Poznan 2013: Week 16: Cultural Blog: 31.06.13

Irish Birthday Brunch
(Complete with home-made Irish soad bread)

This week I’ve been doing a lot of essays and finishing off my coursework for classes, so apart from celebrating Lutfullah’s birthday on Thursday, I haven’t been out much.

Next week I have to hand in my ‘Poland for Beginners’ essay which is a comparison against Northern Ireland and Poland’s primary education systems. During my research for this paper, I found out a lot about the transformation the Polish education system has undergone.

Working hard.. or hardly working?

Under communism, Poland’s educational system focused on finding young people jobs. The system was made up of a strict tracking system which sent the academically weaker 50% of the country’s students into basic vocational schools, directly after Primary school (Pearson foundation, 2013). After the reform, since 1999, Poland’s education system has undergone major changes and restructuring, aiming to improve the general standard of education in society, raise educational opportunities for society, and improve the quality and equity of the education system (The World Bank, 2013). In addition to radical structural changes to the educational system in Poland, schools were asked to construct their own curricula, within a broad framework. The modification of the curricula was intended to not only alter the content of Primary education but, arguably more importantly, change the philosophy of teachers in Poland and improve the professional customs of schools.

Poland’s educational transformation has been commended for achieving “impressive achievements in a short time” (The World Bank, 2013), and over the past couple of years has been considered to be 9^th in the world in overall reading scores according to PISA, making Poland the only transition country to go from being below the OECD average to above average. However, I found that Poland's educational reforms are not over. The structure of the Early years Primary school will be changed again as from the beginning of the school year 2014/2015; the age for compulsory education will drop from the age of seven to the age of six.

As I am very proud of the Northern Ireland’s innovative approach to teaching, especially in relation to the early years part of the curriculum, I discussed in my paper how Poland could learn from Northern Ireland, how to implement these new educational changes for early years teaching.

However, as I delved deeper into this subject of educational systems learning from one another, I realised a very obvious issue that I had not truly considered before.

I had been busy writing about how great the N.I’s curriculum was, when I realised something crucial. No matter how much we teach children how to accept people who are different and live together in our shared community, as long as our education system remains segregated, it seems pointless. Derek Wheeler said, “Keeping people apart makes you imagine what the other people are like. People on the other side of the fence are demonized – they grow horns and tails and you lose out on the opportunity to interact” (Burchill, 2002) and the scary thing is, I can relate to it.

I believe that there is no ‘right’ answer to education, however it seems ludicrous to me that, on the one hand Northern Ireland’s education system is evolving yet the most obvious issue is staring us in the face and so far we still haven’t changed it.