The Unhappy Polish Teacher and the Fluid Modernity

Abstract

The main thesis of the article is the conviction that the efficiency of Polish teachers’ influence on their students depends on several factors, including the following: restoring the readers’ commitment by making literature classes more attractive, enriching teaching styles during Polish classes, introducing new theoretical literary ideas into the school practice and creating a dictionary of intersemiotic poetics. The author presents the state of readership in Poland as a starting point for finding the reasons for the crisis of Polish teaching at school. Moreover, he shows various social, cultural and civilisational contexts which have changed the position of the Polish language classes in the hierarchy of importance of school subjects. However, the main issue here is the problem of the effective use of various theoretical literary interpretations in order to increase the attractiveness of reading the books from the obligatory reading list, as well as other cultural texts. It seems particularly relevant to convince teachers of the importance of their theoretical and methodological competences, allowing for the new styles of reading in the pedagogical practice. The article outlines selected directions of research and their possible pedagogical applicability. It also emphasises that in the “No Reading Age” it is essential to look for the forms which may facilitate the comprehension of belles-lettres and create a universal language of terms to describe the nature of numerous artistic phenomena (prose, poetry, films, paintings, etc.). Moreover, the article presents the advantages of new core curriculum, in which textocentrism becomes the main didactic directive.