Too make a long story short, a bunch of Polish spies (or Military Counter Intelligence agents) on duty in Afghanistan put photographs of themselves with their full names on a popular website here called “nasza-klasa” (our class). It’s a school reunion site where old boys, schoolmates, Taliban fighters and so on meet up to see […]
Jacek Żakowski is what passes for a left winger here in Poland. In fact he’s regarded as practically a Bolshevik, while the organ he writes for, Polityka, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, is considered almost socialist. Despite his undeniably communistic credentials the final few sentences of a recent article about the politics of doing […]
The health service was in such a jock here that they decided to have a so-called “white summit” of various interest groups – doctors, economists and so on. I can’t recall off hand the name of my representative there but anyway, they’ve come up with a plan to get the health service out of the […]
Gazeta Wyborcza is once again heroically forging the way forward in enlightening the benighted masses of Poland. This time the subject is GMOs. To the journalists’ dismay, most Poles don’t want them. In today’s paper Konrad Niklewicz has a short think piece on page two about the question: GW has been debating the subject for […]
The purpose of the mock exams taken last week by school leavers around Poland is to create the conditions of the real thing as closely as possible so the little darlings will be ready for the big day. Well, they certainly succeeded in keeping it real, in preparing children for the tough, hard future – […]
A week or two ago Tygodnik Powszechny described how Polish school leaving exams are marked. The example was given of a pupil who wrote that Adam Mickiewicz in one of his plays described the fate of Poles sent to Siberia during World War Two. Rather than scoring zero (Mickiewicz was a nineteenth century writer), the […]
A week or two ago a bunch of sociologists published the shocking (to Poles) results of a survey they took among Polish academics. They cautioned that the study was biased because mostly those who were frustrated responded. Gazeta Wyborcza ran with it all week and judging by the latest cover, Wprost is taking it up […]
In the late 1960s, in a bold and unorthodox move, the government of Ireland introduced the free milk scheme for primary school children. Under the terms of the scheme, pushed through an unwilling Dail by the socialist minister for education, every child aged from 4 to 7 and in full time education would be supplied […]
A momentous time has come to Poland. For my eldest daughter it was time to take herself to the “hundred days ball” – a kind of a disco in gladrags held one hundred days before the school leaving exam. People will tell you it starts with the pupils dancing a Polonez but this is not […]
Watching a God-awful soap the other night I saw somebody pay for two or three items in a supermarket. The cost was exactly four zloties, which aroused my suspicions. Those suspicions were confirmed when the money was simply received. If you can’t be bothered faithfully reproducing simple things like the fact that everything costs 3.69, […]
