tantaman

How Power Uses Mass Education and Literature

Published 2025-12-19

Introduction: The Myth of Neutral Schooling

We tend to think of education as a natural good—a neutral process by which knowledge passes from one generation to the next. Children learn to read; they absorb facts about the world; they develop skills. What could be more innocent?

But this picture obscures something fundamental. Education is never merely transmission. It is always selection: someone decides what counts as knowledge, what texts are worthy of study, what stories define a people, what virtues children should absorb. And that selection—that curation of a canon—is one of the most powerful tools available to any ruling class.

The historical record is unambiguous. Across civilizations and centuries, elites have understood that controlling education means controlling the imagination of populations. Not through crude propaganda alone, but through something subtler and more durable: shaping what people encounter as “normal,” “excellent,” “authoritative,” and “true” during the years when minds are most malleable.

This essay traces eleven historical episodes where elites have constructed canons and distributed them through institutional machinery. The mechanism is remarkably consistent. When it works, you see the same stack:

What varies is not the mechanism but the content—and the degree of success.

I. Imperial China: The Confucian Classics as a State-Making Machine

For over a thousand years, the Chinese imperial examination system accomplished something no other civilization matched: it fused a philosophical canon with bureaucratic selection so completely that the texts became the state, and the state became the texts.

The core canon was the Five Classics and Four Books of Confucianism—works attributed to or associated with Confucius and his disciples. But what made this system revolutionary was not the content of the texts themselves. It was the institutional machinery that surrounded them.

Beginning in earnest during the Sui and Tang dynasties (6th–10th centuries) and reaching full development under the Song, the civil service examination became the primary pathway to political power and social prestige. As one historian summarized: the examination system was “squarely based upon the Confucian classics” and effectively set curriculum across China, even at the village level.

Consider what this meant in practice. A boy in a remote village in Sichuan and a boy in a wealthy family in Hangzhou studied the same texts, memorized the same passages, learned to compose essays in the same “eight-legged” format. Their teachers evaluated them against the same standards. Their futures depended on the same examinations.

The Analects of Confucius opens with words that would echo through a thousand years of classrooms:

“Is it not a pleasure, having learned something, to try it out at due intervals? Is it not a joy to have friends come from afar? Is it not gentlemanly not to take offense when others fail to appreciate your abilities?”

These are not merely philosophical sentiments. They are the opening notes of a worldview that would be drilled into tens of millions of minds: learning as pleasure, friendship as moral bond, equanimity under non-recognition. The ideal scholar-official is being formed in these very sentences.

The Great Learning, another core text, laid out the famous “eight steps” of moral cultivation:

“The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the kingdom, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts.”

Here is a complete theory of political legitimacy embedded in a study manual. Good governance flows from personal virtue. The state is a family writ large. The cultivation of the individual is inseparable from the ordering of society.

The examination essays required candidates to demonstrate not merely knowledge of these texts, but internalization of their logic. You could not fake your way through. The format demanded that candidates think inside the Confucian worldview, to reason from its premises, to find in its categories the tools for addressing any question.

The effects were profound. An empire-wide “literate official” identity emerged—men who had proven themselves in the same crucible, who shared the same moral vocabulary, who could quote the same passages to each other. This created remarkable continuity across dynasties. Emperors rose and fell; barbarian conquerors came and went; but the examination system reproduced the same type of governing elite generation after generation.

The system worked because it fused text, bureaucracy, and selection so tightly that you could not join the governing class without internalizing the canon. There was no shortcut, no alternative credential, no way around the texts. If you wanted power, prestige, or even just a comfortable life for your family, you submitted your mind to the Confucian curriculum.

II. England: One Prayer Book to Make One Religious People

In 1549 and again in 1559, the English state attempted something audacious: to unify a religiously fractured nation not through theological argument but through a single, mandatory liturgical text. The Book of Common Prayer would shape what English people could imagine worship to be—and in doing so, shape what they could imagine England to be.

The Act of Uniformity of 1559, which authorized the Elizabethan prayer book, made the stakes explicit. Every parish church in England was required to use the same text for all services. The language was specific: this was “the national form” of worship.

Thomas Cranmer, the principal architect of the first prayer book, understood exactly what he was doing. In his preface, he justified the standardization:

“There was never any thing by the wit of man so well devised, or so sure established, which in continuance of time hath not been corrupted... And moreover, the number and hardness of the Rules called the Pie, and the manifold changings of the Service, was the cause, that to turn the Book only was so hard and intricate a matter, that many times there was more business to find out what should be read, than to read it when it was found out.”

