Why European Social Studies Textbooks Look So Different: A Teacher’s Master’s Thesis Journey
The spring I started researching European social studies textbooks for my master’s thesis, I made the mistake of leaving a stack of them on the corner of my desk in the staff room. Within an hour, a colleague from the geography department picked one up, flipped to a random page, and laughed out loud. “Why is the Spanish book spending three pages on the Reconquista and barely two on the entire twentieth century?” she asked. I didn’t have a quick answer. So I just shrugged and said, “That’s exactly what I’m trying to figure out.”
It’s a strange thing to sit at your kitchen table on a Tuesday night surrounded by sixteen textbooks from nine different countries. The coffee cup rings on the cover of a German history book. Sticky notes fluttering out of a French geography section. My fourteen-year-old son came in, looked over my shoulder, and pointed to a photo of a war memorial in one book and a photo of a multicultural protest in another. “Why are they so different?” he asked. That’s the question, really.
I’m a social studies teacher in a fairly ordinary lower secondary school. I’ve taught 11- and 12-year-olds for the past eight years. The idea for the thesis came from a classroom moment that I still think about. We were doing a unit on the end of the Second World War. I gave the students two short primary sources—one American, one German—describing the same event. The class split into two camps. Some said the American version was more “true.” Others said the German account had more “facts.” The kids genuinely didn’t know that a textbook could tell a story differently. They assumed that if a page looked official, it was neutral. That unsettled me.
So I started digging into how European countries actually write their own social studies textbooks. Not as an expert—just as a teacher who wanted to understand the pattern. Once I got past the obvious differences like language and page counts, the real picture began to emerge. Textbooks in Europe don’t just cover the same history differently. They sometimes cover entirely different histories.
For example, the Polish textbook I have spends a huge amount of time on the partitions and the 1795 loss of sovereignty. The French textbook of the same period focuses on Napoleon and the reshaping of Europe. The German book barely mentions Napoleon as a person; instead it uses him as a case study for how national memory can change. My students found this hilarious. “How can the same guy be a hero in one book and a side note in another?” one of them asked. They started calling him “Lego Napoleon” because they said each country built him from different blocks.
But it isn’t just historical figures. The deeper pattern is about which events get emphasized and which ones get quietly underplayed. Colonialism is the one that shows up everywhere in different ways. The French book discusses slavery and the 2001 Taubira Law as part of a big unit on memory and recognition. The Spanish book mentions the Americas mostly through extraction and trade. The Belgian book is honest about the Congo but only in a short section that feels almost like an apology note. The UK book I found was more focused on the British Empire’s trade routes than on the people affected. No one is totally lying. Everyone is just telling a version that fits a national story.
That sounds heavy, but the real classroom reality is much lighter. Once I started bringing these books into my lessons, the students treated them like treasure hunts. They loved flipping to the same event—the fall of the Berlin Wall, for instance—and comparing how many pages each country gave it. The German book had an entire chapter. The Spanish book gave it half a page. One Italian textbook devoted the whole opening to an eyewitness letter from a West Berlin teenager. The kids weren’t angry or confused. They were curious. One boy said, “I think the Italian book really wants us to feel something.” That was the most perceptive thing I’d heard in months.
This is where the practical insight comes in, for parents and teachers who don’t have a thesis deadline staring at them. You don’t need a stack of international textbooks to help your child understand that history is always told from somewhere. Start with your own child’s textbook. Pick one big historical event they are studying—something with a little controversy, like the causes of World War One, or the treatment of migrants in the twentieth century. Then ask two simple questions. First: “Who do you think wrote this book, and who approved it?” Second: “If you were writing this page, what would you add or delete?” You don’t need to talk about bias in an abstract way. Just compare the textbook to a different source you already have at home—a documentary, a family story, a news article you saved. The point isn’t to prove the textbook wrong. The point is to make the child realise that a textbook is a crafted object, not a window.
I also started doing something small in my own classroom. Instead of saying “your textbook says,” I started saying “the authors of your textbook chose to say.” It sounds awkward at first, but it changes everything. The students started asking better questions. They wanted to know who the “authors” were. They asked why our school chose this particular book. They even asked why the chapter on the Middle Ages ended right before the plague. I didn’t know. So we looked it up together. We found out that the national school council had set the curriculum, and the publisher had to compress a huge period into a single chapter. That was a lesson on budget, layout, and curriculum design—not just history. Those are the real forces that shape textbooks.
What surprised me most during the research was how little this kind of comparison happens in everyday school life. Most students only see one textbook, and they assume it’s the same everywhere. But across Europe, the differences are huge. The way a country remembers its past is tied to its present politics. A French teacher once told me that after the 2015 Paris attacks, the official guidance for social studies teachers encouraged more lessons on communication and common values. A German colleague said their state had recently revised its history curriculum to include more family migration stories after a wave of refugees arrived. Textbooks are not just history. They are current events that haven’t finished being written.
I still haven’t finished my thesis. The first draft was too broad, so I narrowed it to a comparison of how five countries handle the period between 1945 and 1989. It’s a mess, but a useful mess. What I’ve learned hasn’t changed how I teach so much as loosened the way I talk about it. I no longer say “The textbook says.” I say “This book’s editors made a decision to include this and leave out that. What do you think they were weighing?”
The other day, my son came back from school with a history test. He got one question wrong. The question asked who the first president of the French Fifth Republic was. He answered Charles de Gaulle, which was correct. His teacher marked it wrong because their textbook said “Charles de Gaulle, under the 1958 constitution,” and the test wanted the name “De Gaulle” only. He was annoyed. I looked at his book. Sure enough, there was a small box on the side explaining that some historians prefer the full name. But the main text had the simpler version. It wasn’t a conspiracy. It was just an editor’s choice.
I think that’s where I’ll leave my thesis for now. Not with a big conclusion about how European textbooks should be harmonised or scrapped. They shouldn’t be. Their differences are valuable. The real lesson is smaller and messier. A textbook is a conversation partner, not an answer machine. And once you see it that way, you can start asking better questions. My students have taught me that. My son has, too. The books are still on my kitchen table, with coffee rings and sticky notes. I’ll probably rearrange them tomorrow. But I won’t get rid of them. There’s still a lot to read between those pages.
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