An issue of the magazine "Polska" devoted entirely to the Hutsul Region, which - as it is stated in the introduction - is the Kosiv and Nadwórnia districts within the Republic. In the issue, the Hutsul community is described quite vividly, the terrain of the area, and every major centre is mentioned; the Hutsul countryside is also comprehensively described. The issue contains numerous illustrations of, among others, everyday items typical for the Hutsul highlanders (e.g. pottery), buildings, and also open-air locations (Source: "Polska", Warsaw 1935, R: 1, No. 9, after: Jagiellonian Digital Library).

A modernised reading of the text

History of education in Poland.

Pagan Poland had neither writing nor scriptwriting, and it was only the adoption of Christianity from Rome that gave rise to education in the country, uniting us for centuries with the culture of Western Europe. In those days there were no secular colleges in the West, and only cathedrals, churches and monasteries established schools to prepare young people for the clergy.

Similar schools were also established in our country, but their role was even more modest for the time being, as the clergy was foreign and could only teach in Latin, a language inaccessible to the general public. It is even difficult to imagine today how primitive this teaching was. Young people sat on the bare ground in summer and on bundles of straw in winter. The pupils had neither books nor exercise-books; they learnt from a handwritten Latin psalter, the only valuable copy of which was in the possession of the teacher: a bishop, a priest or a simple monk, often unfamiliar with Polish and often learning it himself at the same time.

In addition, young people learned calculus and, above all, practised singing church songs. Under these conditions, it was not easy to learn to read and write well, and even the rulers could barely sign their names, which is why seals played such an important role in those times. Those who were more able, more affluent and more thirsty for knowledge travelled abroad to acquire it. During the reigns of Wladyslaw Herman and Boleslaw the Wrymouth, we already meet many priests of Polish origin, and under the influence of these clerics, schools began to rise and develop.

Particularly auspicious for education was the reign of Casimir the Just, who himself received a proper education. Its focal point became the cathedral schools, among which the Kraków school, famous throughout the country, stood supreme. Until the 16th century, the literary language was exclusively Latin, both in Europe and in Poland. The monks in the monasteries wrote down in Latin on the edges of parchment pages, which were a kind of calendars with a list of the movable festivals in the middle, in the order of time, all the news, events and contemporary events, and these notes gave rise to the "Yearbooks", the first historical writings in our region and the oldest literary monuments, such as the "Świętokrzyski Yearbook" from the 12th century.

Church songs were also written down in monasteries, and as a result the ancient hymn "Bogurodzica", which was supposedly composed by St. Adalbert and sung by the Polish knights before battle over many centuries, has been preserved with its melody. The awakening of religious feeling in Poland in the 13th century introduces systematic school facilities, supported by the Church. The development of schools at collegiate and parish churches was slow, and Christian education, but in the Polish language, took root more and more deeply among the Polish people.

The turnaround came, however, only when, in 1364, Casimir the Great established an Academy in Krakow, modelled on the Italian University of Bologna, where the law was held in high regard. The wars and constant disputes with the Teutonic Knights created the need for numerous and able lawyers, well versed in Roman law. In addition to the Faculty of Law, there was a Faculty of Medicine and a Faculty of Philosophy, but no Faculty of Theology, because the Pope, fearing that some heresy might arise at such a distance from Rome, did not give his consent to its establishment. This university was, apart from Prague, the oldest in Central Europe.

Unfortunately, six years after its opening, the great monarch closed his eyes, and with his death, his beloved child - the University of Cracow - began to decline. The Academy was raised by the arrival in Poland of Queen Jadwiga, the most beautiful person in our history, who, although she did not reign long, shone like a golden meteor in the sky with a radiance so beautiful and luminous that the memory of her sacrificial life remained forever in the souls of the whole nation, surrounding her with a halo of holiness and love.

Jadwiga's marriage to Jagiełło and the union of Poland with pagan Lithuania, which had yet to be converted, resulted in the need to have many priests and officials to strengthen the faith and bring order to the vast united lands. For her apostolic mission, Jadwiga obtained permission in Rome to establish a theological faculty and bequeathed all her valuables and jewels to the Academy. After her untimely death, King Władysław Jagiełło took further care of the Academy, donating part of the income from the salt mines in Wieliczka, as well as further foundations.

This first university in Eastern Europe opened its welcoming doors to all nations, fulfilling an enormous civilising role not only in Poland, but also in neighbouring countries. Naturally, it was dominated by Polish students, but it was also crowded with Lithuanians, Hungarians, Germans, Czechs, and quite often students from distant countries, such as Scandinavia and even Switzerland. Academic life in Cracow was so flourishing that in the 15th century the University of Cracow became one of the first in Europe. Scholars from foreign universities flocked to it, attracted by the fame of the Polish school.