Cranmer presents uniformity as simplification—a reasonable reform against medieval complexity. But the simplification was also, necessarily, a choice: this form of words and no other; this order of service and no other; these prayers recited in every church, every Sunday, throughout the realm.

Consider the marriage service, words that would be spoken by virtually every English person who married in church:

“Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this congregation, to join together this Man and this Woman in holy Matrimony...”

These words entered the language. They became what marriage sounds like. They shaped the imagination of intimacy, commitment, and sacred union for generations of English speakers.

Or the burial service:

“We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”

Here is a theology of death and providence, compressed into phrases that would be recited at every funeral. The bereaved heard the same words at every grave. Death itself was standardized, given a single authorized meaning.

The system had high reach because attendance was compulsory. Everyone went to something—baptisms, marriages, funerals at minimum. The prayer book saturated English life.

But it did not produce perfect uniformity. Dissenters persisted. Puritans objected to what they saw as Catholic remnants. Catholics objected to the whole Protestant settlement. Enforcement varied by parish and by era. Civil wars would be fought, in part, over what kind of worship the nation would tolerate.

Still, the prayer book remains a textbook example of shaping citizens through a single shared text performed aloud. It worked not through study or examination but through repetition—the same phrases, week after week, year after year, from cradle to grave. English Christianity became, in large measure, what the Book of Common Prayer said it was.

III. British India: Macaulay’s Deliberate Creation of an English-Formed Elite

On February 2, 1835, Thomas Babington Macaulay submitted a memorandum to the Governor-General of India that would shape the subcontinent for generations. The “Minute on Indian Education” is one of the most explicit documents we have of an imperial power deliberately designing an educational system to transform a population’s culture.

Macaulay was refreshingly—or disturbingly—candid about his intentions:

“We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”

This is not education as neutral knowledge transfer. This is education as cultural engineering. Macaulay wanted to create a new kind of person—someone who would look Indian but think English.

His contempt for existing Indian learning was total:

“I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic.—But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works... And I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”

This is not an argument. It is an assertion of civilizational hierarchy, delivered with the confidence of a man who had read nothing in the original and felt no need to. The judgment was already made; education policy would follow from it.

Macaulay’s logic had a certain brutal clarity. The British could not educate the masses directly—there were too many of them, and literacy was too limited. But they could create an intermediary class:

“It is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern.”

The distribution mechanism followed: state-backed schools and colleges that taught in English, administrative pathways that rewarded English education, an entire apparatus of credentials and careers oriented around English-language competence.

The system worked. Within a generation, an English-educated Indian elite emerged—lawyers, civil servants, journalists, professionals. English acquired a prestige it has never lost on the subcontinent. The language of Shakespeare and Milton became the language of advancement, modernity, and power.

But the system also produced something Macaulay did not anticipate: critics. The same English education that created loyal administrators also created people who could read John Stuart Mill on liberty, who could invoke English constitutional traditions against English colonial practice, who could articulate Indian nationalism in the colonizer’s own language.

Jawaharlal Nehru, educated at Harrow and Cambridge, would lead the movement for independence. Mohandas Gandhi, trained as a barrister in London, would challenge the empire with arguments drawn from Western as well as Indian traditions. The “class of interpreters” became, in significant part, a class of revolutionaries.

This is the double edge of canon-formation. You can shape minds, but you cannot always predict what those shaped minds will do with their shaping.

IV. France: Textbooks as a Factory for “The Republic”

In the aftermath of catastrophic defeat—the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, the humiliation of German troops parading through Paris—the leaders of the new Third Republic faced a question: How do you rebuild a nation?

Their answer: through the schoolroom.

The Ferry Laws of the 1880s established free, compulsory, secular primary education throughout France. But compulsion was only the container. The content came from a generation of textbook writers who understood their task as nothing less than manufacturing French citizens.

Ernest Lavisse was the master craftsman. His school histories sold on the order of tens of millions of copies—an almost incomprehensible figure. For decades, virtually every French child learned French history from Lavisse or his imitators.

Lavisse was explicit about his purpose. History education was not about facts; it was about sentiment:

“If the student does not carry with him the living memory of our national glories, if he does not know that his ancestors fought on a thousand battlefields for noble causes, if he has not learned what cost of blood and effort the unity of our fatherland and the conquest of our freedoms from the old regime—if he does not become a citizen penetrated by his duties and a soldier who loves his flag, the teacher will have wasted his time.”

This is not a description of historical inquiry. It is a prescription for patriotic formation. The purpose of history class is to make students love France—to feel the “living memory” of national glories, to identify with ancestors, to prepare for sacrifice.

