Training
Changing education at all levels was a key factor in the
political and economic transformation that took place from
1989 onwards in Poland. The financial situation made
implementation difficult during the 1990s, but major changes
have taken place in the 2000s and the school system has
improved significantly, both in terms of results and
availability and quality. See TOPSCHOOLSINTHEUSA for TOEFL, ACT, SAT testing locations and high school codes in Poland.
Since the 1998/99 academic year, a new school system has
been applied that is based on compulsory schooling between
the ages of 7 and 18. Since 2004/05, one year of preparatory
preschool class is also compulsory. The compulsory school is
six years old and is followed by a three-year compulsory
secondary education (gymnasium). The students can
then proceed to a three-year liceum with a
scientific or humanistic field or a four-year technical
technician, who prepares for university and graduates
with a degree (matura), or to various vocational
and vocational schools.
The higher education, which is free of charge, is
announced at about 500 institutions, of which just over 300
are private. The oldest university is the Jagellonian
University of Krakow (founded 1364) and the largest is the
University of Warsaw (53,700 students in 2012). Transition
from primary to secondary school, as well as from the latter
to universities and colleges, is based on exams and degrees.
In the early 1990s, only about a fifth went on to higher
education. In 2010, about 70% read on at college or
university.
The consequence of the split
In a country without its own national institutions, art
and culture had a special significance. Language, literature
and music became the linking elements and were important -
also purely political. The main trend within the rich Polish
romantic literature (Adam Mickiewicz and Juliusz Slowacki)
had a profoundly radical political and national commitment.
The demand for literature and culture to play a political
role was prevalent right up to our day. Poets and
intellectuals were important critical figures of society -
even in the postwar period.
The division became of central importance for the
development of the Polish class community. The freedom
fighters were divided into an aristocratic and a democratic
wing. The patriotic petty nobility continued to form an
important social class after feudalism was in retreat in
Western Europe. The new intelligentsia was largely derived
from the impoverished peasantry, which had lost its
properties either for political or economic reasons. At the
same time, the old rich aristocratic land-sharing families
such as Radziwill, Potocki and Lubomirski flourished. They
owned huge areas. Especially in the eastern part of Poland,
which since 1945 has belonged to the Soviet Union. In the
first half of the 19th century, however, capitalist
development took place in certain parts of the country, but
the industrial leaders were often of German or Jewish
descent.
Following the unsuccessful uprising in Russian Poland in
1863, a positivist movement developed which criticized the
romantic tradition. "One must do a positive job here and
now," was the slogan. Politically, the positivists were
progress-friendly liberals, such as the great realistic
writer, Boleslaw Prus. During this period, the first
approaches to a modern labor movement emerged - e.g. the
group "The Great Proletariat" in Warsaw in the mid-1880s.
But it didn't take long for national issues to split. The
labor movement was divided into Polish, German and Jewish
groups.
Before the turn of the century, the Polish socialists
were divided into a more moderately national conscious wing
to which the later dictator Jozef Pilsudski belonged, and a
radical Marxist and supranational wing with Rosa Luxemburg
as the most prominent figure. The revolution of 1905 became
an important event that led to radicalization, but the
Luxembourg wing - the Social Democratic Party in Poland and
Lithuania - nevertheless became a minority within the labor
movement, which was also strongly influenced by the national
struggle. Rosa Luxemburg and her supporters did not want a
national Polish assembly, but a revolution in which all
peoples of the Russian Empire should participate. This
"Luxembourg" also characterized the new Polish Communist
Party in the first years after the World War.
At the beginning of the century, the bourgeois mass party
of the National Democrats emerged with Roman Dwoski as the
dominant leadership figure. The party was politically
oriented towards a compromise with Zarist Russia, and it was
supported by strong forces within the ecclesiastical
hierarchy, which also had considerable political power in
divided Poland. The party had a clear front against the
young workers' movement and gradually developed a
nationalist and anti-Semitic ideology, which to some extent
pointed to the strong national fascist currents of Poland in
the interwar period.
The outbreak of World War I brought the Polish question
to the fore again. Russia and the Western powers, on the one
hand, and the central powers - Germany and Austria-Hungary,
on the other, tried to exploit the Polish national feeling
to achieve their political and military goals. During the
first phase of the war, Marshal Pilsudski created a Polish
legion which was fought on the Austrian side with Kraków as
the base, but later the legionaries came into conflict with
the central powers, and Pilsudski was interned in Germany
during the last phase of the war. Roman Dwoski fled to the
Western powers, where he worked hard for these to agree to
the restoration of a new Polish state if they won the war.
Large parts of Poland became a scene of war. The central
powers occupied Warsaw and proclaimed a Polish state, which,
however, never had any real existence. The war damage was
great and the distress spread as the war dragged on. As in
the rest of Central and Eastern Europe, the distress and
social misery of the war radically affected the masses, but
Polish politics continued to be characterized by the
conflict between those who regarded national independence as
the most important and those who had the social revolution
as their main goal.
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