School education and the construction of national identity during the Albanian Renaissance

Abstract

This article aims to analyses how the school and the first text in Albanian language have an impact on the construction of national identity during the Albanian Renaissance. Setting up a new collective representation was continually affected by exchanges and communication between different social agencies, such as family and school, which often were called by Albanians activists and patriots to support the education of the masses. For this reason is important to analyze the teaching of behavioral attitudes and moral values useful for patriotic education in Albanian school. Also, the texts proposed by Naim Frashëri, Jani Vreto or Ndre Mjeda aimed to demonstrate that the education of young`s character wasn`t influenced only from historical or geographic disciplines, but also literary ones. The authors argued that the duty of the children were to learn, loving parents, friends, their country and the world. God had given man the thought, the decency and goodness, so he has the power to think right and to make useful works. For this reason it was necessary to start from the heart of the child to go to the heart of the nation and from the family – which was the homeland of the heart – to the nation. In this way we could understand that giving responsibility to the young Albanians in their identity projects wasn`t a simple process. In fact, the writing of the language and not the teaching of the same was considered by Vreto a fundamental element, or even emerging, for the survival of cultural memories and construction of a new idea of the nation. The country was considered as a big home and all citizens like brothers, meaning “brothers” who speak the same language and gain of the same natural resources. Anyhow, associate the concept of their own home with one of his country offered a new approach to issues of identity, that of place attachment as an essential element for the construction of national consciousness.