Why Social Studies Textbooks Look So Different Across Europe: A Teacher’s Look at How We Teach History
The kitchen table was covered in open textbooks, and my daughter, who was fourteen at the time, was staring at three different versions of the same war. One was from Germany, one from France, and one from the UK. They all had a chapter on the First World War, but the photos, the captions, the questions at the end—they didn’t match.
“Why is this one so short?” she asked, pointing at the German book. The British one had four pages of trench diagrams and a timeline. The German one had one photo of a cemetery and a poem. “Does Germany not teach about this?”
That’s the moment I had to explain that teaching the war in Germany is a very different task than teaching it in Britain. And that’s also the moment I realized my master’s thesis in pedagogy—comparing social studies textbooks for 11-to-16-year-olds across Europe—was going to be a lot messier than I thought.
I’m a teacher, but I’ve also just spent a year reading European textbooks like other people read novels. I requested sample copies from publishers in the Netherlands, Sweden, Spain, Poland, and France. I stacked them on my desk, next to the coffee mug I kept forgetting to wash. My students would occasionally flip through them during break, and their reactions were usually the same: “This is so boring,” or “Why is everything in boxes?”
But the more I read, the more I realized that the format tells you as much as the content. A Spanish social studies textbook for 13-year-olds is thick, glossy, and packed with colorful diagrams. A Swedish one is thinner, with lots of white space and open-ended questions like “What do you think about this?” A French textbook has long extracts from primary sources. A German one often starts with a problem or a controversy, not a straightforward narrative.
None of these are wrong. But they teach different things. The Swedish book is training students to form opinions. The French book is training them to read evidence. The German book is training them to question the story itself. And the British book—at least the one my daughter was looking at—is often trying to tell a compelling national story, with heroes and turning points and a clear sense of progress.
I remember teaching a lesson last year on migration. The school had a mixed set of old textbooks, and I gave one group a chapter from a German book and another group a chapter from a Dutch book on the same topic. The German chapter had a lot of data: graphs, population statistics, policy timelines. The Dutch chapter had personal stories from refugees, along with maps of their journeys. The students in the German group quickly got bogged down in the numbers. They could read the graph, but they kept asking, “What are we supposed to actually see here?” The Dutch group was the opposite. They remembered the names of the people in the stories, but they struggled to connect them to broader causes. One girl said, “Okay, but why did they leave? It just says ‘war’ in the caption.”
That lesson changed how I think about textbooks. It’s not just about what’s included or excluded. It’s about what a textbook implicitly asks a student to do. A data-heavy book asks you to analyze. A story-heavy book asks you to empathize. A source-heavy book asks you to interpret. A question-heavy book asks you to take a stance. None of those are bad, but for a 12-year-old, being asked to do all four in one semester is a lot. And that’s where schools—and parents—can help.
Here’s something I’ve started doing at home, and also in my classroom: comparing one event across two textbooks. You don’t need to buy anything. Just look at one chapter from the child’s own textbook and find a different version online or from the library. Ask: “Who is in this story? Who is left out? What questions does the book ask you to answer?” For 11-to-14-year-olds, that last question is often the most revealing. If the textbook asks “List three causes of the war,” it’s treating the war as a problem to be solved. If it asks “Could the war have been avoided?” it’s treating history as a debate. Neither is better, but together they teach a bigger point: history is a construction, not a fixed thing.
I also realized that the age group matters a lot. In the first years of secondary school, students are just learning to separate facts from opinions. Textbooks that mix them can confuse. I found a French textbook for 12-year-olds that presented a newspaper article from the 1930s as part of a chapter on propaganda. The kids didn’t understand why they were being asked to analyze an advertisement as if it were a historical document. They needed me to say, “This is an artifact. It’s made by real people, and it’s trying to make you feel something.” Then they got it.
That’s the practical insight that my thesis keeps circling back to: textbooks are artifacts, not mirrors. They reflect a country’s preferred memory of itself at a certain time. The German textbook with the poem about the cemetery is not trying to hide anything. It’s trying to teach a different lesson—that war is not something to romanticize. The British textbook with the trench diagrams is not trying to glorify war either, but its focus on equipment and strategy makes the war feel like an engineering problem. Both are true, but they’re different truths.
As a parent, you can use that. When your child says, “The textbook is boring,” ask, “What would make it less boring?” When they say, “This is what happened,” ask, “According to whom?” It sounds simple, but it’s actually a very powerful habit. It teaches them to read the textbook as an argument, not as a list of facts. That’s a skill they can use in every subject, from science to math word problems.
I’m still working on the thesis, and my kitchen table is still cluttered with sample copies. I haven’t reached a neat conclusion about which textbook is best. I’m not sure there is one. But I’ve noticed that the most engaging textbooks—the ones that actually get kids talking—are not necessarily the most modern or well-designed. They’re the ones that leave room for disagreement. A chapter that ends with a question like “What would you have done?” works better than one that ends with a summary box. And a textbook that occasionally confuses students, in a way that forces them to ask for help, is not a failure. It’s an opportunity.
My daughter still thinks the German book was too sad and the French book had too many words. But later that week, she went back to the pile and opened the German one again. She read the poem out loud, slowly, and then said, “I don’t know why they chose this one. But I can tell they chose it on purpose.” That’s a good enough start for me.
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