A parallel phenomenon appeared in Le Tour de la France par deux enfants, a reading primer by Augustine Fouillée (published under the pseudonym G. Bruno) that sold over six million copies. The book follows two orphan boys from Lorraine—the lost province—on a journey through France, learning about each region’s geography, industry, and virtues.

The opening sets the tone:

“Children, you will learn in this book about our fatherland, France. You will see how much you must love and respect it.”

The book is propaganda disguised as geography, civic education disguised as adventure story. The children encounter model citizens, learn useful trades, absorb lessons about duty and solidarity. By the end, they are not merely literate; they are French.

The system worked because France combined compulsory attendance with standardized materials and a centralized teacher corps. The same lessons were taught in the same way from Brittany to Provence. Regional languages were discouraged; French became the language of advancement and legitimacy. The “national novel”—France as a continuous story of progress toward republican liberty—became the shared inheritance of the educated.

When the next war came in 1914, France mobilized a nation of citizens who had been taught, from childhood, that sacrifice for the fatherland was the highest virtue. The textbooks had done their work.

V. Meiji Japan: A Single Moral Text, Ritually Installed in Every School

On October 30, 1890, the Meiji Emperor issued a document that would shape Japanese education—and Japanese souls—for over half a century. The Imperial Rescript on Education was less than 500 words. It would be memorized by tens of millions of children.

The Rescript distilled a complete moral worldview into compact, memorizable form:

“Know ye, Our Subjects: Our Imperial Ancestors have founded Our Empire on a basis broad and everlasting and have deeply and firmly implanted virtue... Ye, Our subjects, be filial to your parents, affectionate to your brothers and sisters; as husbands and wives be harmonious, as friends true; bear yourselves in modesty and moderation; extend your benevolence to all; pursue learning and cultivate arts, and thereby develop intellectual faculties and perfect moral powers...”

This reads like Confucian ethics—and it is. But notice the frame: “Our Imperial Ancestors,” “Our Empire,” “Our subjects.” The virtues are nested inside imperial authority. To be moral is to be loyal. To cultivate yourself is to serve the emperor.

The Rescript continued to its climax:

“...should emergency arise, offer yourselves courageously to the State; and thus guard and maintain the prosperity of Our Imperial Throne coeval with heaven and earth.”

Here, in a single sentence, is the fusion of ethics and politics that would lead to total war. Emergency may arise. When it does, offer yourselves—not your time or your taxes, but yourselves. The emperor requires it. Heaven and earth require it.

The distribution was extraordinary. Copies of the Rescript were sent to every school in Japan. They were not filed in drawers. They were displayed with the Emperor’s portrait in special shrines or chambers. They were treated with ceremonial reverence.

Students did not merely read the Rescript. They performed it. On national holidays and ceremonial occasions, the entire school would assemble. The principal would open the scroll with white gloves. The Rescript would be read aloud while students bowed. Then students would recite it from memory.

Historian Carol Gluck describes the effect: the Rescript became a “sacred text” whose authority derived not from argument but from ritual performance. It was not debated. It was not questioned. It was recited, bowed to, absorbed.

The shaping power was immense because it combined universality (every school, every student) with ritualization (not just reading, but ceremony). The Rescript entered minds through the body—through bowing, through collective recitation, through the solemn atmosphere of school assemblies.

When Japan mobilized for the wars of the 20th century, the men who fought had grown up bowing before the Rescript, memorizing its words, absorbing its equation of personal virtue with national sacrifice. The schoolhouse had prepared them for the battlefield.

VI. United States: McGuffey Readers as a Mass Moral-Literary Canon

While European nations centralized education through ministries and mandates, the United States achieved something remarkable through the market: a de facto national canon distributed through the purchasing decisions of thousands of local school boards.

William Holmes McGuffey was an Ohio professor and minister who compiled his first readers in the 1830s. By the time the series stopped being printed in 1960, it had sold an estimated 122 million copies. In the 19th century, as one scholar noted, “practically every American child” in public school used them.

The McGuffey Readers were not merely literacy instruction. They were moral formation packaged as reading practice. Each lesson combined vocabulary, pronunciation, and penmanship with character training. Children learned to read while learning what to value.

A typical McGuffey lesson might tell the story of a boy who found a wallet:

“A poor boy found a purse containing a hundred dollars. He took it to his mother, who said, ‘My son, you must find the owner, and give it back.’ The boy found the owner, who gave him a dollar as a reward. His mother said, ‘That dollar is worth more than a hundred dollars would be if you had kept the whole.’”

