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Discourse Analysis of Croatian History Textbooks: Representation of National Minorities in Croatian Educational System

History textbooks reflect the official historiography of countries, edited in accordance with the laws and instructions of the national education curriculum and the national education program. Textbooks can have an impact on the formation of stereotypes about certain aspects and people at the national, class, gender and ethnic level, under the auspices of the historical rationale. In this paper, we analyzed discourse in history textbooks (for eight grade of Croatian primary schools) on minorities that now form a part of the Croatian demographics and who are faced with certain structural problems along with stereotypes and prejudices at the micro level. The analysis showed that the monolithic presentation of people in various time periods mentioned in the textbooks reflects on the representation of minorities as passive victims or as people who support the ‘aggressors’ of that historical period (Italians and Serbs). With stereotyping minorities and simplification of the historical processes, these textbooks can have significant influence on the attitudes and emotions towards various people and ethnicities in Croatia and become a harmful element in Croatian and European multicultural policies today.

Croatia, history textbooks, discourse analysis, minorities, multiculturalism

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