At the great Councils of Constance and Basel, the theologians of Cracow founded the solemnity of their homeland, successfully defending its rights against the Teutonic Knights' charms. The greatest heyday of the Jagiellonian University was during the reign of Kazimierz Jagiellon. Thousands of students, known as "scholars", graduating from it, provided the country with numerous educated clergy and enlightened teachers, the so-called "bachelors", as a result of which even parochial schools gained some ground, so that their network covered the whole of Poland, and so the "Alma Mater", or "Mother of All", was called the Cracow University. During this period, a new current called humanism came from Italy to Poland, which, based on ancient Greek and Roman culture, brought about a great flowering of learning and writing.

The Viscounty, which opposed it, became a battleground between the old scholastic direction and the new, revivalist one. However, the victory of the scholastics led to the decline of the Wszechnica, and a whole series of new private colleges sprang up in the country, with the Poznań school at the forefront of these, maintained by the local Bishop Lubrański, while in subsequent years the Zamojska Academy, founded by Hetman Jan Zamojski, and the Vilnius Academy, founded by the Jesuits, became famous.

During the reigns of Sigismund I and Sigismund Augustus, science, literature and education reached the zenith of their splendour, so that for many centuries to come they would shine with the excellence of their works, and this period is called the "Golden Age". There were many reasons for this, not least the discovery and development of the art of printing, which made the book accessible to everyone. In 1470, the first printing works was established in Poland, which also had a great impact on the development of intellectual life in the country.

The first poet from this period to write in Polish was our kind-hearted Mikołaj Rej from Nagłowice, who, convinced that Poles should write in Polish, said explicitly in one of his later works:

"And let the nations know that Poles are not geese, that they have their own language".

In a series of paintings entitled "The History of Civilisation in Poland", the great Polish historical painter Jan Matejko visually commemorated this great epoch in the flowering of knowledge and writing.

The political collapse of the country at the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th centuries. - Swedish, Cossack, Muscovite and Turkish wars, internal unrest, religious disputes caused by Luther's reformation during the reign of the Vasa dynasty and subsequent electoral kings, and especially during the reign of the Saxon dynasty, which was alien and indifferent to Polish culture, caused a decline in morality, education and schooling in Poland.

The nobility, forced to constantly hold a sabre in their hands, had no time to grab a pen. The ravaged towns were incapable of sustaining a mental movement. Parish schools in villages and towns disappeared completely. The stagnation in education was not conducive to the awakening of talent. Fervour and interest in science and the arts were extinguished amid dangers, anxieties and worries.

However, the merciful fates sent us a providential man - a saviour whose name should be written in golden letters in the book of spiritual life in our history, and that was Father Stanislaus Konarski, a young scholar who, having donned the monastic robe of the Piarists, and returned from his studies abroad, realised that, in order to revive a disenchanted generation, it was necessary to breathe into its young people a new spirit of love for the homeland, knowledge and duty, and to develop in them the fortitude of will.

This mission was to be fulfilled by the Piarist-run "Collegium Nobilium", a scholarly institution that he founded in 1740, in which, in contrast to the Latin-obscured schooling of the time, he ordered physics, law, modern languages etc. to be taught, giving all lectures a social and national character. The growing Russian influence in the country opened the eyes of all the healthier-minded, encouraging resistance. When Pope Clement XIV abolished the Jesuit order in 1773, by a parliamentary resolution the Jesuit funds and estates were allocated to national education, establishing the "Educational Commission", which was the first ministry of education anywhere in the world.

It reformed the two crumbling universities of Kraków and Vilnius, and all schools from the highest to the lowest, established teachers' seminaries, and introduced the Polish language as the language of instruction everywhere. The "Society of Elementary Books", which was set up, had as its duty the publication of model school textbooks. This was presided over by Ignacy Potocki, and the implementation of these laws was overseen by the secretary of the Commission, Father Grzegorz Piramowicz, who is today's Minister of Education.

The library named after the Załuski brothers, the bishops, and the patronage of King Stanislaus Augustus, whose personal influence affected all strata of society, contributed a great deal to raising education and intensifying the literary movement. Endowed with a great sense of beauty, a passion for the arts and an understanding of the value of education, Stanislaus Augustus supported educational reform and himself founded the first secular school in Warsaw, the so-called "Knights' School", a kind of Cadet Corps, where T. Kościuszko was also educated.

There, the sons of indigent nobility, at the expense of the state, practised the art of war and drill, and studied fortification and strategy. Thanks to all this, the level of general education and national-political awareness rose quickly and, for those times, incredibly high, as evidenced by the fabled May 3rd Constitution. Unfortunately, its adoption aroused fear and opposition among our three enemies - our neighbours - precipitating the second partition of Poland.

Fearful lest the prey they wanted should slip through their fingers, they quickly annihilated all the efforts of the patriots, committing one of the greatest rapes the world has ever known on the living flesh of our homeland, after which each of the three partitions separately experienced Gehenna. Poland as a state collapsed, but the work of the last years of independence was not in vain, serving as a basis for national existence through the long years of captivity.