The message is explicit: honesty is more valuable than money. But notice how the mother is the moral authority, how the reward comes not from the money itself but from the rightness of the action. The reader absorbs a complete moral economy—virtue, authority, reward—while practicing reading.

Other lessons taught industry, sobriety, kindness to animals, respect for parents, piety without denominational specificity. The readers were Protestant in sensibility but broadly so—acceptable to Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and most others who dominated the American common school movement.

McGuffey’s preface made his intentions clear:

“The object of the Readers is to furnish the student with a series of lessons, so graded as to secure the gradual and easy acquisition of the art of reading; and at the same time, to improve and enlarge the mind, to cultivate the taste, and to elevate the morals.”

Reading, thinking, taste, and morals—all in one package. The hierarchy is telling: reading is the means; moral elevation is the end.

The effects were broad but soft. The McGuffey Readers shaped baseline literacy and moral vocabulary for huge swaths of the population, but the United States remained pluralistic and regionally variable. There was no state compulsion to use McGuffey; there were just network effects and market dominance. There was no central examination to test absorption; there was just the accumulated influence of millions of children reading the same stories, absorbing the same lessons, acquiring the same language.

The legacy persists in unexpected ways. The phrases “God helps those who help themselves” and “A stitch in time saves nine” entered American speech partly through their repetition in McGuffey lessons. The readers helped define what “good English” sounded like, what moral reasoning looked like, what an educated American could be expected to know.

VII. Stalin’s USSR: A Single Authorized Narrative

In 1938, the Soviet Communist Party published a book that would become, by mandate, the most widely read text in the Soviet Union: The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course.

The book offered a comprehensive—and comprehensively false—account of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. It established what one scholar called “a single authorized narrative” of Soviet history: the inevitable triumph of Bolshevism, the heroic role of Stalin, the perfidy of enemies and deviationists.

The opening pages established the tone:

“The history of the C.P.S.U.(B.) is the history of the overthrow of tsarism, of the overthrow of the power of the landlords and capitalists, the history of the rout of the armed intervention of the foreign imperialists during the civil war, the history of the building of the Soviet state and of Socialist society in our country.”

This is not history as inquiry. This is history as legitimation—a chronicle of triumphs that proves the rightness of the present regime.

Stalin personally edited the text, inserting himself into events where he had been marginal or absent, removing rivals who had been liquidated, reshaping the past to justify the present.

The distribution was compulsory. The Short Course was required reading across the Soviet Union—in schools, in party cells, in workers’ study circles. An academic archive notes that it was compulsory from 1938 to 1956 and that over forty million copies circulated.

This mandatory text sat atop an existing literacy and propaganda infrastructure. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet state had established “reading huts” (izby-chital’ni) in rural areas—small centers where peasants could access approved texts, attend readings, and participate in discussions guided by Party activists. The Short Course became the centerpiece of this network, discussed in guided sessions across the vast Soviet territory.

The effects were significant. A standardized political memory emerged—or at least a standardized public vocabulary. Everyone knew the official story, the official heroes, the official villains. Deviation from this narrative was dangerous. The interpretive possibilities narrowed to a single line.

But the system was brittle. It depended on coercion and on the stability of the center. When Stalin died in 1953 and Khrushchev denounced his crimes in 1956, the “truth” flipped rapidly. The Short Course was quietly withdrawn. A new authorized narrative replaced it. Those who had memorized the old version now had to forget it.

This is the paradox of coercive canon-formation: it can achieve high compliance and reach, but it creates a truth that exists only as long as the power that enforces it.

VIII. Maoist China: The “Little Red Book” as Portable Ritual Scripture

In 1964, Lin Biao, the Chinese Defense Minister, commissioned a pocket-sized book of quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong for use in political education within the People’s Liberation Army. Within two years, it had become the most printed book in human history.

Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung—the “Little Red Book”—was not a systematic treatise. It was a curated selection of passages, organized by topic: “The Communist Party,” “Classes and Class Struggle,” “Socialism and Communism,” “War and Peace.” Each quotation was brief enough to memorize, pointed enough to apply.

Typical entries read:

“Every Communist must grasp the truth: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

“A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous.”

“The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history.”

These are slogans as worldview—compressed, quotable, repeatable. They do not invite reflection; they demand assent.

The distribution during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) was beyond anything previously attempted. Reporting commonly notes over one billion copies printed, making it a ubiquitous object of daily life. Everyone had one. Everyone was expected to carry one. Everyone was expected to study it.

