Kaczynski's Legacy

The twins were raised in a very patriotic anti-communist family. Both parents were in the AK. The father didn't play too great a role in raising the twins, but the mother taught them well in the God, honour and homeland tradition. The twins were not active in the dissident movement until 1976 when Macierewicz came up with the idea for KOR. Jarosław was a member of the editorial team of "Głos", a dissident journal edited by Macierewicz. In 1977, Jarek got his brother to join KOR. Lech was also a member of the dissident Free Trade Unions of the Baltic Coast and held clandestine lectures for workers on international labour law.

Which is why they were child stars, lived in a villa and got into law school (an optionnot widely available to the real proletariat....)

What you're saying is they were hypocritical, happy to use and support the PRL state while privately complaining about it?

Quite the reverse really, given that they both volunteered to prosecute dissidents before that year.

No proletariat, they were strictly patriotic, Catholic intelligentsia, both parents had MAs, the father in engineering, the mother in Polish literature - she was chief librarian at PAN's IBL.

Millions of Poles had to survive and support their families as best they could under the Soviet yoke. Very few believed the USSR would ever collapse in their lifetimes. But the moment an opportunity to do something about it emerged, vague and unlikely as it may have seemed, the twins lost no time in jumping into the fray. At that time (mid-1970s) the Balcerowiczes, Rzeplińskis and many others were loyal, card-carrying PZPR members.

I had given you more credit than that obsessive-compulsive nincumpoop HB, but I can see I was wrong. You're two of a kind!

They had no choice about which side to pick: they'd both tried to sign up to prosecute the enemies of the commie regime and had been rejected.


At that time the likes of Mr Michnik had done years in prison for opposing the same commie regime Chairman Kaczynski volunteered to serve and for which a certain draft-dodging American was happily shilling.

That Cat Michnik (unless you claim he ain't got no bollocks!) had it very good in the slammer. The warders treated him well and enjoyed chatting and joking with him compared to the normal riffraff and criminal scum they had to deal with. Only later did That Cat Michnik come round to the commies calling dictator Jaruzelski and his chief henchman Kiszczak "men of honour". For that alone he is on every decent Pole's sh*t list!

As good as Chairman Kaczynski had it when he was locked up for his work to bring down the system that gave him an education reserved for the children of the elite and a multi-million zloty villa?

HB, as usual your third-hand knwoledge shows you don't know (to use an Americanism) sh*t from Shinola. The regime could not produce enough cars, flats and appliances to meet people's needs but free infant-schhol to uni education was available to all qualified students. In their youth theK twins were not revolutionaries just ordinary PRL Poles. Only after Macierewicz thought up KOR in 1976 did they become active dissidents. You're thinking along the lines of class-conscious British stereotypes of the Oxford and Cambridge variety.

You mean only after their applications to be loyal servants of the Party by prosecuting dissidents had been rejected did they become dissidents.

Yes Polly, but Harry is closer to the truth because the facts are that only a minority of students were permitted under the Communist system to attend the kind of secondary school that allowed access to higher education and once you completed your secondary education without taking Matura, there was no way for adults to compensate for that later, for example by attending evening classes as they would have been able to do in the USA or even in little backward Ireland of those times.

In the early years of Communism it was necessary to replace all the professionals lost through the removal of existing intelligentsia and other pesky individuals, so it was therefore necessary to educate the ordinary working classes. But the stats show that during the 1970s and 1980s more than half of secondary school students in Poland attended basic vocational schools which meant that they were effectively barred from ever receiving higher education. Many capable students never even took the entrance exam for the general secondary schools as there were limited places available and they were told that they were unlikely to pass and simply not allowed to take it at all. Add to that, the fact that the Matura was marked by students' own teachers, so a teacher could deliberately give a low mark to a student or a higher mark to another according to their whim, and that did happen Polly. Poland at the beginning of the 1990s was the European country with the lowest participation in higher education.

