One category of the doctrine of past is the category of past or history. There is past of man, society, culture. Man is born and then grows not only in the natural environment, but besides in a peculiar socio-cultural environment. This environment is to any degree a product of past activities and changes over time.
A peculiar form of human past is the alleged historical consciousness. The current socio-political and cultural situation is to any degree a product of the past years and centuries. Human activism “materializes” in cultural products, which, alongside the planet of nature, form a context for the individual life of the next generations. Therefore, what has been done in the past (e.g. the political division of the world, literature, sculpture) is now ongoing, and the ongoing past products modify to varying degrees the current lives of peoples and full nations. Thus, historical awareness, cognition of past events, facilitates a deeper knowing of the present and its own identity. cognition of past besides allows us to anticipate, with any probability, the future.
St. John Paul II wrote:
"The communicative of a man is expressed in his ability to nonsubjective history. Man is not only subject to the current of events, not only acts and acts in a certain way as an individual and as a associate of a group, but has the ability to reflect on his own past and objectivity, to describe its related course of events. The objectivised and written past of nations is 1 of the essential elements of culture – an component that constitutes the identity of a nation in temporal dimensions" ("Memory and Identity". Kraków: Znak 2005 pp. 78-79).
It was incorrect that the subject of past and the Present was removed from the school curriculum. Although it is well known that this subject, and especially the textbooks by Prof. Wojciech Roszkowski, was unacceptable for left-wing environments. any may besides be afraid about the disregard for the millennium of Bolesław Chrobry’s coronation and the 500th anniversary of the Prussian tribute.