The Little Red Book functioned less as reading material than as ritual object. Red Guards waved it at rallies. Workers held study sessions around it. It was displayed, carried, brandished. To be seen without it was dangerous. To quote it was to demonstrate loyalty.

A Western visitor to China during this period described the atmosphere:

“The book was everywhere—in hands, in pockets, on desks, beside beds. People quoted it in conversation, in meetings, in denunciations. It had become not a book to be read but a talisman to be held.”

The effects were intense: ideological conformity signals at unprecedented scale, a lived ritual object fueling personality cult dynamics. You didn’t need to believe; you needed to perform belief, constantly, publicly, with the red book in your hand.

But like other coercive canon-formations, it was time-bound. Its dominance depended on the political moment and the enforcement environment. After Mao’s death in 1976 and the fall of the Gang of Four, the Little Red Book quietly disappeared from daily life. The fervor that had made it sacred could not survive the changed political winds.

IX. Nazi Germany: Children’s Books and Youth Organizations as Worldview Factories

The Nazi regime understood, with terrible clarity, that the minds of children were the strategic territory. As Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf:

“The folkish state must not adjust its entire educational work primarily to the inoculation of mere knowledge, but to the breeding of absolutely healthy bodies. The training of mental abilities is only secondary.”

And yet the training of mental abilities—or rather, mental dispositions—was extensive. The regime aimed, as historians have documented, to win over youth “in the classroom and through extracurricular activities.” Youth organizations scaled reach rapidly: by 1939, membership in the Hitler Youth was virtually universal for German teenagers.

The curriculum was redesigned to embed racial ideology throughout. Biology classes taught racial classification. History classes taught the stab-in-the-back myth and the perfidy of Jews. Literature classes emphasized völkisch themes.

But the most remarkable artifacts are the children’s propaganda materials produced for younger children. Der Giftpilz (”The Poisonous Mushroom”), published in 1938, was explicitly designed to teach children that Jews were a threat and could never belong to the national community.

The book opens with a mother and son gathering mushrooms:

“Look, Franz, just as a single poisonous mushroom can kill a whole family, so a single Jew can destroy a whole village, a whole city, even an entire people.”

The analogy is biological, natural, intuitive. Mushrooms can be poisonous; Jews are like poisonous mushrooms. The lesson requires no sophistication to absorb. A child of six can understand it.

Subsequent chapters illustrated various antisemitic tropes—the Jewish merchant who cheats customers, the Jewish lawyer who corrupts justice, the Jewish doctor who harms Aryan patients. Each story was illustrated with grotesque caricatures, the visual grammar of hatred.

The book concludes:

“Without solving the Jewish question, no salvation for mankind.”

This is genocide foreshadowed in a children’s book—the logic of elimination presented as an obvious moral conclusion.

The system worked while the regime controlled the entire stack: school, media, youth organizations, family pressure. Children were surrounded by a consistent message from every institutional source. Alternative views were unavailable or dangerous.

But it collapsed in 1945 with the regime itself. Denazification programs attempted to undo what had been taught. The effectiveness while in power was high; the durability was nil. The canon depended entirely on the political structure that enforced it.

X. Atatürk’s Turkey: Remaking the Reading Public by Remaking the Alphabet

In 1928, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk launched one of history’s most audacious cultural interventions: he changed the alphabet.

The Ottoman Empire had written Turkish in Arabic script for centuries. Arabic script carried with it connections to Islamic scholarship, to Ottoman literary traditions, to the cultural world of the Middle East. Atatürk wanted to break those connections.

The new Latin alphabet was not merely a technical change. It was a cultural revolution. At a stroke, the entire literate population became semi-literate. Anyone who could read Ottoman Turkish now faced a new script. The historical archive—centuries of Ottoman literature, law, and administration—became inaccessible to ordinary readers.

Atatürk personally toured the country teaching the new letters. He gave blackboard demonstrations in public squares. He wrote:

“Our rich and harmonious language will now be able to display itself with new Turkish letters. We must free ourselves from these incomprehensible signs that for centuries have held our minds in an iron vice... You will learn the new Turkish letters quickly.”

The distribution mechanism was the literacy campaign conducted through “Nation Schools” (Millet Mektepleri). Adults and children alike were taught the new alphabet. Reading and writing in Latin script became mandatory for public employment. The old script was effectively outlawed for official purposes.

Scholarship describes the campaign as largely effective. Literacy rates rose substantially in the early republic. A new generation grew up that could read the new script but not the old—that had access to new state-produced texts but not to Ottoman literary heritage.

