Stanisław Kot - Historian of Culture and Education

Abstract

Professor Stanisław Kot (1885-1975) belonged to the most prominent Polish scholars of the first half of the twentieth century. His rich scientific output pertaining to the history of culture and education made him, as early as the interwar period, one of the few Polish representatives in European historiography. The life and activity of Prof. Kot left their stamp both on the history of science and political history. For he was an example of man who simultaneously pursued science and politics, and he reached a very high social and professional rank in the two provinces. As a professor of the Jagiellonian University he founded a chair of the history of culture, the first chair of this kind in Poland, and it was he who founded the Polish school of the history of culture and education. As an activist of the Peasant Party, Centre-Left and Front Morges which cooperated with Wincenty Witos and gen. Władysław Sikorski, he was during the Second World War a minister, deputy prime minister and ambassador of the Polish Government Abroad. After the war he was an activist of the Polish Peasant Party and ambassador of the Interim Government of National Unity in Rome. In 1947, after the election to the Sejm had been forged, and Stanisław Mikołajczyk escaped from the country, he chose to live abroad.

Prof. Stanisław Kot, as a scholar, was an unquestioned figure in Polish historiography. His scientific output contains over 300 works and is well-known both at home and abroad. His works dealing with the history of the Reformation and history of education play a particular role. We should mention that Stanisław Kot’s two-volume History of Education was re-edited in the 1990s, and the students of Polish universities use it as their basic academic handbook.

The current renaissance of Prof. Stanisław Kot is a special phenomenon in the history of science, a phenomenon which shows how great was the scholar, and especially how great were his works.