Threats Related to Patriotic Education. An Analysis of the Primary School Textbooks

Abstract

The article presents the issue of patriotic discourse in school textbooks for teaching Polish for grades 4–8 of primary schools. At the same time, this issue is placed in the aspect of recent changes in education made and announced by the minister of science and education. The analysis of the textbooks carried out using the KAD method shows that, although we constantly deal with a romantic vision of patriotism due to the canon of reading, it is sometimes broken through reflection on historical events and the past. The martyrdom tendency, formed in the period of Romanticism, is still the dominant one, the presence of which is part of the paradigm of the long duration of Romanticism. The article also addresses what patriotic education at school should be today. Not only today, but for a long time now, we have been dealing with a tendency to produce and reproduce a conservative discourse and be closed within a martyrological narrative. This way of understanding patriotism today may lead young people to consider any form of patriotism as anachronistic and inadequate to our times.