The strongest oppression occurred initially under the Prussian partition. Although it then diminished somewhat, but after the victorious war with France in 1871, it became more acute again under the influence of the development of German nationalism, which aimed at the complete Germanisation of the Poles, manifested in the struggle against the Catholic Church under the name of "Kulturkampf".

Even catechism lectures had to be given in German, and when children were ordered to say their prayers before lessons in German, a revolt broke out among several thousand Polish children, who were then tortured by their inhuman teachers, ending with the world-famous trial in Września in 1901. For the time being, the history of our education and culture under the Russian partition took a different course. Emperor Alexander I, wishing to pass himself off as a liberal in the face of Western Europe's course at that time, and to win the Poles over to his side in the hope that they would also attract their fellow countrymen from the neighbouring partitions, began to pursue a policy of tolerance, kindness and goodwill.

Seeing Poland's cultural superiority over semi-wild Russia, he appointed Father Adam Czartoryski, an alumnus of the Educational Commission, as superintendent, and, following its example, wished to reform schooling throughout his empire. The first role within this plan fell to the University of Vilnius, which fulfilled it superbly, becoming a radiant centre of educational work in the post-partition period. The second focal point of Polishness in the eastern areas of the Russian partition was the famous Krzemieniec Lyceum in Volhynia, founded by the inspector Tadeusz Czacki - with the covert participation, assistance and enlightened advice of the experienced education expert Hugo Kołłątaj.

However, this renaissance of Polish education was short-lived. After Napoleon's defeat, the Tsar quickly retreated from his constitutional intentions. For Muscovite nationalism, panting with hatred of Western civilisation, the autonomy of Polish higher education institutions was an unbearable anomaly. The discovery of a secret student organisation by the cynical Novosilcov's investigative committee served as a pretext for the persecution and restriction of university self-government in 1823. In 1832, Vilnius University was closed down.

A similar fate befell the Liceum Krzemienieckie, as well as the newly opened in 1816. Warsaw University, which after only a few years of existence ends its ephemeral life. The Piarist schools, so favoured by the nobility as 'seedbeds of rebellion', were closed down, and many others were converted into government schools and subjected to strict police supervision. The unsuccessful course of the Crimean War shook Russia's absolutism, and the result was the appointment of Aleksander count Wielopolski as director of the Government Commission, who set about vigorously reviving education.

His greatest work was the re-establishment of a university in Warsaw under the name of the Main School, but the ruthlessness of his conciliatory policy, instead of improving relations in the country, led to the tragedy of the January Rising, after the fall of which the most severe reaction once again took the upper hand. The cruel Muraviev's rule in Lithuania exterminated Polishness not only by gallows, imprisonment, exile or expropriation, but also by a series of spiritual tortures, such as: closing down gymnasiums, printing houses and the press, eliminating the Polish language from schools and public places, severely punishing private teaching, russifying religious services, removing Polish teachers and officials, and, finally, inundating the country with textbooks that lied and slandered the nation's past.

The same policy in the Kingdom was led by the notorious Superintendent Apukhtin, harassing Poles at every turn and issuing a series of laws, the culmination of all this persecution. However, the defensive stance of our society effectively paralysed all the impostors, and when the revolutionary turmoil following the defeat in the Japanese War spread to us, the slogan of the Polishisation of schools was put forward, and a spontaneous strike of schoolchildren broke out on 28 January 1905, which won the victory of the private Polish schools.

The Great War and the German occupation gave us certain freedoms in the field of education, and the establishment of the free Polish state opened up wonderful horizons for the development and work of education and the realisation of broad ideas and plans. In Lesser Poland, the partitions found education in a state of final distress, as the beneficent influence of the Educational Commission had not yet managed to reach there, so the Austrian government set about sharply to make the neglected country happy in its German way. It was not until the granting of constitutional liberties to the Slavic peoples in 1867 and the abandonment of Germanisation that the spirit and arms were unclenched and the wings given to the arms, that the Polish-language Universities of Krakow and Lviv began to flourish.

The Academy of Arts and Sciences (Akademia Umiejętności), the highest institution of Polish culture, was created with joint efforts, taking the place of the former Scientific Society. The reborn Poland paid special attention to raising education in the country as soon as possible, and the Constitution guaranteed special rights to knowledge for the whole of society. Thus, in accordance with this intention, the whole area of our land - from the mountains to the sea - was soon covered densely with a multitude of common schools. Numerous secondary and vocational schools were established in rapid succession, and the dozen or so higher academies are, as it were, the crown of the whole.

The number of school children and young people is very considerable, as in 1933/34 there were more than 5 million of them attending schools and universities. However, there are eight million Poles abroad, and the upbringing of their youth in the Polish spirit is an extremely important concern of the whole Polish nation. To this end, there is a special Polish Education Abroad Fund whose task is to bring education to those hundreds of thousands of Polish young people who are so dear to our hearts.