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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 nothing in the aforementioned pinko rag are worth quoting in full:

But somehow it has come about that in a country which – it is ever clearer – is involved in a civilisational leap, everything public has for years been consistently pushed into deeper chaos. The point of this is obvious. When TVP [public television] broadcasts only dancing on ice and the speeches of chairman Kaczyński, when the quality of public education has fallen well below private education, and when a visit to a specialist in a public health clinic means a three year wait everyone will finally agree with the ideological thesis that all public services should be privatized

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 jock. The chairman of the steering committee, Professor Marek Safjan (he’s not a politician or a doctor or a patient but a judge), has some interesting comments on the nature of the consultative process: “our document must be accepted in full or rejected in full. There is no other way.” Perhaps he hasn’t got out of the habit yet of instructing juries. Among the proposals that I must accept or reject en masse is the introduction of a symbolic fee for visiting doctors. Perhaps I should rephrase that in case children or people for whom money is no object are reading: Among the proposals that I must accept or reject en masse is the introduction of a “symbolic” fee for visiting doctors. People regularly kill each other over symbols. Another proposal I must accept or reject is that of giving people the right to pay for operations in public hospitals if they don’t want to wait their turn (more commonly known as “bribery”). Naturally you would only be allowed to skip the queue on condition that this does not happen at the cost of patients waiting in the queue. (All in today’s Gazeta Wyborcza.)

So it would seem that the white summit mountaineers have come up with the wonderful idea of formalising and legalising the existing jock.

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 last two weeks but what is really needed is a public information campaign. Who should organize it? The government? No (“niekoniecznie”). The problem with the government is that some of its members are opposed to GMOs. Also, its election promises included hostility to transgenetically modified plants. Niklewicz, therefore, rules them out. The initiative, instead, lies with industry and its related GMO lobby. So it’s okay for those with a vested interest in pushing GMOs to inform us about them but it is not okay for those who are opposed, even if they do happen to be our democratically elected representatives.

While we’re at it, why not have a chemicals and cosmetics company lead the public information campaign on the beauty myth? Or let the cigarette industry inform us about the dangers of smoking…

Niklewicz writes that BASF earned 57.9 billion euros last year. Just 1% of that would buy a lot of “study and education,” he writes, though he doesn’t put the words in inverted commas. By an extraordinary coincidence, BASF has an ad on page seven of the paper. Perhaps the company has already started informing us about GMO.

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 - not only of the actual exam but of life after school:

Some head teachers held the exams early. The questions therefore found their way onto the internet allowing half the pupils to cheat their mocks, just like the real thing.

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 pupil was given a passing mark. After all, Poles did go to Siberia during the war so there’s quite a lot of truth in the glaringly inaccurate statement.

Recently I had the opportunity to cast an eye over the mock finals in English and I can confirm that they have screwed up their education system with the zeal of the recently converted. A typical assignment might be to write a letter containing four pieces of information. For transmitting the four pieces of information there are four marks. For writing correct English there is one mark. It’s the communicative method, you see: less of that stuffy old grammar. The trouble is that English is a terribly easy language to communicate in (I know – trust an educationalist to turn a strength into a weakness). Duke out a few stuttering syllables and you’re away. “Arrive tomorrow night” is perfectly clear English – even acceptable if you’re still into writing telegrams.

Okay, you could argue over how marks should be divided between communication and correctness but surely even the most dogmatic educationalist would clap a hand to her head at the failsafe mechanism: the teachers marking the exams are expected to mark every incorrect word. If the proportion of incorrect words exceeds 25% the pupil fails, regardless of the amount of information transmitted. This of course means that teachers are supposed to count every single word written by their dozens of pupils…

“I will see you before you meeting him.” How many words are wrong there? One word – “meeting”? or did the pupil mean to write “I will see you before your meeting with him”? If the latter, then “you” is wrong” and “with” is wrong (since it is missing). That’s two words out of eight – enough to fail outright – or is it out of nine? God forbid the pupil write: “I will see you before you’re meet him.”