Drawing on a range of archival sources in Poland, Germany, Belgium, and Luxembourg and a growing literature on borderlands in several disciplines, the author profiles the role of primary schooling in the search for a universal childhood in the interwar years in Polish Upper Silesia and the territories of Eupen, Malmedy, and St. Vith under Belgian authority. The experience in borderland schools, subject to international and transnational changes as they were, differed from that of schools in the heartland. The methodology of this study rests on the interplay of borders and human territoriality, multiple loyalties, and micro history in multilingual regions. Education and language learning policies were more negotiable in borderlands, where languages competed, than at the center.

The two regions differed significantly. Venken compensates for the size disparity by focusing on the Lubliniec district in Polish Upper Silesia. Crucially, Eupen, Malmedy, and St. Vith were colonies of Belgium under the authority of the governor of Liège province until 1928, when they were fully incorporated into the province. In Polish Upper Silesia, religious and language rights were protected until 1937 under the Geneva Convention, administered by the League of Nations. Consequently, policies of language uniformity in the Polish heartland could not be duplicated in Polish Upper Silesia. Belgium, conversely, was a bilingual state with a broad commitment to linguistic choice. There were also commonalities between the two regions. Both established compulsory primary education after the war. Both were former German territories where historical borders lingered on as phantoms in local memories. During the interwar years, Germany took a strong interest in language matters in both territories.

Following World War I, language was the primary indicator of nationality and the determinant of national borders in Europe. The ideal of creating a just Europe through education met its greatest challenge in borderlands with mixed linguistic groups. In Chapter 1, Venken outlines primary education policies and practices during the war: in Germany, child-centered education was the norm, in Belgium, civic education for the masses predominated, and in Poland, defining the Polish child and language of instruction prevailed. Chapter 2 examines primary education developments in the two borderlands during the immediate post-war period. Chapter 3 explores the challenges of imposing national language learning in multilingual border spaces between 1919 and 1925. Chapter 4 outlines tensions between efforts to reduce the influence of an unwanted language and counter efforts to attain the greatest possible autonomy in language choice within a complex structure between 1926 and 1933. Chapter 5 looks at reform pedagogy in Polish Upper Silesia, in pursuit of the ideal of universal childhood, and resistance to reform pedagogy by the Catholic Church in Belgium and its borderlands. The ideal childhood as the anchor of peace in Europe was never clearly articulated. Venken concludes that conflict over the meaning of childhood ended in the collapse of all meaning. The book concludes with a rapid survey of borderland language and schooling policies in a number of states including Soviet Ukraine, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Romania.

With a growing population, Polish Upper Silesia required new schools. Many of the best schools in the region were built with German money, a challenge for a poorer Poland. The Geneva Convention gave guardians the right to choose the language of their children's schooling until the late 1930s. The prestige of the German language made it popular with Polish parents. As German bellicosity grew in the 1930s, choice of schooling narrowed. School authorities increasingly limited parental choice by requiring tests for entry into German schools and forbidding German pupils to attend a school more than three kilometers from home. Belgian borderlands needed no new schools, but German textbooks supported German schools, compulsory for German speakers until 1928, when guardians could choose the language of instruction for their wards. The rise of Nazism from 1933 caused more parents to choose French schools. The Belgian government, convinced that Eupen, Malmedy, and St. Vith would inevitably revert to German rule, became increasingly indifferent to their fate.

Venken believes that the commonalities between the acts of governments and the responses of residents of the two regions suffice to suggest a profile. With this ambitious and complex work, the author has admirably opened the conversation in this fascinating field of study; but the many differences suggest that more examples are needed to test that claim.