6533b852fe1ef96bd12aaf86

RESEARCH PRODUCT

The political and military struggle to incorporate Greater Poland into Poland after World War i, in history textbooks the Case of Polish High School textbooks in use at the Turn of the Twentieth and Twenty-first centuries

subject

description

The vast majority oj historians view school history education as extremely important. They emphasise that it plays a key role not only in shaping young people s knowledge about the past, but also in defining the historical awareness of the whole ofsociety, because ofiten what students learn at school determines their lijelong knowledge about many historical issues. Unfortunately, awareness o f these obvious statements dpes not go hand in hand with respect for the achievements of history didactics. This is a scientific discipline in which one of the most important research areas is the analysis of school history textbooks, which are still basie sources of students’ knowledge about the past, alongside history teachers and the Internet. Bearing the above in mind, the author of this article decided to analyse about a dozen of the most popular history textbooks used in Polish high schools at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, with a focus on how they present the political and military struggle o f 1918—1919 to incorporate Greater Poland into Poland. The work uses mainly the philological and comparative methods. By isolating the main themes of the Greater Poland Uprising and selected themes of the Paris Peace Conference from the textbooks, it is shown that in the analysed textbooks these issues received attention adeąuate to their importance and occupied as much space as reąuired by the curriculum frameworks for history teaching in the 1990s and the core curricula in operation sińce the beginning of the present century. Practically all of the analysed books contain, along with brief commentary and sometimes also a didactic review, the basie facts about the background, course and significance of the Greater Poland Uprising. The analysis shows that the school history textbooks used in the 1990s were certainly more accurate, but also ojfered a more interesting narrative. Unfortunately, a relathely weak aspect of all of the analysed textbooks was the use of additional didactic elements.