The Criticism of Written Sources in Ivan Franko's History-Pedagogical Works

Abstract

The criticism technologies of written sources, which were applied by the outstanding Ukrainian scientist Ivan Franko (1856–1916) in his works from the history of education, are analyzed in this article. Relevance of the study is attributed to the following factors: 1) nowadays active attention of the scientists is connected with the methodologies of history-pedagogical research; 2) technologies of criticism by historians of education including Ivan Franko are unexplored. The author used such methods as content-analysis of scientific and journalistic works of Ivan Franko from the history of education, analysis and synthesis, typological interpretation, logical- semantic method. The results of the study are: a) Ivan Franko paid great attention to written sources to study the history of education; b) the mechanisms of external criticism of sources which Ivan Franko applied (analysis of location, material basis, format, language, date and authorship, addressee, representativeness of documents) are indentified; c) methods of internal criticism of sources, which were based on explaining certain concepts, establishing the genesis of ideas, separating simple facts without further verification, are clarified. The following conclusions are drawn: Ivan Franko used external criticism in his works from the history of education but internal criticism was less used. The next task is to study the understanding of the concept ''fact'' by Ivan Franko.