Nationalism and Integrity Values in Elementary School Citizenship Education Through School Culture

Abstract

Citizenship character education, particularly nationalism and integrity, remains a persistent challenge in Indonesian elementary schools amid accelerating digital disruption that reshapes how students internalize national values. This study aimed to identify the forms that school culture-based citizenship character education takes and to examine the factors functioning as catalysts and inhibitors in its implementation. A qualitative Systematic Literature Review design was employed, following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses protocol and guided by the Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcomes, and Context framework. Journal articles indexed in Google Scholar, Scopus, and Garuda, published between 2016 and 2026, were searched using Publish or Perish software, yielding 500 initial records narrowed through four screening stages to a final sample of 15 studies, analyzed using qualitative thematic content analysis. Results show that citizenship character education is realized through classroom- and technology-based interventions, school culture and local wisdom practices, and curricular framing of national ideology, with teacher competence, principal support, and parental collaboration functioning as catalysts, while facility limitations, uneven teacher understanding, and digital disruption function as inhibitors, the latter producing behavioral inconsistency between school and digital-space conduct. School culture thus functions as a necessary but insufficient ecosystem for internalizing nationalism and integrity unless deliberately extended into digital spaces, offering a theoretical refinement of character education models and a practical basis for school policy and teacher development.