History curriculum can shape nationalist attitudes

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This text is part of: "I would never send my kids to school" by Piotr Wozniak (2017)

Boring history

After 12 years of schooling, I knew very little of history, esp. history of the world. My hazy recall from some 800 hours of teaching tells me that history lessons were a string of deathly boring stories related to Polish great men fighting for freedom against mortal enemies (esp. the Germans), suffering, and dying in a heroic fashion.

At the age of 23, I slowly started learning history on my own and an entirely different picture emerged. The world seems far more complex and far more interesting (see: The history of my own learning history). The school tried to make sure I admire Polish heroes. Today, via natural intellectual resistance, I see the opposite. The more heroic the narrative in reference to the Poles as related by the Poles, the more I run away to better quality sources. Four decades later, I see all those indoctrination efforts as pathetic and counterproductive. I saw my true Polish heroes like Copernicus or Marie Curie-Sklodowska mentioned in three short paragraphs in the high school history book. At the same time, The Battle of Klushino was named one of the twenty most important events in Polish history. Did you know? If Poles are outnumbered 1:5 in a battle with Russians, they are bound to deserve a monument.

Sadly, the new Polish education reform (2017) seems to be a throwback to those old totalitarian efforts of brainwashing. Perhaps it is even worse. In communist times, we hated the Germans but we loved the Russians. Amazingly, I was quite susceptible to that love propaganda and I totally loved chatting with Russian troops travelling in convoys around Poland here and there. In today's textbooks, both Russians and Germans are painted as historic enemies. For comfort, all those negative sentiments seem to be slowly dying to spite all indoctrination hopefuls.

Historians criticize curriculum reform

I am not a historian and history is just my hobby. Here I would like to quote, in translation, couple of observations made by Dr Piotr Laskowski, and co-author Anna Dierzgowska. Laskowski is a historian, educator and a philosopher, critical of the school system. Dzierzgowska is a radical feminist, teacher of history, translator, social critic, and a co-founder of the Social Education Monitor (Spoleczny Monitor Edukacji).

The authors see the new Polish history curriculum as distortive and harmful. The authors notice, to my comfort, that the new curriculum is also awfully boring. This will activate natural student defenses, and will definitely reduce the negative impact, or perhaps even make the indoctrination effort counterproductive.

The new curriculum presents history viewed in political context, organized chronologically, dominated by the history of Poland, with little admixture of Europe, and nearly no general history

The new curriculum is based on the concept of a nation, and its main themes revolved around political strife and military history

Disagreements about history are healthy

When I speak of the value of wrong models or knowledge darwinism, I speak of healthy strategies for creative learning in any domain. Knowledge of history is vast and thus particularly sensitive to evolutionary forces shaped by the arrival of new microhistory evidence, and the infinite comparative analysis. Laskowski notes that the approach taken in the curriculum makes this heterogeneous learning process difficult:

History should be presented from different perspectives. It should not be a one-sided story of the dominant social formation. It would help understand the complexity of historic interactions. We could thus forget the stereotype of Poland that is always proud and always suffering. Most of all, we should realize that history is not a set of facts set in stone. History is subject to an never-ending scientific discourse. Diversity forms immunity against rigid standardized models of historic forces. We should terminate historic cults and objects of hate (e.g. directed at the communists). We should stop treating students as dumb vessels for well chewed up soup of facts

History at school will be separated from modern historic thinking and research. It will turn into a set of preprocessed facts for cramming. It will be irrelevant and dead, and as such, insufferably boring

Colonial disgrace

Traditionally, we learn little of remote lands, and when we do, we see it mostly through our European mission civilisatrice:

When attention is paid to the non-European world, it always happens in the context of the European conquest. […] The student is supposed to study the long-term impact of great explorations and geographic discoveries on the social, economic and cultural life in Europe. […] The curriculum uses colonial terminology: "discovery", "New World", "Indians". It also nicely skirts over the use of force, exploitation, and genocide. The new reform makes no effort to change that Eurocentric thinking

Traditional enemies

I have many friends in Germany, and through that lens, the Germans seem to be the nicest nation in the world. However, when a smiling German enters a Polish fish bar, he may see some sour faces as soon he betrays his nationality by using his native language. There are few explanations for this ugly contrast other that having kids grow up with untold stories and movies from the times of the World War 2.

The curriculum continues the old tradition of teaching history of Poland as a nation that is perpetually threatened and nearly always at war with Germany

Nationalist education

When the curriculum says that "the role of school is to strengthen the sense of national identity", Laskowski concludes in a wider context:

The sentences used in the curriculum clearly paint a vision of nationalist education […] The nation-oriented curriculum is factually erroneous and may foster dangerous attitudes

Finally, the unavoidable association between nationalism and genocide needs to be remembered (see my own not-so-nice expression of patriotism in youth):

At the end of the 19th century, the inseparable concepts of the nation and the race were the driving force for colonial genocide, for the slaughter of the first world war, and the Holocaust. Today, similar associations lead to the suffering and death of thousands of refugees and migrants at the borders of Europe. This is the legacy addressed by the authors of the new curriculum. This is the legacy that is supposed to help bring up the new generation

Child's rights violation

The crowning conclusion of Laskowski and Dzierzgowska is the ultimate condemnation of the goals of the curriculum:

The goals of the curriculum [..] are in violation of Article 29 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which says that "the education of the child shall be directed to [...] the preparation of the child for responsible life in a free society, in the spirit of understanding, peace, tolerance, equality of sexes, and friendship among all peoples, ethnic, national and religious groups and persons of indigenous origin"

Conclusions

The review by Dzierzgowska and Laskowski paints a sad picture of the Polish primary school curriculum in history. It is again nationalistic, it is again political, and it is again one-sided and rigid (see: School curriculum is inherently political). It is bound to produce thousands of graduates who see history as boring. Such graduates are less likely to be interested in looking for new sources of knowledge. All those little simplistic resentments and stereotypes planted in hundreds of hours of schooling will often remain in their minds fossilized till the end of life. The only true remedy is free learning. For that, we need to abandon the concept of compulsory curriculum. Compulsory schooling must end

Further reading

Source

This reference is used to annotate "I would never send my kids to school" (2017) by Piotr Wozniak


Quoted excerpts come from the following reference:

Title: Assessment of the outline of the history curriculum for primary schools

Original title: Opinia o projekcie podstawy programowej przedmiotu historia dla szkoły podstawowej

Authors: Anna Dzierzgowska, Piotr Laskowski

Date: January 2017

Source: Social Education Monitor (Spoleczny Monitor Edukacji)

Backlink: School curriculum is inherently political

Link: https://www.monitor.edu.pl/analizy/opinia-o-projekcie-podstawy-programowej-przedmiotu-historia-dla-szkoly-podstawowej.html



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