A New Understanding of Modern Greek History of Education in Light of the Postmodern Theoretical Accounts about Nationhood and Identity

The aim of this paper is to present and explain the long and bitter contestation between two poles over the orientation, the aims and the content of education as well as the form of the Greek language to be used in the school textbooks. During the last seventy years (1750-1821) of the Ottoman rule of Greece the poles were cultural but were transformed into mostly social and political after independence (1829). The paper argues that the main reasons of this contestation were their completely opposite views about the historically right cultural future of the reborn nation and the daily widening after independence cultural schism between a highly educated elite and the vast majority of poor and uneducated people as a result of unequal and change-resisting educational provisions. The paper elaborates on the composition, the propositional content, the discursive strategies and the linguistic devices of the two poles.