8. KULTURA: Education and the Cultural Heritage
Culture, literally, is that which can be cultivated. In the biological world, it
is concerned with plants that can be grown in the fields, or with enzymes and
bacteria which can be grown in the laboratory. In human affairs, it refers to the
sum total of attitudes, beliefs, principles, values, assumptions, reflexes, tastes,
mental habits, skills, and achievements which distinguish one society from
another, and which can be transmitted from one generation to the next. In the
life of the Polish nation, and of others like it, it is the most precious part of the
national heritage. It is the one thing which gives the promise of eternity.^1
Historians rarely agree on the nature and springs of culture. Christian and
post-Christian writers often imply that it is something akin to the soul of the
individual — something innate, mysteriously endowed by God, inimitable,
insubstantial, but unmistakable. Marxists hold that it is an emanation of
socio-economic forces - the highest product of the particular stage of develop-
ment which society has reached, believing that feudal, capitalist, or socialist
cultures possess material and organizational attributes as well as artistic and
intellectual ones. The pseudo-psychological and the sociological schools of his-
tory tend to suggest that culture can be measured, described in questionnaires,
and reduced to 'models'. Everyone agrees, however, that it provides a prime
area for social and political conflict. Every social group wishes to educate its
children in its own image. Every nation seeks to preserve its values from out-
side intervention. Every government hopes to lead its subjects into the paths
of loyalty and mutual concord. In the Polish lands, where the population
was conscious of belonging simultaneously to different classes, nations, and
states, it was sure to be subjected to a wide variety of competing cultural
claims.
In the lives of those people who were conscious of their separate Polish ident-
ity, the struggle to safeguard and expand the nation's culture was unrelenting.
In a country whose political independence had already been undermined in the
mid-eighteenth century, it often constituted the last line of defence. It was
directed at two groups in particular - to the educated minority, whose national
consciousness was well developed, and to the uneducated masses, whose aware-
ness of national or political allegiances had still to be awakened. It concentrated
on two interrelated campaigns - on the nurture of the Polish language, and on
the education of children.