Underground education or clandestine education refers to various practices of teaching carried out at times and places where such educational activities were deemed illegal.
Examples of places where widespread clandestine education practices took place included education of Blacks during the slave period in the USA and the Secret Teaching Organization in Poland under the Nazis.
There is a Greek - mostly oral - tradition claiming that secret schools ( Krifo scholio ) operated during the Ottoman period. There is scant written evidence for this and many historians view it as a national myth. Others believe that the Greek secret school is a legend with a core of truth. According to certain sources, secret schools for Albanians operated in late 19th century by Albanian-speaking communities and Bektashi priests [1] [2] or nationalists [3] under Ottoman rule.
During the era of slavery in the United States, the education of enslaved African Americans was discouraged and eventually made illegal in most of the Southern states. In protest, a number of American activists engaged in illegal underground education of slaves. [4] [5]
In the 19th century during the partitions of Poland, various forms of the underground education, promoting teaching in Polish language and about the Polish culture, often repressed by the partitioning powers, sprung up on Polish territories. Most famous of these was the Flying University that operated in Warsaw. [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] Similarly by the break of the 19th and 20th centuries in Lithuania, a clandestine school (slaptoji mokykla) operated in almost every village, because of the Lithuanian press ban (1865 to 1904) in the Russian Empire. [11]
In Ireland during the 18th and 19th century, "Hedge schools" were illegal schools operated by Catholics and Presbyterians; at the time, only Church of Ireland education was permitted. [12]
Due to antisemitic policies in Nazi Germany, [13] some Jewish parents turned to or were forced to use private and sometimes clandestine means to educate their children in the mid-1930s. [14]
World War II saw the cultivation of underground education in Poland (Polish: Tajne szkolnictwo, or tajne komplety). Usually carried out under the aegis of the Polish Underground State, often through the Secret Teaching Organization, prepared scholars and workers for the postwar reconstruction of Poland and countered German and Soviet threats to eradicate Polish culture. [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] Secret schooling was organized in some Jewish Ghettos during the Nazi regime and the German occupation in Europe, in particular in the Warsaw Ghetto. [22] [23] [24] [25] [26]
In the 1930s and 1940s, the authoritarian nationalistic regime of Brazil took anti-immigrant measures, especially against the Japanese. Japanese and other foreign schools, languages, and printed material were restricted and a compulsory assimilation program was instituted. Japanese schools became illegal in 1938. During that period, Japanese immigrants established secret schools and a newspaper in Japanese was printed. [27]
Underground education took place in a number of Soviet Bloc countries, such as Poland [28] [29] [30] and Czechoslovakia. [31] [32]
During the Taliban rule in various parts of Afghanistan (late 20th, early 21st c.), secret schools operated, mostly for women and girls (ex. Golden Needle Sewing School). [33] [34]
The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest of the Nazi ghettos during World War II and the Holocaust. It was established in November 1940 by the German authorities within the new General Government territory of occupied Poland. At its height, as many as 460,000 Jews were imprisoned there, in an area of 3.4 km2 (1.3 sq mi), with an average of 9.2 persons per room, barely subsisting on meager food rations. Jews were deported from the Warsaw Ghetto to Nazi concentration camps and mass-killing centers. In the summer of 1942, at least 254,000 ghetto residents were sent to the Treblinka extermination camp during Großaktion Warschau under the guise of "resettlement in the East" over the course of the summer. The ghetto was demolished by the Germans in May 1943 after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising had temporarily halted the deportations. The total death toll among the prisoners of the ghetto is estimated to be at least 300,000 killed by bullet or gas, combined with 92,000 victims of starvation and related diseases, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the casualties of the final destruction of the ghetto.
The Home Army was the dominant resistance movement in German-occupied Poland during World War II. The Home Army was formed in February 1942 from the earlier Związek Walki Zbrojnej established in the aftermath of the German and Soviet invasions in September 1939. Over the next two years, the Home Army absorbed most of the other Polish partisans and underground forces. Its allegiance was to the Polish government-in-exile in London, and it constituted the armed wing of what came to be known as the Polish Underground State. Estimates of the Home Army's 1944 strength range between 200,000 and 600,000. The latter number made the Home Army not only Poland's largest underground resistance movement but, along with Soviet and Yugoslav partisans, one of Europe's largest World War II underground movements.
Piaseczno is a town in east-central Poland with 47,660 inhabitants. It is situated in the Masovian Voivodeship, within the Warsaw metropolitan area, just south of Warsaw, approximately 16 kilometres south of its center. It is a residential area and a suburb of Warsaw. It is the capital city of Piaseczno County.
Otwock is a city in the Masovian Voivodship in east-central Poland, some 23 kilometres (14 mi) southeast of Warsaw, with 44,635 inhabitants (2019). Otwock is a part of the Warsaw metropolitan area. It is situated on the right bank of Vistula River below the mouth of Świder River. Otwock is home to a unique architectural style called Świdermajer.
During World War II in Poland, education often took place underground. Secretly conducted education prepared scholars and workers for the postwar reconstruction of Poland and countered German and Soviet threats to eradicate Polish culture.
