Page 79 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

National Democrats in power in Warsaw, discrimination against Ukrainian-language schools

flourished. By 1924, the introduction of new school laws by the education minister Stanisław

Grabski effectively brought an end to state-funded Ukrainian-language schools and introduced

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nominally bilingual schools in which the Polish language was prioritized. But if Ukrainian
nationalists in Vienna and Ukrainian-speaking schoolteachers in Volhynia inevitably objected to

what they saw as the denationalizing techniques of a Polonizing state, Poles justified their policies by

falling back on the language of a natural and time-honored civilizing mission toward the proto-

national populations of the east. When they argued that state elementary schools would eliminate the

remnants of imperial backwardness that plagued all borderland inhabitants and instead provide

cultural uplift for Ruthenian and Polish children alike, they based their approach on the idea that they

were doing nothing less than returning Volhynia to its proper cultural position in the West. Stanisław

Grabski himself claimed that Poland’s eastern school policy was part of a mission that was explicitly

connected to broader Western principles, one in which non-Polish populations would naturally

recognize the superiority of Polish education. Evoking the language of competition that had long

been central to the Endecja’s vocabulary, Grabski argued at a meeting with the governors of the

eastern borderland provinces in 1925 that “victory will go to the highest, strongest culture,” and that

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“Polish culture will be a magnetic influence for the weaker culture of the national minorities.” In
this way, representatives of the government in Warsaw discussed how a civilizing mission would

continue the historic work of Poland in the east, erasing foreignness and importing Western

principles to the periphery.

37 By October 1925, it was reported that there were no “purely Ruthenian” schools left in Volhynia. “Protokół: obrad
na zjeździe wojewodów ziem wschodnich w dniu 19-20 października,” AAN MSW (Part 4) 10/44.
38 “Protokół: obrad na zjeździe wojewodów ziem wschodnich w dniu 19-20 października,” AAN MSW (Part 4)
10/45. Stanisław Grabski later defended his policies. See Grabski, Szkoła na ziemiach wschodnich: w obronie
ustawy szkolnej z 31 lipca 1924 r. (Warsaw, 1927).

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