In recent years, the Neue Rechte or Nouvelle Droite has expanded its efforts to normalise the positions it advocates and thus achieve a discursive shift to the right. While this is the official policy of the Alternative für Deutschland and the Rassemblement National, they are accompanied by more secretive activities: The Neue Rechte and the Nouvelle Droite are establishing alternative educational programmes based on extreme right convictions. Parent-curated reading and film programmes are recommended as an antidote to the supposedly tendentious programmes of state schools. Extreme right publishing houses provide the material for private primary schools “hors contrat”, that is independent of the official curricula, who, at least in France, are often characterised by Christian fundamentalism. Privately funded institutions such as the Institut für Staatspolitik or the Institut Iliade act as Think Tanks of the Neue Rechte/Nouvelle Droite and offer summer schools and ‘promotions’, mimicking the programmes of public universities or of the elitist French Grandes Écoles.
Thus, alternate educational curricula are established outside of the state system, to provide an ‘education’ impregnated with right-wing ideas throughout. In particular the educational programmes for children aim to expose them only to content that conforms to their parents’ ideology in order to raise a generation of young people who will represent the values of the Far Right and regard them as completely normal. In the context of the ‘metapolitical’ programme to occupy the “pre-political space” (“Vorfeld”) the focus on the formation of children and adolescents whose political consciousness is still malleable, should be regarded as a new degree of structuring and organisation. We therefore deem it of the utmost importance to subject it to close academic scrutiny.
The project funded by the Volkswagenstiftung aims (1) to map the educational activities of extreme right movements in Germany and France for the first time, (2) to explore their transnational interdependencies, (3) to analyse their programmes and activities in different media. Hereby, we will identify the structures of what could develop into a proper alternate educational universe. The project is exploratory and designed as a pilot study that might be expanded to other national and international contexts.