Consistency of National Ideology and History Education in Kazakhstan: From a Post-Colonial Perspective

Abstract

Despite the fact that various social science scholars have conducted research on Kazakhstan’s nation-building, nationalism, and the construction of its national ideology, there still remains a considerable room for further research pertaining to the actual results of constructed ideology, and its impact on the nature of history education in Kazakhstan. In that regard, the purpose of this thesis is to find out what exactly was constructed by the Kazakh nation-builders since the country’s independence. The paper examines the outcomes of the ideological construction through the analysis of the development of history education in Kazakhstan. The direction of nation-building is revealed through the analysis of national ideology documents, while the coherence of ideological goals is scrutinized through the study of Kazakh history textbooks. The research involves a content analysis of both, national ideology documents and history textbooks, as well as the interviews conducted with history teachers. The research also applies the post-colonial theoretical framework for the analysis of discourses in national ideology and history education. The study result shows that official ideology of Kazakhstan differs from actual realized ideology. Officially Kazakhstan promotes inclusive “kazakhstani” nation however, actually translating ethnic both “kazakhified” and civic “kazakhstani”. The construction of parallel nations continues in history education. The analysis of the history textbooks and interviews with the history teachers clearly demonstrates the differences to the colonial past in Kazakh and Russian teaching classes. Kazakh classes pay attention to the development of national consciousness and Russian classes prioritize economic advantages of Kazakhstan colonial past. The translations of the actual and official national ideologies to history education create discrepancy. Therefore, the national ideology of Kazakhstan and history education correlates in some parts and disconnect elsewhere.