The concept of nation-state in Italian elementary school children: spontaneous concepts and effects of teaching

Two experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1, the definitions given by kindergarteners, third graders, and sixth graders (N = 60) for several political terms were searched for a characteristic-to-defining-shift (Keil, 1989). The children were presented with seven words: kingdom, king, border, tax, soldier, capital city, and policeman and were asked (a) if and where they had ever heard each of them and, if they had, (b) to explain their meanings. Kindergarten children did not know most of the terms or defined them mainly by means of characteristic but nondefining features. The third graders appeared to represent the state only in physical terms. Soldiers and policemen were described as employees but not as public servants. In Experiment 2, the extent to which children's misconceptions can be changed through explicit instruction was examined. A curriculum lasting about 16 hr was implemented with a group of fourth graders (N = 30). On pretest, most of the children depicted the state in the same ways as the third graders had in Experiment 1. After the curriculum implementation, nearly all of the children showed a political conception of the state, describing it not only in terms of a territory in which a population is settled but also in terms of government.