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The Fundamentals of National Education
Zygmunt Balicki

2. Mother Tongue and Literature

The link between the generations and the living bond that joins contemporaries into a nation is the mother tongue. The young should feel and know that the language they speak serves not only to express thoughts, but also to express the soul of the nation; that in it, as in a mirror, are reflected its gift of observation, its methods of thought, the character of its feelings, and in general those special traits that give a distinctive form to its spiritual individuality. In the precision of language and speech lie the seeds of truth inherent in the mentality of the nation.

It has rightly been said that “the more perfect is a language, the harder it is to lie in it.” Through the mother tongue the young should learn that simplicity and integrity of expression which tolerates neither ambiguity, nor the stretching of concepts, nor intellectual charlatanism. Forcefulness, precision and vigour of phrasing form the best protection against verbosity in speech—that trait of small minds which so easily produces verbosity in action, a trait of small characters. Both defects share the same nature: the accumulation of data without substance, data that furnish no material for conclusions—the very beginning of all purposeful action.

That is why conciseness of speech is an unconscious exercise in the capacity for deed. Let us therefore train the young, through the old language, to reflect in their speech the traits of a healthy, growing nation, and above all let us teach them to feel the spirit of the language, not merely to know the rules of its correct forms.

If language is the means of expressing the soul of the nation, then national literature is the direct expression of that soul. Here, precisely, lies the field for cultivating in the young generation that subtle feeling, that even immediate intuition which at once enables them to recognise what in writing is the reflection of a soul unspoiled by anything alien, what is a thoughtless accretion and imitation, and what is its deviation and degeneration.

All the great works of world literature have reflected the spirit of the nations that produced them, and there are no monumental works that do not bear this stamp. Just as there is no beautiful landscape in painting that does not reproduce the distinctive nature of a particular time and place as seen through the prism of the artist’s soul, so there is no beauty in literature that is not a reflection of the distinctive national soul of its creator.

The great works of national literature, to a higher degree than any others, are the direct expression not only of the nation’s spirit but of its national thought; they contain an all-embracing synthesis of nation's beliefs, illuminating with the radiance of poetry the heights to which the creative thought of every successive generation ought to rise.

In literature, as in all human works, the mind of the young should seek not what is new, but what is imperishable and eternal, and should discover not what deserves criticism and awakens doubt, but what is worthy of admiration and awakens rapture. Then the youthful mind will uncover the true treasure contained in the literature of the Fatherland: it will come to know what, in life, in the works of man, in the human soul and in the soul of the nation, is worthy of love.

#patriotism

The Fundamentals of National Education
Zygmunt Balicki

1. A spiritual bond with one’s homeland

National upbringing requires of the individual a different attitude toward the Fatherland than treating it as something that exists outside our soul—despite all desire for the good of that Fatherland and condemnation of everything that strikes against it. The soul not only carries the Fatherland within itself, but also feels itself to be within her, joined to her by all its fibers and completely merging its own personality with her selfhood—and such a bond can be consolidated only when the layers of the national instinct reach down into the depths of the ancestral past.

“From the moment,” says A. Comte, “when one recognizes that one has common ancestors, when one knows of those dead who rule over us, from that moment one has a Fatherland.” The history of a nation ought to be the age-long carrying out of the testament left by those who gave their nation its personality among other nations in the form of a state and who traced the paths of its future.

The will of the dead ancestors animates the living: it must be fulfilled, and then the historical tasks of the nation will be fulfilled. Living relationship with the dead generations—that is what the history of the Fatherland should be for the young, if it is to form the real foundation of their patriotism, the pledge of their close union with that Fatherland which was, is, and will be.“The history of a nation is written in living letters in the souls of its citizens,” says one of the thinkers of the younger generation, Ludwik Posadzy.¹

Having reached into the depths of the soul, everyone can awaken those feelings that once stirred former generations.

For every human being is created in the image and likeness of the society in which he lives and carries its features within himself. Whoever is able to read the genesis of those features in himself possesses the rare gift of historical intuition.” To develop this historical intuition in the young generation, to make it relive the nation’s history together with the nation, to reconstruct its more important moments from memoirs, to portray with full plasticity the life, customs and beliefs, the labors and hopes of past generations, and against that background to engrave in its soul the age-old testament of the nation—this is not merely something more; it is something entirely different from teaching chronology and enumerating historical events.

The bond with the dead once included a bond with the earth in which their ashes rest. An analogous union of homeland studies with history ought to link, in the minds of the young, the native nature and the ancestral soil, the graves of the forefathers, the traces of ancient culture and the monuments of the past, the living people with their features of tribal heredity, their economic efforts, their civilizational achievements, their present struggles and cares—into one clear image of the Fatherland. And again, such knowledge of the country is something entirely different from the formal geography of the lands and dry information about the state of culture in those lands.

*¹ In his book: On the Mission of the European Nations. Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of France, Germany and Poland, Inowrocław, 1909.

#patriotism

The Discovery of the Mind - The Greek Origins of European Thought (1953)
Bruno Snell

#civilisation #philosophy

The Bright Ages - a New History of Medieval Europe (2021)
Matthew Gabriele & David M. Perry

Note: A new history of medieval Europe challenging the 'Dark Ages' narrative, highlighting cultural and intellectual achievements instead of darkness and ignorance

#middleages

The A to Z of Ethics (2010)
Harry J. Gensler & Earl W. Spurgin

#ethics

Harry J. Gensler & Earl W. Spurgin - The A to Z of Ethics (2010)

"And we, today we are with You, Lady, Lady I repeat, Mother of God, Virgin, and we turn our hearts toward the hope that You are for us, toward the strongest and most certain anchor! We offer You mind, heart, body, our entire selves, honoring You according to our strength with psalms, hymns, and songs full of spirit. If honor given to other servants is—as the Word of God teaches us—proof of love for our common Lord, then how can we not make the effort to honor You, Mother of the Lord? How can we not honor You? Shall we not place You above life itself, since You have given us Life? In this way, indeed, we will show our love for the Lord even better."

St. John of Damascus (+749) Homily on the Assumption of Our Lady, 14

#mary