Jak wprowadzać uczniów w kulturę polską i europejską? Wiedza a tożsamość

Abstract

Answering the question posed in the title, the author assumes that the introduction in the field of knowledge will be taking place truly and honestly owing to the scientific knowledge, e.g. about the original context, with consideration of numerous sources of the European culture, reading original works in different contexts. In the field of identity, on the other hand, the introduction will take place without religious ideologization of traditions together with abandoning the religious stance for the sake of the exploratory one. Formerly Polish knowledge and identity were intertwined into the service of the communist ideology and currently they dangerously yield to the religious ideology. The phenomenon manifests itself through the choice of literary works of art, reading them in the religious stance, omission of vast areas of knowledge and almost automatically defining the foundations of the European culture as Christian. The author abandons old metaphors of bases, foundations and sources for the sake of understanding knowledge as schemas, scenarios and frameworks. As frameworks or grounds of Polish language education which forms knowledge-based cultural identity of students he enumerates: 1. the notion of Europe and the sources/roots of the European culture not reduced to Christianity combined with the Greek and Roman cultures; 2. Indo- European heritage combined with Hindu Vedas; 3. pre-Christian Polish and Slavic culture, paganism; 4. familiarization with pagan mythologies: Polish, Slavic, Germanic, Celtic; 5. Western components of the European culture: Asian, Jewish, Islamic, Arab; 6. millennia of the existence of Byzantium whose absence creates a huge gap in our knowledge; 7. the notion of Mediterranean culture (also encompassing the eastern and northern shores of Africa: Egyptian, Libyan and Moroccan).