WORLD WAR II EVENTS AS REPRESENTED IN SECONDARY SCHOOL TEXTBOOKS OF FORMER ALLIED AND AXIS NATIONS.

Abstract

This research has two objectives. The first objective is to analyze how former combatants of World War II now present the 'facts' of that struggle to their current student population. To accomplish this, eight secondary school history textbooks were selected with the assistance of the International Textbook Institute in Braunschweig, Federal Republic of Germany. The chosen texts are from The United States, England, Italy, West Germany, The Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, and East Germany. The six non-English textbooks were literally translated into English. The second objective is to create comparative education research methodologies that are compatable with the incipient power of microcomputers. The 92,707 words in the bodies of the textbooks are submitted to six analytic techniques to assess the nature of the information within them. The first three techniques are 'time-centered', and the last three are 'event-oriented'. All of the six techniques are structured as ad interim algorithms that are imposed onto a generic 'electronic calculating sheet' software program for microcomputers. All appendices included in this study are data outputs from the computer program. This research suggests certain conclusions. First, that the specific affiliation of selected countries during World War II is not significant in the presentation of the 'facts' in their textbooks; whereas, the present affiliation (Nato/Warsaw Pact) is significant. Second, the communist texts are, relative to the Western texts, quite political; however, the Western texts are generally academically less rigorous. Third, all of the selected texts tend to be ethnocentric by selecting and avoiding 'facts', and ignoring some of their negative behaviors in the struggle.