ABSTRACT
Republic and that had shaped early American literacy education (Shannon, 2001).
In Poland, literacy education has, for the last 200 years, been intimately connected to “freedom” and nation-building. Prior to 1918, when the Polish state was brought back into political existence by the Treaty of Versailles after a 124-year absence from the map of Europe, Poland did not have a national education system. Throughout Poland’s turbulent history, literacy education has served as a vehicle for a variety of historical and ideological projects: denationalization under foreign occupation; preservation of collective memory and struggle for political freedom and national liberation (in the Polish context, the two were usually conflated); political and cultural reconstruction (most recently in 1919, 1945, and after 1989); and ideological transformation (after 1949, with the advent of Stalinism, and after 1989, following the democratic transition) (Axer, 2007). During periods of foreign occupation, school literacy education typically served the interests of foreign empires, while during the real-socialist period it was the vehicle of ideological indoctrination; in both cases, school literacy contrasted with the national tradition preserved, also largely through literacy, in the home (as well as in samizdat publications and clandestine teaching) (Axer, 2007). In this sense also, Poland’s situation, at least as far as literacy education is concerned, may be regarded as “post-colonial.” For historical reasons, the subject “Polish” has, over the last century, been central to the elementary and secondary education curriculum (unlike in the United States, there has never been systematic instruction in reading and writing in higher education) in terms of the total number of instructional hours, the volume of applicable official directives and guidelines, and the number of textbook editions. This curriculum has traditionally consisted of three major components: reading and literature, the study of language, and speech and writing. Pedagogically, the system was characterized by integration, gradation, and continuity, with the overarching aim to develop facility, fluency, appropriateness, and correctness in the native language (Kijas, 1968). While the general framework of this curriculum changed little between the 1930s and the 1990s, after 1949 all of its components received a strong ideological inflection as literacy education became the primary vehicle for the transformation of consciousness in the service of the Marxist-Leninist state.