The effects were profound: accelerated literacy, cultural break from Ottoman written tradition, new national-linguistic identity. Turkey was literally re-scripted, its reading public remade.

This is a “canon-adjacent” case in our framework. Atatürk did not merely select approved texts; he changed the medium through which texts could be read at all. He altered the reading substrate of society. It was, arguably, one of the fastest ways to shift cultural continuity—faster than changing the books, because it changed what books were even accessible.

XI. Russia and Ukraine: Competing Canons, Competing Nations

The other cases in this essay show elites within a single polity selecting and distributing canons to shape their own populations. The Russia-Ukraine case shows something different and arguably more consequential: two competing canons, each claiming the same historical heritage, each producing a distinct national consciousness—and the violent struggle between them that continues to this day.

Both Russia and Ukraine trace their origins to the same medieval polity: Kyivan Rus’, the East Slavic state centered on Kyiv from the ninth to the thirteenth century. Both claim Prince Volodymyr the Great, who converted to Christianity in 988, as a founding figure. Both invoke the cultural prestige of this medieval civilization.

But here the claims diverge—and the divergence has been enforced through centuries of educational policy, literary suppression, and canon-formation.

The Russian Canon: Ukraine Does Not Exist

Russian imperial historiography developed a scheme—enshrined in textbooks, examinations, and official doctrine—that treated Kyivan Rus’ as the first chapter of Russian history. In this telling, the center of gravity simply moved: from Kyiv to Vladimir-Suzdal to Moscow, a continuous transfer of legitimate authority.

In this scheme, “Little Russians” (Ukrainians) and “Great Russians” were branches of a single people. The Ukrainian language was classified as a dialect—”corrupted” Russian influenced by Polish. There was no separate Ukrainian history, only regional variations within a single Russian story.

At the center of the Russian literary canon stood Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), whom Britannica describes as “often considered his country’s greatest poet and the founder of modern Russian literature.” His status transcends literature; he is “virtually the symbol of Russian culture.” Dostoevsky, speaking at the unveiling of a Pushkin monument in Moscow in 1880, declared him a prophet and “the embodiment of Russia’s national ideals.” Stalin promoted Pushkin massively in 1937, ensuring that by the 1960s, statues of the poet stood in every town of the Soviet Union.

What Pushkin offered was a literature of the educated, Europeanized elite—written in a Russian that drew on French sophistication and courtly polish. His world was that of the nobility, the salon, the duel. His masterpiece, Eugene Onegin, became the template for Russian self-understanding, featuring characters—Onegin, the superfluous aristocrat; Tatyana, the authentic Russian woman—that became archetypes subsequent Russian literature would endlessly rework.

The Ukrainian historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky, writing in 1904, dissected this “traditional scheme”:

“We know that the Kievan State, its laws and culture, were the creation of one nationality, the Ukrainian-Ruś, while the Volodimir-Moscow State was the creation of another nationality, the Great Russian. The Kievan Period did not pass into the Volodimir-Moscow Period, but into the Galician-Volhynian Period of the 13th century and later into the Lithuanian-Polish of the 14th–16th centuries. The Volodimir-Moscow State was neither the successor nor the inheritor of the Kievan State. It grew out of its own roots.”

Hrushevsky argued that the Russian imperial scheme was not merely wrong; it was a tool of political absorption. By claiming Kyivan Rus’ as the origin of Russian statehood, Moscow erased the continuous existence of a distinct Ukrainian people—a people who had lived on the same territory, developed distinct institutions, and eventually came under Lithuanian, Polish, and Ottoman rule before being absorbed into the Russian Empire.

Suppression: The Valuev Circular and Ems Decree

The Russian imperial response to Ukrainian cultural awakening was not argument but suppression. On July 18, 1863, the Russian Minister of Internal Affairs, Pyotr Valuev, issued a secret circular to censorship committees that effectively banned educational and religious literature in Ukrainian.

The circular’s justification was remarkable in its directness:

“A separate Little Russian language never existed, does not exist, and shall not exist, and the tongue used by commoners is nothing but Russian corrupted by the influence of Poland.”

This is not a claim about linguistics. It is a claim about nationhood—a declaration that the Ukrainian people, as a people, do not exist. And the policy that followed was designed to make this declaration true by preventing the development of a standardized Ukrainian literary language.

The Valuev Circular banned not fiction but precisely the genres through which a standardized language develops: educational textbooks, religious materials, primers, dictionaries. A people could read poetry in their “dialect,” but they could not learn to read in it, could not pray in it, could not develop the institutional infrastructure of a literary culture.

