Knowledge or Ideology?
Teaching immigration in social science textbooks

The delimitation of the concepts of knowledge and ideology has often been debated in philosophy and the social sciences, at least since Marx-Engels and then with Mannheim and others. In this paper, we reformulate this distinction within a new theory of ideology, defined as the basis of the shared social representations of social groups, and a new approach to knowledge, defined as the shared, justified beliefs of sociocultural communities. Thus, shared knowledge is taken for granted in a community and hence presupposed in public discourse, whereas ideologically based beliefs are not taken for granted outside the ideological group, but asserted and defended, and usually associated with norms and values shared by the group. This general, theoretical discussion will be illustrated with an analysis of how social science textbooks in secondary education in Spain teach about a typical controversial topic such as immigration -- with the question whether and how they teach knowledge or ideology in this case. This example itself also illustrates the well-known debate in education about the ideological nature of textbooks and teaching in general - e.g. about hidden curricula.