Page 190 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

Based on these assumptions, Paszkiewicz offered a broader case for the critical role of the

state in the life of the rural child, as well as for the significance of these children in the state project.

It was the schoolhouse, he believed, that offered to break the vicious circle by which negative

characteristics were passed down from generation to generation. As he cautioned his readers, this

undertaking would not be easy. Having been influenced by parents who had taken part in

denunciations during the war and postwar borderland conflicts, children tended to trust neither their

teachers nor their classmates, and the sharp contrast between a child’s home life and the conditions at

school, with its excess of new and strange impressions, admittedly meant that “the first day of school

95
shocks the little savage (dzikus).” And yet, despite these hurdles, Paszkiewicz went on, the

schoolteacher could transform savages into citizens. The Volhynian child, he stated in the last

sentence of his chapter, “undoubtedly possesses advantages of character and uncommon intellectual

96
abilities” and would provide “a valuable type of citizen for society and the state.” Photographs of

Volhynian youngsters (Figure 5.2), who were dressed in their best clothes and sported neatly parted

or closely cropped hair (for girls and boys, respectively), also suggested their roles as future citizens.

[INSERT FIGURE 5.2]

Figure 5.2: Volhynian children. Source: Maria Librachowa (ed.), Dziecko wsi polskiej: próba
charakterystyki (Warsaw, 1934).

CIVILIZING SITES (II): THE MODEL OUTPOST

The schoolhouse was not, however, the only rural location that provided a site for the state’s

civilizing mission in the east. Instead, in an area where demographically Jewish towns provided

somewhat ambiguous centers of modernity (at least in the eyes of Polish elites), model rural

settlements offered an alternative type of civilized space. In particular, two incoming Polish groups

95 Ibid., 245.
96 Ibid., 254.

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