Chapter 9: Conclusion

We began by arguing that teachers and teacher collectives played an important role in developing the nation-state in both the Nordic and East Asian regions. Despite the disparate timelines in nation formation, we showed that teachers were essential to developing national identity in all nations. We further argued that the initial interactions between teacher collectives and the state had powerful ramifications for the development of the profession. We showed that the role of the teacher was informed by contrasting cultural logics, some of which originated in the “teacher as sage” (East Asia) and “teacher as pastor” (Nordic) traditions. But, taking a long view of history, we could see that rather than simply sharing core, static cultural logics, nations within regions varied in how these cultural logics were adapted and revised as the nation-state and the national teaching force developed. These changes have significant ramifications for how we think about the very notion of regionality itself, and as we will take up in Volume II, how nations serve as sites of cultural production and institutional change within the global cultural dynamic.