Teaching the nation: history and nationalism in Polish school history education

This article aims to analyse Polish history teachers’ understanding of the role of teaching history. Drawing on the results of qualitative research conducted in Wroclaw, we argue that teachers see history education through the prism of nationalism. Teachers construct the past in equivocally nationalist terms. They regard nationalist representations of the past as taken for granted. Moreover, teachers reproduce a dominant nationalist discourse by using history to promote the idea of the homogeneous nation. We argue that teachers see their role primarily in terms of imposing the dominant structures of collective memory on the pupils. We also discuss the differences between teachers pertaining to the understanding of the concept of the nation, the way of teaching Polish history and the type of obligation towards the nation. We also demonstrate that teachers do not see a contradiction between history defined as an objective science and history understood as a ‘nationalising’ tool.