In 1876, Tsar Alexander II extended the restrictions through the Ems Decree, which banned the import of Ukrainian publications, prohibited Ukrainian-language theater, and forbade even the printing of Ukrainian musical lyrics.

The effect was devastating but not total. Ukrainian publishing in the Russian Empire dropped from dozens of titles per year to a handful. Cultural activity shifted to Galicia, under Austro-Hungarian rule, where Ukrainian institutions could develop. The poet Taras Shevchenko’s Kobzar—the foundational text of modern Ukrainian literature—could be published uncensored only in Prague.

The Ukrainian Counter-Canon: Shevchenko’s Kobzar

If the Russian imperial project was to deny Ukrainian nationhood, the Ukrainian response was to assert it through literature. And the central text of that assertion was the Kobzar of Taras Shevchenko.

Shevchenko was born a serf in 1814, freed at age 24 through the efforts of artists who recognized his talent. He published his first collection of poems in 1840, naming it after the kobzari—the wandering bards who traveled Ukraine with their stringed instruments, singing of Cossack glory and national suffering.

From the first lines, Shevchenko wrote as a Ukrainian nationalist—though the term did not yet exist. His poem “Kateryna” opens with a warning:

“Fall in love, you dark-browed girls, / But not with Muscovites. / For Muscovites are strangers, / They will do you wrong.”

The poem tells of a Ukrainian girl seduced and abandoned by a Russian soldier—a parable of imperial exploitation rendered as personal tragedy.

In “Night of Taras,” Shevchenko invoked the Cossack past as a reproach to the subjugated present:

“Ukraine, O my dear Ukraine, / Trampled by the Polacks! / My dearest! When I think of you, my homeland, / My heart can only cry... / Whither all the Cossacks / Whither their red coats? / Whither our good fortune / And whither blessed freedom?”

This is history as call to action—a reminder that Ukrainians were once free, a lament that they are now enslaved, an implicit demand that they become free again.

Shevchenko’s “Testament” became the manifesto of Ukrainian nationalism:

“Break your chains / And water freedom with the enemy’s evil blood... / And remember me in a free, new family.”

Tsar Nicholas I considered Shevchenko a personal enemy. In 1847, the poet was arrested for membership in the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, a secret society advocating Slavic federation and the abolition of serfdom. He was exiled to military service in Central Asia with an explicit prohibition: he was forbidden to write or draw.

The Kobzar became, over the following century, what scholars have called “a national gospel.” It was cherished in Ukrainian households alongside the Bible. It was smuggled, memorized, recited. An official Soviet estimate counted 110 editions published in Ukraine during the Soviet period alone—and this does not count the editions published in the diaspora or smuggled underground.

The Kobzar worked as a counter-canon precisely because the imperial system had created the conditions for its reception. By denying that Ukrainians existed as a distinct people, the empire made any text affirming Ukrainian distinctiveness into an act of resistance. By banning educational literature in Ukrainian, the empire made literary Ukrainian into a language of opposition. Shevchenko did not merely describe Ukrainian identity; he helped create it—providing the vocabulary, the historical memory, the sense of grievance and aspiration that would define Ukrainian nationalism for generations.

Hrushevsky’s Counter-History

If Shevchenko provided the emotional and poetic foundation of Ukrainian national consciousness, Mykhailo Hrushevsky provided the historiographical one.

His ten-volume History of Ukraine-Rus’, begun in 1898 and completed posthumously in 1937, was the first comprehensive synthesis of Ukrainian history. More importantly, it was the first to treat Ukraine as a continuous subject—a people and territory with their own story, not a province that wandered into and out of Russian history.

Hrushevsky’s 1904 essay—published, remarkably, in St. Petersburg during a brief relaxation of censorship—laid out the argument in its sharpest form:

“The traditional scheme of ‘Russian’ history is an old scheme which has its beginnings in the historiographic scheme of the Moscow scribes... The Volodimir-Moscow State was neither the successor nor the inheritor of the Kievan State. It grew out of its own roots, and the relations of the Kievan State toward it may more accurately be compared to the relations that existed between Rome and the Gaul provinces.”

This was intellectual dynamite. Hrushevsky was claiming not just that Ukraine had a distinct history but that Russia’s foundational narrative was a fiction—that Moscow had stolen Kyiv’s heritage and called it their own.

Russian historians rejected the argument. But Ukrainian historians, and more importantly Ukrainian nationalists, embraced it. Hrushevsky’s scheme became the basis of Ukrainian national historiography. When Ukraine briefly achieved independence in 1917–1918, Hrushevsky became its first president. His portrait now appears on the Ukrainian 50-hryvnia note.

