Where Is Poland? | Education

Chapter 2

Education

The Polish language is being erased from the public space. But the situation is the most dire in the schoolsystem. The Poles call this period the 'Apukhtin night', after a Russian school superintendent whose dream it was to hear Polish mothers singing Russian lullabies to their children. The fate of the Poles in Prussia is similar.

Coursebook for learning Russian. Source: Polona.pl

Polish as a foreign language

When Brandes arrives in Poland, the process of removing the Polish language from the school system has reached its apex. Although just two decades previously the authorities were attempting to force people to write the Polish language with the Cyrillic alphabet, now the aim of the administration is to Russify Polish children completely.

Therefore, in elementary schools, Polish lessons were non-obligatory and intended more as a way for pupils to deepen their knowledge of the Russian language, than to learn about the national literature. In the curriculum of the Polish-speaking lands, Polish was nevertheless regarded as a foreign language – during the lessons, Russian was used as the language of instruction. Pupils read carefully selected and censored fragments of Polish readings, which were then translated into Russian as an exercise. However, except for these classes, speaking Polish was forbidden. History lessons conveyed the official state propaganda. The last type of lessons to be taught in Polish were religion classes.

In addition, schools were drastically underfunded. In 1877, the annual per-capita expenditure on education was just 24 kopeks – the equivalent of six loaves of bread. It is therefore no wonder that according to the census taken 5 years later, 55% of Warsaw's population was illiterate. Rural schools were in an even worse situation.

School in Września, 1901. Source: Jagielonian Digital Library

Fighting the Kulturkampf

In Prussia, ruled by the 'Iron Chancellor' Otto von Bismarck, the Polish language was deleted from educational curricula in 1887. Earlier, the authorities had banned the use of the language in public offices and courts, even in areas where the Poles constituted the majority of the population. At the same time, the Catholic Church, considered the traditional bastion of the Polish identify, was persecuted. This policy was known as Kulturkampf.

In addition to persecution in the field of education, at the moment of Brandes' arrival in Poland the Prussian authorities were taking further legislative actions meant to displace them from the eastern provinces of the country (known as the ‘Prussian deportations’). As a result, 26,000 Poles who did not have German citizenship were forced to leave their homes.

In 1886, the Prussian Settlement Commission started to purchase Polish property and land in order to redistribute it among the Germans and therefore modify the composition of the population, especially in the Wielkopolska province.

Additionally, the German Eastern Marches Society (called 'Hakata' by the Poles), established in 1894, actively lobbied for anti-Polish regulations, took active part in carrying out the deportation policy, and opposed to the use of Polish language at schools, courts and offices. The ideological slogan of the organisation was:

We stand against the most dangerous, the most fanatical enemy of German existence, of German honour and of the German reputation worldwide: against the Poles.

The Children's Strike in Września in 1901-1902 was an especially important moment in the history of Germanisation in the Prussian Partition. The schoolchildren in the town rebelled against new law, ordering the teachers to conduct religious education classes in German. Those who participated in the strike were flogged, and their parents were sentenced to jail in highly publicised trials. In a certain sense, the school strike that encompassed the Wielkopolska and Pomerania provinces in 1906 represented a continuation of this. It involved 70,000 pupils and was the largest protest of its sort in Europe.