ABSTRACT
One key educational task is helping pupils and students to locate themselves. In their state, in their global or geo-political region, in the world. Thus the knowledge of boundaries is important, particularly if those boundaries are disputed, as they are still in many parts of Europe. Teaching boundaries in geography or history lessons seems almost a self evident element of the learning of a future citizen. Yet, too often as Noel Malcom notes:
There is indeed something rather artificial about writing the history of a unit of territory, as a unit, when its defining borders have been a political reality only for the last few decades of that history… there are histories of eighteenth-century Italy, although there was no country called Italy at that time; there are histories of Bulgaria which go back centuries, and there are histories of Greece down the ages, even though the modern borders of Greece were finalised only in 1947
(Malcom, 1998, p. xxxiv).