Today’s Teachers Protest, and the Fight Yet to Come
Below I’m posting a few images from today’s protest by the Związek Nauczycielstwa Polskiego (Polish Teachers’ Union, or ZNP). Around 50,000 people attended, despite a driving rain and cold. Their slogan was “No to Chaos in the Schools.” If you aren’t familiar with the issues, they summarize their complaints here. The actual specifics of the proposed reform plan from PiS are (in my opinion) not the main issue here. The plan is so ill-formulated and so hastily thrown together that it will indeed bring chaos to the schools, with very little apparent justification or sense of direction. I think there are two possible interpretations: 1) the Ministry of Education is incompetent, and promised to implement reforms before the start of the 2017/18 school year without understanding that it would be impossible; 2) the whole point is to deliberately explode the educational system so that it will be possible to move forward with a massive purge of school directors and teachers. Under interpretation #2, none of the structural reforms matter: it’s all about creating overstaffing in some schools and understaffing in others, which will allow mass firings without directly violating the ZNP contract. I don’t know all the legal or contractual nuances here, but that’s probably not the point: confusion will allow PiS to bypass those details. Kaczyński has always prioritized placing loyal followers in key positions, from the national level to the local level. And for him, nothing is more important than education, because he has said repeatedly that the future depends on creating a generation of “patriotic” Poles steeped in Polish martyrology and religiosity. The general outlines of the new curricular changes are actually much more disturbing than arguments over how many years the kids go to elementary school, and how many to secondary school. While many of the details are yet to be announced, the general program will significantly expand the hours devoted to history, mostly eliminate the other social sciences, cut back a bit on the hard sciences and math, and severely restrict the hours that used to be available for electives. That framework will set the stage for replacing education with indoctrination, but that plan will only work if the right teachers are in place. People of Kaczyński’s generation know all too well that during the communist era, teachers often told the students that certain propaganda had to be parroted back for exams, but that the truth was otherwise. To avoid a repetition of that old pattern, a purge is essential. If I’m right, then today’s protest was just the opening salvo.
