Chapter 2: De-Nationalize History and what Have we Done?: Ontology, Essentialism, and the Search for a Cosmopolitan Alternative

Ours is not the first generation of teachers and scholars to seek to transcend nationalist ontology and essentialism in historical textbooks and primary and secondary school education. In 1898, as Americans celebrated the United States’ triumphant entry onto the global stage in the so-called “Spanish-American War,” Jane Addams, the Chicago-based educator and social critic, cast about for an ideal of solidarity “strong enough to move masses of men out of their narrow national considerations and cautions into new reaches of human effort and affection.” (1907, p. 236). Contact with young immigrant children in neighborhoods around Chicago made Addams impatient with the “abstract” and “institutionalized” patriotism taught in US public schools—so “remote from actual living.” Among children, patriotic indoctrination spawned juvenile contests of one-upmanship; among grownups, it promoted jingoism and inevitably led to war. Addams acknowledged that patriotism provided individuals a necessary “outlet for their beliefs,” as well as a “sense of being in the sweep of the world’s activities.” But surely there were ways of meeting those needs more consistent with democracy and more in tune with the globalizing times (quoted in Hansen, 2003, pp. 154–5).