In the Shadow of Russification, the School Strike of 1905 and World War I – Education in the Kingdom of Poland at the Turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries in the Light of Manuscript Sources from the Collection of the National Library (Selected Problems)

Abstract

The aim of the article is to present the effect of socio-political changes taking place in the Kingdom of Poland at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries on the course of the educational processes of children and young people of school age. It was a period of increased Russification, intensified homeschooling, the school strike of 1905 and the related development of Polish private schools, and finally, the outbreak of World War I, which destabilised the education of many students. The source database for the article are the unpublished diaries from the collection of the National Library in Warsaw. 29 manuscripts were selected which met the main selection criterion – their authors were educated in the period from the 1890s to the time World War I ended in the territories of the Russian partition. These authors represent various social groups, from peasants', workers' and craftsmen's families to the intelligentsia and landed gentry, which allows for a broader comparison of the specificity of the models of education preferred and practised by them. The analysis of the source material included both homeschooling and institutional education. The analysed memoirs are documents of a private and personal nature, which subjectively present their authors' experiences in the context of political and social changes at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, including the manifestations of modernity characteristic of that period, often standing in contradiction of sorts with nostalgia for the tradition of the past.