Kathryn Ward
Warsaw, Summer 2008
With the financial support provided by a CREEES Travel and Research Grant, I was able to spend a month in Warsaw carrying out dissertation research.
My dissertation focuses on state and non-state educational organizations in the villages of Poland’s ethnically-mixed south-eastern borderlands (kresy) between 1918 and 1939. The lands I study were home to a mosaic of national, ethnic, and religious groups, which included Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, Germans, Russians, and Czechs. These areas, particularly the rural localities I focus upon, were viewed as potentially unstable territories with ethnically-diverse, poor, uneducated, and “backward” populations. In addition to securing the borderlands through military strength, the interwar Polish state attempted to integrate these lands by “educating” the local populations and encouraging them to be “loyal” Polish citizens.
By studying educational institutions and organizations, including schools, scouting groups, youth clubs, summer camps, and teachers’ unions (and the individuals who were involved in running them), I will explore the experiences of both rural teachers and the communities they were supposed to serve. My project thus marks a shift away from the prevailing focus on political and intellectual projects for the borderlands and towards an exploration of how elite ideas were – and, indeed, were not – executed “on the ground.” The dissertation will therefore tell the story of how children, teachers, and adult villagers interacted on a day-to-day level in a multiethnic borderland. I plan to use school inspection reports, teaching personnel files, and school board records to get as close as possible to the interwar experiences of these largely forgotten villages.
My work at the Warsaw University library this summer mainly involved reading educational journals and school board bulletins for the south-eastern kresy. The educational journals gave me a sense of the priorities of interwar educational policies – the focus on physical, moral, and military strength (and the links between them); the interest in hygiene; the sense that education in rural areas, for both children and adults, was necessary for the security of the state; and the significant participation of non-state organizations in the activities of state-run schools. The journals also suggest the idealized image of the rural teacher that was propagated in interwar Poland. He or she was responsible not only for the moral, physical, and intellectual upbringing of children and young people, but also for the eradication of illiteracy among the adult population and the organization of state festivals. The model rural teacher provided the link between the world of the village and that of the modern state.
The journals and school board bulletins also reveal just how difficult it was to achieve these ideals. Alongside praise for the work of the rural teacher in the south-eastern school districts one finds alarming reports of failure, including articles about teachers who did not fulfill their rural duties, or who alienated local parents through their unwise involvement in party-politics. The school board bulletins tell stories of anxiety and panic, in which local conditions in war-torn rural districts severely limited efforts to create enlightened rural populations.
These reports have taken me several steps closer to understanding the experiences of teachers, young people, and adult villagers in these areas. They have also allowed me to gain a better understanding of what to search for in the archives. That archival work, the next step in my research, will take me even closer to the experiences of these villages and will, in turn, allow me to engage with larger questions about education, nationalism, and the role of teachers in rural and multiethnic societies.
I would like to thank CREEES for the ongoing support for my project, and for making my summer research in Warsaw possible.