Religious Education in Polish Textbooks on the History of Education from the 19th Century and the Beginning of the 20th Century

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to show how religious education was portrayed in Polish textbooks on the history of education. The subject of the analysis are both the oldest publications of this kind, published in the second half of the 19th century and intended mainly for students of teachers’ seminars in Galicia, as well as later publications, intended also for university students. The adopted time perspective allows the author to indicate the main directions of change in the textbooks on the subject; the oldest textbook examined in the paper comes from 1868, while the most recent of the analysed publications were published before the outbreak of the Second World War.
The issues taken up in the paper include both the scope within which the matter of religious education was considered in textbooks, as well as the attitude of individual
authors towards religious education. Therefore, important here are not only issues concerning the selection of specific concepts, schools and educational activists propagating religious ideas in teaching and education, but also the form of their presentation. Crucial is also the question about the effect of various factors, e.g. the political situation or the development of historical and educational research, on the changes in the assessment of the religious education in its conceptual and practical aspect made by the authors of these studies.