O "czytaniu" dzieła malarskiego w szkole - inspiracje, kontynuacje, zaniechania

Abstract

Discussing painting masterpieces has been a fixed component of Polish teaching for over a century, and has many times become the subject of educational theoreticians’ and practitioners’ reflections. A remarkably important contribution to the topic was made by the didactics of the 1920s and 1930s. On the one hand, the present article is a critical review of the most important achievements of that period. For this purpose, the author conducted a detailed analysis of all traces of painting in the 1920s-1930s Polish language education, namely in syllabuses, textbooks, and all kinds of publications by educational theoreticians and practitioners. On the other hand, the article is an attempt to answer the challenge of the modern school. A glance at the past serves the purpose of justifying the new solutions, offered within the modern “visual artwork didactics”, as no new concept of employing painting artworks (and other texts of culture) in teaching Polish should be detached from its tradition. On the contrary, each such concept must be rooted in this tradition, or must be inscribed in it, even by means of confrontation, at least for the sake of finding additional evidence that certain solutions cannot be preserved in school any longer. The review of the achievements of the “old masters”, carried out from the perspective of the 21st century, is to show: which part of this legacy is the most important and universal; which part has been – unfortunately – forgotten, even though it should not; and which part could become (and sometimes becomes) an inspiration for the authors of syllabuses and textbooks, and for the theoreticians of didactics, and what could serve (and sometimes does serve) as an argument in disputes on the role of painting in cultural-literary education.