Tartakowsky, Ewa
Teaching History in Poland since 2017
- 2020.
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This analysis of a corpus of textbooks and of the history curriculum introduced by a reform in 2017 brings the historical narrative prescribed for Polish schools under question. It shows how this narrative articulates and interferes with the “politics of history” of the Law and Justice Party (PiS), which has held power since 2015. There is a qualitative crystallization of a national ethnoreligious discourse and of a single – martyrological and heroic – narrative about history. This marks a break with both the “education in shame” supposedly promoted by previous government and with the advances made in what is called “critical history,” which takes account both of other elements than those related to a Polish Catholic identity and of Polish society’s “unglorious” past.