The fathers of Polish independence pre-their hipster mustaches
The biggest problem with history teaching in any state is that it is tied to the history of a state. This should not be surprising as each state bureaucracy, particularly ones with little or no ethnic legitimacy, tries to justify its existence. However, in a nation-state such an approach is completely unnecessary. Thus, for example, if you look at the “History of Poland” the very topic is ridiculous. What is Poland? It is either an administrative governance unit – currently part of a so-called European Union (itself an administrative unit tied only to a specific geography) – or it is a nation-state.
In the former case, it is unnecessary – certainly few people would have created a governance unit along the border lines picked for current Polish boundaries (the product of Yalta and the Soviets). That area can certainly be (and has been) sliced up in many different ways – some of them making infinitely more sense than the current set up (for example, why not a country that runs all along the Norther European plain from Holland to Belarus but leaves out the mountains of southern Germany and the Polish Carpathians?).
But in the latter case the history of Poland is only relevant as a history of Poles. Poland existed in many different shapes and forms and sometimes did not exist at all. The Poland of the Commonwealth time was both a powerhouse and a disease in political form that effectively enslaved the vast majority of its population and that, unsurprisingly, found its doom, falling a victim to democracy understood by its elites (such understanding coming with the generous intellectual underpinning delivered by its neighbors) as a sordid anarchy.
Instead, what matters to the consciousness of its people are the family ties among them – and the history of that family – not the existence, misexistence or nonexistence of a political bureaucracy. The history of the state Poland should, therefore, be a secondary topic in history teaching in Polish schools – an appendage of the teaching about the Polish nation.
One might even argue that the existence of a state makes for a competitor (and a jealously monopolistic one at that) in the area of history writing to the local sages and teachers. For example, in the Soviet Union, history was just Marxist nonsense spewed forth to justify the existence of an oppressive and misshapen political unit whereas the teaching of, say, Lithuanian, history was forbidden.
Šafarik
The state also makes its people lethargic in that they might be inclined to feel that they can outsource history writing to the state’s bureaucracy. But a lack of a state can have a powerful motivational effect. It should be of little surprise that some of the greatest Slavists – Šafarik, Kętrzyński, the Bogusławskis wrote during times when neither Czechia nor Slovakia nor Poland existed and when their existence was nowhere in sight. Look also at the Sorbs who haven’t had freedom since the middle of the 10th century and yet, to this day, they persist. Don’t get me wrong the nation-state is an important product of the existence of each underlying nation – but it should never be forgotten that the state is a product of that specific nation and should not be an end of itself – otherwise the bureaucrats take over the story.
Kętrzyński
In the Polish case, Suavs existed long before the name Poland appeared on any maps and such Suavic Poles persisted despite the appearance, disappearance and reappearance of a Polish state. Poland, therefore, is, in reality, not a state but a people. The same can be said of Czechia, Slovenia, Lithuania and, of course, many others. And if all such people are to find a good and prosperous future, the teaching of history in each such state should be a teaching of a story about a people and their ties – whether that is done by the state or by others.
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