The Białystok Ghetto uprising was an insurrection in the Jewish Białystok Ghetto against the Nazi German occupation authorities during World War II. The uprising was launched on the night of August 16, 1943 and was the second-largest ghetto uprising organized in Nazi-occupied Poland after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April–May 1943. It was led by the Anti-Fascist Military Organisation, a branch of the Warsaw Anti-Fascist Bloc.
Gwardia Ludowa or GL was a communist underground armed organization created by the communist Polish Workers' Party in German-occupied Poland, with sponsorship from the Soviet Union. Formed in early 1942, within a short time Gwardia Ludowa became the largest clandestine fighting force on Polish soil which refused to join the structures of the Polish Underground State loyal to the London-based government-in-exile. In the January 1 of 1944 GL was incorporated into the communist Armia Ludowa.
Szymon Datner was a Polish historian, Holocaust survivor and underground operative from Białystok, best known for his studies of the Nazi war crimes and events of The Holocaust in the Białystok region. His 1946 Walka i zagłada białostockiego ghetta was one of the first studies of the Białystok Ghetto.
Simcha Rotem was a Polish-Israeli veteran who was a member of the Jewish underground in Warsaw and served as the head courier of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ŻOB), which planned and executed the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against the Nazis. He was one of the last two surviving Jewish fighters in the Warsaw uprising and the last surviving fighter from the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
The Flying University was an underground educational enterprise that operated from 1885 to 1905 in Warsaw, the historic Polish capital, then under the control of the Russian Empire, and that was revived between 1977 and 1981 in the communist People's Republic of Poland.
Tadeusz Pankiewicz, was a Polish Roman Catholic pharmacist, operating in the Kraków Ghetto during the Nazi German occupation of Poland. He was recognized as "Righteous Among the Nations" by Yad Vashem on February 10, 1983, for rescuing countless Jews from the Holocaust.
Polish culture during World War II was suppressed by the occupying powers of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, both of whom were hostile to Poland's people and cultural heritage. Policies aimed at cultural genocide resulted in the deaths of thousands of scholars and artists, and the theft and destruction of innumerable cultural artifacts. ''The maltreatment of the Poles was one of many ways in which the Nazi and Soviet regimes had grown to resemble one another", wrote British historian Niall Ferguson.
The Lublin Ghetto was a World War II ghetto created by Nazi Germany in the city of Lublin on the territory of General Government in occupied Poland. The ghetto inmates were mostly Polish Jews, although a number of Roma were also brought in. Set up in March 1941, the Lublin ghetto was one of the first Nazi-era ghettos slated for liquidation during the deadliest phase of the Holocaust in occupied Poland. Between mid-March and mid-April 1942 over 30,000 Jews were delivered to their deaths in cattle trucks at the Bełżec extermination camp and additional 4,000 at Majdanek.
"The Little Smuggler" is a famous poem by the Polish poet Henryka Łazowertówna (1909–1942). Written in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust, it tells the story of a small child who supports his starving family by — illegally, under Nazi dispensation — bringing over food supplies from the "Aryan side", thereby allowing for his family's survival while at the same time risking his own life. Indeed, the last stanza of the poem gives expression to the heroic child's fear — not of his own death but that of his mother who, in the event of the loss of her child, would be left without her daily sustenance.
Kazimierz Cwojdziński was a Polish mathematician and professor of the School of Engineering in Poznań. Cwojdziński published his works regarding secondary school curriculum and school mathematics in the journals Wiadomości Matematyczne, Muzeum, Parametr, and Matematyka as well as the German journal Archiv der Mathematik und Physik. He was among the first year-group to obtain a doctorate in mathematics from the Adam Mickiewicz University.
Bat-Sheva Dagan was a Polish-Israeli orator, psychologist, and writer. A Holocaust survivor born in Łódź, Poland, she was incarcerated in a ghetto in Radom with her parents and two sisters in 1940. After her parents and a sister were deported and murdered in Treblinka in August 1942, she escaped to Germany, but was discovered, imprisoned, and deported to Auschwitz in May 1943.
During the German occupation of Poland, citizens of all its major ethnic groups collaborated with the Germans. Estimates of the number of collaborators vary. Collaboration in Poland was less institutionalized than in some other countries and has been described as marginal, a point of pride with the Polish people. During and after the war, the Polish government in exile and the Polish resistance movement punished collaborators and sentenced thousands of them to death.
The Warsaw Ghetto Museum is a historical museum in Warsaw currently under construction.
CENTOS was a Polish-Jewish children's-aid society. Founded in 1924, it became a "leading organization for Jewish childcare" in the Second Polish Republic and was highly active in the Warsaw Ghetto during The Holocaust in Poland.
Gustawa Jarecka was a Polish novelist. She was a daughter of Moszek Jarecki and Natalia Jarecka.
the intellectuals organized and sought the right to teach the Albanian language, and nationalist militantism was manifested in the growing sacrifices of the Albanians of all strata that were donating, paying for the private secret schools, funding publications, and so on
Nazi legal decrees affecting Jewish life from 1933 onward are listed in chronological order and analyzed along with the resultant need for clandestine education for Jewish children
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link){{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)