The history textbooks in the face of the reform of the education system. The challenges of selecting content

Abstract

At Polish schools textbooks are an important part of the accoutrements of both students and teachers. More often than not the teachers submit to the content of the textbook. Thus one can observe it being used as an informal curriculum. The fundamental problems of historical education thusly continue to be: the selection, hierarchisation and systematization of the content. It is impossible to teach methodology and research techniques without the background provided by factual information. The criterion for choosing facts should be the continuity of phenomena in modern culture and social reality as well as their presence among the employed codes and the accepted systems of values. The question of the number of terms and phenomena crucial for creating ideas allowing for the understanding of the past constantly returns as a vital problem to be tackled as without resolving it the very usefulness of teaching history becomes dubitable. The new core curriculum outlines what the textbooks should include, however, it is a relatively terse document which only hints at what the obligatory content is. An analysis of the ministerial document’s entries proves that the expectations towards the content are a complete enigma to the authors of the textbooks. The authors of the core curriculum proclaim a departure from learning encyclopedic knowledge by heart. The student, however, will not be able to acquire higher level skills without using factual information and terms and establishing their own system of ideas. This is why the promises that the core curriculum will provide clear expectations from schools and explain the examination requirements have not been fulfilled.

And overview of selected fragments of seven textbooks has shown that the narration in most of them was built from identical or very similar elements, however, the authors of some of them selected different strands for their book or shortened it considerably. My conclusions are meant to show that the decisions as to the chosen events and the narration, just like earlier, remain in the hands of the textbook authors and the first criterion of evaluating the books is still the factual content.