What a Coloring Book Reveals About the Power of Educational Materials

In this post, I take a closer look at how seemingly harmless educational materials—even a playful children’s coloring book—can solidify simplified political narratives and shape perceptions long before critical thinking develops. Drawing on my long-standing research, I explain why German school textbooks may not express open hostility, yet still present limited and often distorted views of Jews, Judaism, and Israel. And I outline what needs to change so that education becomes a tool for understanding rather than a source of misleading narratives.

Educational Material - a powerful tool.

A seemingly harmless book with far-reaching effects

A seemingly harmless coloring book in the display of a Zurich bookstore: colorful, playful, innocent at first glance. Yet precisely its childlike aesthetic gives it an influence that reaches far beyond the medium itself. “From the river to the sea: A Coloring Book” is aimed at children in primary school and transforms one of the most complex political conflicts of our time into a morally clear-cut story. An idealized Palestine on one side, faceless Israeli soldiers on the other—a hateful black-and-white worldview that children are not only supposed to look at but even actively color in. In doing so, messages become internalized long before the ability to recognize contradictions or weigh different perspectives develops.

The example, reported on by the Jüdische Allgemeine, fits perfectly with my own work in the field of textbook research. For this small book stands for a much larger question: What responsibility do educational materials carry, especially when they speak about history, identity, and political conflict? And what does this mean for a society increasingly confronted with misinformation, social polarization, and hatred of Jews?

Why textbooks must be understood as instruments of power

As attentive readers know, I have been working on precisely these topics for many years. If we want to understand how a society thinks about itself, how it interprets its past, and what kind of future it imagines, we cannot consider schoolbooks as neutral transmitters of knowledge but as instruments of memory, value formation, and political interpretation. The historical foundational research on which my academic analyses are based therefore deliberately differs from a purely descriptive view of content. It encompasses hermeneutic and qualitative methods, combined with socio-scientific and linguistic perspectives as well as critical empirical data evaluation. This creates a broad field of investigation: questions of collective memory, the prevailing Zeitgeist, state-intended value formation—and ultimately the power of the medium of the schoolbook.

Memory culture and the visibility of Jewish life

The results of my research in Germany show clearly how strongly all these dimensions appear in educational materials. Most prominently visible is the role of remembrance culture. Since 2005, teaching about the Holocaust has been firmly anchored in history lessons, and since 2016 the Conference of Ministers of Education and the Central Council of Jews have explicitly recommended a broader representation of Jewish history, religion, and culture. This normative framework is reflected in the schoolbooks—though with a limitation: Jewish life often does not appear until late in a student’s school career and almost exclusively in victim roles. The diversity of Jewish history and Jewish present remains pale, fragmentary, or entirely absent.

Zeitgeist and the persistence of stereotypes

The Zeitgeist is equally evident. Although many authors make an effort to use gender- and diversity-sensitive language, stereotypical patterns are nevertheless perpetuated. Jews frequently appear as “different,” “foreign,” or historically marginal, even where there are no openly hostile statements toward Jews. This marking as foreign is rarely explicit but structurally significant: it shapes the implicit image of a group that is not seen as a natural part of German history and society.

Israel and the Middle East: how omissions create misinformation

These structures become particularly visible when examining the treatment of Israel and the conflicts in the Middle East. As I was able to demonstrate in my 2024 study Misinformation about Israel and Antisemitic Views in School Textbooks?, false depictions lead directly to misinformation. In various places in German history schoolbooks, one finds imprecise or incorrect representations of Judaism, Jewish history, the Holocaust, Israel, and the Israeli-Palestinian and Arab-Israeli conflicts. These are not isolated cases but patterns arising from the combination of curricular gaps, editorial decisions, and societal expectations. That such gaps exist has much to do with the structure of the curricula. In the curricula I analyzed, central topics are missing entirely: neither the Arab-Israeli nor the Israeli-Palestinian conflict appears at all; Jewish history does not begin until the Middle Ages and is presented almost exclusively from a perspective of suffering. The present remains excluded; the diversity of Jewish everyday life and the religious or cultural dimensions of Jewish identity appear hardly at all. This inevitably produces a one-sided image that reinforces stereotypes.

Structural distortion instead of overt hostility

It is remarkable that many of the examined works indeed make an effort: layout, image descriptions, headings, and graphic elements are often carefully designed, and explanatory texts accessible. The problem lies less in what is obvious than in what is structural: choices of perspective, terminology, and the selection of what is told and what remains untold. It is precisely through this that subtle forms of distortion arise—hardly noticeable as polemic, yet still establishing a particular image.

In sum, this leads to a finding that is both alarming and constructive: schoolbooks in Germany rarely present openly hostile content toward Jews, but they convey a one-sided picture that continues to mark Jews as marginal figures of history and depicts Israel—if at all—in a distorted or incomplete manner. The consequence is clear: curricula must be revised, content expanded, and methodological approaches broadened. Above all, Jewish life in all its diversity must become more visible—historically, culturally, and in the present.

A chance to rethink education

Here lies a major opportunity for education: to shift from purely “learning from the past” toward learning with the past and within the present. Encounters between pupils and Jewish individuals in the everyday life of schools, more modern and differentiated teaching materials, and strengthened teacher training can make a decisive contribution to ensuring that Israel, Jewish culture, and Jewish life are no longer perceived as foreign but as part of our shared history and present.

If historical education is truly to serve as a teacher of life, then schoolbooks must meet the following expectations: respect, mutual understanding, rejection of hatred and enemy images, and the promotion of peace. If these standards are taken seriously, education can become a powerful tool against hatred of Jews and against oversimplified political narratives.

Further reading and contact

If you would like to read more details about my textbook research, you can do so here: Misinformation about Israel and Antisemitic Views in School Textbooks?

If you are an author, a publisher, or involved in curriculum development and believe my expertise could be helpful, please feel free to get in touch:

melaniecarinaschmoll(at)gmx.de