the world were supposed to make future citizens for modern nation-states. National literacies are not to be mistaken for the literacy rates in a nation-state, but they are the individual’s ability to make sense of symbols, acts, and signs related to a particular nation and thus to live a meaningful life in this nation.

In their introduction, Fox and Boser show that analyzing the nexus of nations, nationalism, and education is highly relevant as it is important in order to understand the functioning and the global aspirations of modern Western educational culture, as well as it is important to analyze national thought styles, which affect all science even though most scientists are not aware of it.