# The Crippling of Our Youth - URL: https://syn.by/en/history/archives/crippling-our-youth/ - Published: 1924-06-28T20:00:00+00:00 - Updated: 2026-11-12T01:47:17+00:00 - Section: Archives - Language: en - BE edition: https://syn.by/historya/arkhivy/kaliechannie-moladzi.md - RU edition: https://syn.by/ru/istoriya/arhivy/kalechenie-molodyozhi.md > The Polish school in the West raises Belarusian youth in the spirit of the szlachta, monarchism and Catholicism, and this is more terrible than the political partition of the Fatherland. The paper calls on readers to defend the young from spiritual maiming. ![](https://syn.by/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/illustration-6647-1024x585.webp) That "Chinese wall" which has divided our Fatherland into Eastern and Western Belarus, breaking up in this way the whole economic and national organism of Belarus, promises us extraordinarily hard and menacing consequences in the future. Today we shall dwell on one of them. The matter concerns our youth, which is being brought up on this side and on that side of the border line. For while there, in the East, our youth is brought up on broad ideals common to all humanity, while there the basis of its whole ideology is laid in respect for the working people, who are themselves their own "god", here, in the West, we see something simply the opposite. Speaking of the upbringing of our youth in Western Belarus, we must make the reservation that only a very small part of it has the good fortune to study in a native Belarusian school, faithful to the great ideals of liberation, both universal and our own Belarusian ones. The reason is that Belarusian schools are very few. By contrast, the vast majority of our youth is forced to go to Polish schools, and it is of these that we shall speak here. The very names of the Polish schools speak eloquently of their direction and spirit. Take Vilnia alone: the university is named for King Stefan Batory, the gymnasium for King Zygmunt August, the teachers' seminary for girls for Queen Jadwiga, and so on. The cult of kings, the cult of the idea of monarchism, penetrates the school textbooks too, and so our boys and girls, drawing their learning from the Polish source, learn at school that every king was noble, wise, courageous, full of all virtues, like some superhuman being, whereas those who dared to set the will of the people against the will of the king, who raised the popular masses to the struggle for liberation, were all scoundrels, traitors and so on. And alongside royal power the Polish szlachta and Catholicism are idealized. If to this threefold cult of monarchy, lordliness and the Catholic Church we add a morbid nationalism, which drives into children's heads the conviction that there is nothing in the world higher than Polish culture, then that is everything on which humanistic upbringing is founded in the Polish school. We must note, however, that Polish creative thought, which found expression chiefly in Polish literature, could not confine itself within such narrow bounds and at all times sought more room for itself and soared to the highest summits of the human spirit. And so the Polish school strives to ensure that its pupils do not read such "freethinking" works, which could truly broaden the young people's outlook. Just look at the reading programmes for Polish authors. Of the three great Romantics, Krasiński, Mickiewicz and Słowacki, in the schools it is especially the latter two who are read and studied, as the most national; the reading programmes pause only lightly, as if reluctantly, on Krasiński, that rebellious spirit who knew how to rise above his own people and embrace with his gaze the whole world, all humanity! And Sienkiewicz? His nationalist trilogy, an apotheosis of the szlachta, monarchism and Catholicism, is chewed over in every way, and the pupils all but know it by heart. So too "Rodzina Połanieckich", the brightest reflection of Polish bourgeois ideals. But not read at all are either the world-famous work of the same Sienkiewicz, "Quo vadis?", translated into nearly all European languages, or Prus's "Faraon", or Żeromski's "Popioły", or Żuławski's "Eros i Psyche", or in general any of the other works of the newest Polish writers in which the great impulses of the free human soul are expressed. For the Polish school wants to bring up not a human being but a good official, a policeman, a gendarme, a good bourgeois, who, suitably raised, would be a sincere defender of the present social and political order in Poland. That is the spirit in which our youth too is brought up in the Polish school. "Be a Pole, and you need nothing more!" — this is how one can put what the Belarusian boy and Belarusian girl who have finished their studies in a Polish school are steeped in. And need we add that on this ground they form the view that everything non-Polish, non-lordly, non-Catholic is worth nothing? That they learn to despise their own people and the working man in general? That they quite sincerely spit even on their own Polish workers, as the pupils of one local Polish school spat from the windows in Vilnia on 1 May at the workers' march?!… As we see, the spirit with which our youth is steeped in the Polish school in the West truly contradicts sharply everything that is idealized in the East. And for us this is an enormous threat: that the sons of our people, grown up on either side of the border line, once they have become mature men, will not understand one another, and that the physical partition of Belarus will draw a border between our souls as well. This threat is far more terrible than the mere political partition of our Fatherland. And this danger must be fought with all our strength; our youth must be defended against such spiritual maiming, which, among other things, already shows itself in the West, for example, in our Belarusian students in Vilnia. Our community must become aware of where this leads, and must give particular attention to that part of our youth which the present Polish school maims spiritually. Youth is our future. And all our heroic labour for the present will carry no weight if we do not secure our future.