Canon and Counter-Canon in War

The current war between Russia and Ukraine is, among other things, a war between competing canons.

Vladimir Putin has explicitly invoked the Russian imperial historical scheme to justify his invasion. In a 2021 essay, he declared that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people”—the same claim that underlaid the Valuev Circular. He has claimed that Ukraine has no independent historical existence, that it was an artificial creation of Soviet nationality policy, that its separation from Russia is an aberration to be corrected.

The Ukrainian response has been to double down on the counter-canon. Shevchenko’s monument in the town of Borodyanka was damaged by Russian shelling in 2022; Ukrainian artists wrapped it in bandages as a symbol of national resilience. When Ukrainian soldiers defend their country, they invoke the Cossacks, quote Shevchenko, appeal to the historical memory that the Kobzar kept alive through centuries of suppression.

This case demonstrates the limits and the power of canon-formation simultaneously. The Russian Empire successfully suppressed Ukrainian cultural development for decades; the Soviet Union continued the suppression with brief intervals of “Ukrainization.” Yet the counter-canon survived—in the diaspora, in memory, in the treasured copies of the Kobzar passed from generation to generation.

The competing canons produced competing nations. And those nations now exist as geopolitical facts—facts that cannot be erased by force, precisely because they are anchored in texts, memories, and identities that millions of people have internalized.

What Separates Successful Canon-Shaping from Weak Attempts

Across these eleven cases, certain patterns emerge. Shaping is strongest when elites control:

  1. Where people must be: compulsory school, mandatory worship, party meetings. Canon-formation requires captive audiences—spaces where people must show up and cannot easily leave.

  2. What people must pass: exams, credentials, advancement gates. The Chinese examination system achieved such durability because it tied the canon to career advancement. You could not join the governing class without internalizing Confucius.

  3. What people repeat aloud: ritual recitations and ceremonies. The Imperial Rescript on Education worked not because students read it but because they bowed before it, recited it collectively, performed it. Repetition through the body goes deeper than reading.

  4. What alternatives are costly: censorship, stigma, legal penalties. The USSR suppressed competing histories. Nazi Germany controlled all youth institutions. When alternatives are dangerous, the official version becomes the only version.

  5. How early it starts: childhood is the compounding machine. McGuffey shaped Americans before they knew they were being shaped. Nazi children’s books reached minds before critical faculties developed. The earlier the intervention, the more natural the conclusion seems.

The weakest cases are those where elites control only some of these levers. The McGuffey Readers were influential but not coercive; alternatives existed. The Book of Common Prayer reached everyone but could not prevent dissent. Macaulay’s system produced collaborators and critics alike.

The most disturbing cases are those where elites controlled everything—the Nazis, the Soviets, Maoist China—but these systems proved brittle. They achieved high compliance under coercion but could not survive the collapse of the coercive apparatus.

The most durable cases combined legitimacy with institutional completeness. Imperial China lasted a millennium because the examination system persuaded as well as compelled. France’s Third Republic textbooks worked because they offered something people wanted—national identity, social mobility—not just something imposed.

The Russia-Ukraine case adds a crucial dimension: what happens when a counter-canon emerges to challenge an imposed one. The Russian Empire controlled schools, banned publications, and denied Ukrainian nationhood through official doctrine. But it could not prevent the Kobzar from being written, copied, memorized, cherished. The suppression itself became evidence for the counter-narrative—proof that Ukrainians were a distinct people whose existence the empire feared. When empires face not just compliance but competing consciousness, the canon machine meets its limit.

Conclusion: What This Means for Us

We inherit the products of canon-formation without recognizing them as such. We read Shakespeare because he was placed in curricula; we consider certain texts “classics” because they were selected; we share moral vocabularies because they were drilled into millions of minds before ours.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is simply history. Every educational system transmits some content and not other content. Every curriculum reflects choices—about what matters, what is excellent, what young people should become.

The question is not whether education shapes minds. Of course it does. The question is whether we recognize this shaping for what it is.

To free ourselves from the belief that mass education is neutral is not to reject education. It is to approach it with appropriate awareness. What are we being taught to value? What alternatives are we not being shown? Whose interests does this curriculum serve? What kind of person does it aim to produce?

These questions do not have simple answers. But asking them is the beginning of intellectual freedom—the capacity to hold one’s own formation at arm’s length and examine it, to distinguish between what one was taught and what one has decided is true.

The canon-makers have always known what they were doing. It is time for the rest of us to know it too.