In my last post, concerning the inadequacies of the debate around the Jedwabne atrocities, I highlighted the distance between the informed debate and the broad understanding of the population at large, especially people far from the major cities, uninvolved in and not comprehending elite cultural debates. I pointed out that the popular distrust of official rhetoric which made a great deal of sense during the Communist period was now being applied to the important discussion about the painful past, making the debate for much of the population counterproductive. The consequences of this are becoming tragically evident now in a cultural war, spreading like wild fire across Poland, a cultural war about educational reform.

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Educational reform in Poland has been ongoing since 1999 – each of its stages stirring controversies of a different sort. The most recent protests could be labeled as the “Occupy” stage. The protests have been coalescing around some supposedly minor changes in school curriculum that aim to integrate middle school and high school programs and also allow students to choose, for the first time, a subject track in high school.

The core reason for these protests is a new way of offering and teaching history, in particular the introduction of the new “History and Society” course for students in the science track. This course will encompass overarching topics that the teacher will be able to develop together with students. Among the list of recommended topics provided by the Ministry of Education are the following: “Europe And The World,” “War and Military Systems,” “Woman, Man, Family,” and “Motherland’s Pantheon And Motherland’s Disputes.”

Proponents of the reform believe that it succeeds in finding solutions to two major problems: first, the new curriculum provides much better continuity between middle and high school, allowing students to cover a greater swath of history. Middle school students and first year high school students will follow a unified World and Polish history curriculum, after which they get to choose their track. Second, science track students will be able to build upon the history knowledge they acquired in earlier grades, but now they will learn to . . .

Read more: A Polish Cultural War: The Battle over the History and Education