Malvinas.The historical construction of a national cause in the school space (1870-1945)

Abstract

In this paper we seek to analyze the emergence of the Malvinas ‘cause’ as part of the slow construction of a nationalist sentiment, based on the hypothesis that school history played an important role in this conformation. For this we approach the treatment that textbooks for primary and secondary schools made on the Malvinas theme between 1870 and 1945. We situate the genesis of this national feeling in the school environment in the context of the configuration of the disciplinary code of School History (Cuesta Fernández 1997) marked by a ‘patriotic education’ that began to develop progressively since the end of the 19th century. From this nationalist program the claim of the Argentine rights on the islands was developed first in textbooks of History used in the secondary schools (from the decade of 1880) and very later in textbooks elaborated for the primary schools, from the 1950s. We will try to explain in this work the reasons for the absence of treatment of the Malvinas ‘cause’ at the primary level throughout the first half of the 20th century.