More than Language: Secondary Education in the German-Polish Borderlands, 1919–1939

• In Event: League of Notions?: Local Agency, State Power, and International Institutions in Interwar East European Borderlands

Abstract

Nationalists have always shown interest in schools. Historians, following their lead, became keen chroniclers of school wars. Instructional language, religious education, and history or geography curricula, especially in primary education, received ample attention. Yet secondary education presented further challenges: access to post-elementary schools seemed to dictate whether a nation could prosper or remain oppressed. Without gymnasia, how could there be Polish lawyers and bureaucrats? Without a higher commercial school, would Slovene peasants always remain subjugated to German merchants? However, attending a gymnasium, especially in German, posed a risk of assimilation. Battles over secondary education thus expose the intersectional stratification of nationalism: nationalism was not devoid of class dynamics, entangling the fight over national identity and social opportunities. In interwar Central Europe, borderlands witnessed a new arena for waging these battles. The League of Nations patronized a Mixed Commission and Arbitral Tribunal willing to hear complaints of all sorts. Its archives demonstrate a wide variety: parental demands for extension over missed admissions deadlines, opportunistic attempts to circumnavigate reform through “court shopping,” and honest confusions about the definitions of “minority schools.” My paper focuses on cases from Upper Silesia. The cases will be used to analyze how a host of historical actors – parents, employers, nationalists, principals, and other stakeholders – sought to use this new forum for advancing their educational interests. That such petitions were invited, gathered, and collected offers a contribution to the history of school reform (not only nationalism) that is hard to reconstruct outside borderlands.

Author

• Orel Beilinson, Yale U