The Persistent Legacy of the Fallen Empires: Assessing the Effects of Poland’s Historical Partitions on Contemporary Social Norms Towards Education

Abstract

"This paper refers to the historical experience of Poland to demonstrate the importance of former institutions on present regional differences in the norms towards education. Previous studies revealed significant gaps between the school achievements of students in different regions in Poland, ones that correspond to the 19th-century partition of the country by its three neighbours: Austria, Prussia, and Russia. In particular, students in the former Austrian partition perform better compared to the two other regions. In this study, a self-designed survey of parents is used to operationalize different kinds of norms towards education. As it turns out, parents from the region formerly under Austrian rule show more trust in educational institutions, more belief in the formative role of schooling, and less conviction in the material returns from education. The results show that contemporary interpretation of school achievements, as well as the design of educational policy should not be limited to material inputs, but it needs to take into account a broader cultural context of education."