Abstract:

What is nowadays called a regional education, is – as it is easy to realise in every day education experience – an area on one hand new, and on the other - quite old. There are authors, who derive the concepts of regional education from the works of ancient Greece. However the analysis, carried out basing on the humanities, being a foundation of the present discussion, shows, that regional education is a new idea, quite a young one.

Regional education is being endangered with that in a particular way. The system changes in the world, new faces of nations, ethnic groups, local communities, development of the means of communication, globalisation etc. especially stimulated discussion and controversies around such notions as the cultural identity, national identity, the homeland – large and little, region, regionalism, cultural heritage. They became present in the lips of politicians, ideologists, activists, animators, organisers. Quite obviously they entered also the workshop of researchers and scholars, sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, psychologists, geographers, historians, economists, lawyers and finally – pedagogues.

The regionalism, the Renaissance of which is readily today spoken of, constitutes de facto an important source for regional education. And the regionalism is a peculiar ideology, expressing the attitude to a particular, important or even sometimes beloved by each of us and every group, members of which we are, territory. The territory of childhood, the territory of life – our territory. And as such an ideology – regionalism is an attribute of a human being, has a stricte human dimension. Such understood regionalism is not only a process of transmission of knowledge of a given territory, this is a process of experiencing this territory, regardless of the name we give to it: home, region, little homeland or our world.

I also draw the attention to the fact, that the regional education should not be restricted to school alone, but that it oversteps the limits of possibilities and competence of that institution. But first of all my aim is to point out, that the intrinsic attributes of regional education contain numerous suggestions and important propositions for the education in general. I have reached here to the look from the perspective of the essence of some behaviour and ways of functioning of the human being.

As a priority I have taken not to look at the sphere called the regional education through the prism of the newest pedagogical or sociological concepts, but to take it as an essence of human behaviour, from the perspective of anthropology of culture, sociology, psychology or pedagogy,

In consequence of the assumptions made, I undertake the analysis of regional education in context of three, neglected in pedagogy, categories space, place, time. Because those three categories are practically being the reference for all the processes and mechanisms of: developing cultural identity, rootedness, experiencing culture, etc.

For these reasons, regional education is also a subject of my lectures and workshops which I realize in my own university (Nicolas Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland) but also in some others universities in Poland as visiting professor (in Warsaw, Olsztyn, Poznań and Bydgoszcz).

Keywords:

Human being, Regionalism, Cultural identity, Intercultural educations.