Page 184 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

promote this vision of mutual exchange. Polish children, he argued, should have to learn about the

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histories and cultures of Poland’s minorities, as well as the other way around.

At the same time as they disagreed on the precise content of the school curriculum and the

relative influence of the Roman Catholic Church, however, Sanacja activists and their ideological

enemies on the right shared a wider assumption that local people could be protected from damaging

political influences (however defined) only after illiteracy and other symptoms of rural backwardness

had been eradicated. When one of the Volhynian leaders of the pro-Endecja Polish Motherland

Schools organization (Polska Macierz Szkolna) wrote that “the kresy population, consisting in a

significant measure of illiterates with a low cultural level, is very susceptible material to the

influence coming from the east,” the basic sentiment was not substantially different to that espoused

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by Sanacja officials. The latter also believed that eradicating the interlinked phenomena of
illiteracy, physical slovenliness, and ignorance would allow for the creation of a new type of rural

citizen. As an article in the Volhynian Review put it in 1931, the lack of elementary schools meant

that in some counties barely 15 to 20% of school-age children attended school, and the province

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risked a “flood of illiteracy” that would constitute a “disaster” in areas bordering the Soviet Union.

Even in the late 1930s, one supporter of Józewski reported that around 40% of Ukrainian school-age

children did not attend school and he reminded his readers that “in a modern state, illiterates are not a

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positive element.”

Proponents of education, both here and across Poland, also argued that rural schools could

create modern citizens by inculcating children with an appreciation for hygiene and sanitation, a key

metric by which state officials measured levels of civilization. After all, available statistics

71 Tomiak, “Education of the Non-Dominant Ethnic Groups,” 189.
72 Tadeusz Krzyżanowski, “Zagadnienia kulturalno-oświatowe na Kresach Wschodnich,” Oświata Polska no. 3
(1929), 151.
73 “Katastrofalny stan powszechnego nauczania na Wołyniu,” Przegląd Wołyński, 22 February, 1931, 5.
74 Joachim Wołoszynowski, Nasz Wołyń (obserwacje i rozważania) (Łuck, 1937), 19.

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