I seriously don't know where you take this from - maybe I lived too short under communism but never heard of such a thing


they were not - my mom attended a weekend school that would end up in a matura if she didn't quit - she first finished a vocational school - you are talking bollocks Atch

and now Poland is probably a country with the highest percentage of junk diplomas that give you no job prospects and a country where qualified blue collar workers (like say lathe-operators) are more sought after than master degree holders

You have again demonstrated you odn't know sh*t from Shinola. Jarosław Kaczyński was not incarcerated, his brotehr Lech was interned during martial law. Jarek told me they probably wanted to have someone to follow to the sources of illegal bulletins, underground Soldiarity hide-outs, etc.

And he's never forgiven them for that slight....

Yes, that's the point, isn't it. Even when thousands of dissidents were being locked up, Chairman Kaczynski wasn't. Which means that either his daddy used the same connections which got the family a multi-million zloty villa and places on a very highly sought-after university course for all his kids to ensure that the successful volunteer to prosecute dissidents wasn't locked up for even a day, or Chairman Kaczynski was such small-fry that he wasn't worth locking up for even a day.


Yes, a short plain bloke who can easily get lost in a crowd is the obvious choice when picking a person to follow.

Which means only that he wasn't locked up. Reading into it some Harry's made conspiracy theories tells us more about you than anyone else including JK.

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She likes to spin a tale but if you're looking for informational value of her stories you're safer to look elsewhere.

'Until the 1990s, the majority of secondary school students attended various types of vocational education institutions, while access to higher education was limited to a relatively small group'.

(Maciej Jakubowski, Evidence Institute, University of Warsaw,January 2015)

'Young people of the working class were led into a cultural cul-de-sac,namely basic vocational schools'
(Rafał Piwowarski, Secondary Education in Poland, Council of Europe Press,1996)

You can read the same in stacks of scholarly research articles, books etc. Students who attended vocational schools did not get the chance to take the Matura exam which permitted access to higher education. The fact is that Communism did not provide equal educational opportunties to all children. And there is simply no doubt that a well connected family with Party associations could see to it that their child attended university even if that child was below average, whilst a brighter child from a working class family might well be denied the opportunity even to receive a full secondary education. The Communist education system focused on fitting people into jobs and that was all. If they were short of welders you were going to be a welder, if they were short of doctors you were going to train as a doctor and so on. Now, I'm actually not at all in favour of the American idea that everyone needs a college education. I also don't agree with turning every blessed thing into a college degree and trying to make it an academic subject but under the old system, there's no doubt that young people with potential slipped through the net.


If your mother was capable of taking the Matura, what was she doing in a vocational school in the first place? Do you see the unfairness and elitism of a system which decided that your mother should be denied access to a full education? Your mother should have received a proper secondary education on equal terms with every other child, and following Matura had a choice of university or an apprenticeship or technical qualification or just a plain old job. Did your mother receive her weekend school for free? I'm just interested because I would certainly expect that in a Communist country. Access to weekend schools would also have been limited depending on where in Poland one lived. A bright young person living in a rural area, who was denied the opportunity to take Matura at secondary level, might never have been able to get that chance in later life.


That's a separate issue. It's a result of an improperly regulated higher education system.

Of course not. To enrol one had to pass the entrance exam. Only a minority even sat it and fewer yet passed it. Those that did were the brainy type with higher IQs.


Your litany of titles is growing. Not only PF's LL and HB but also the forums No. 1 conspiracy theorist (CT).

as I have shown on the example of my mom that's simple ******** - people simply CHOSE not to follow a higher education in MOST cases - it was not necessary - most of these people would never pass a matura anyway - instead of filling them with unnecessary rote material the state offered them practical proffessions - you could always go to school later be it an evening school or a weekend school to get to pass matura - the brighter students chose Technikums if they wanted a matura and a profession anyway

- what do you mean by full education? - a university degree in every field? - as I said those brighter kids had a choice to go to Technikums not to mention Liceums - but of course there were entry tests there to sieve out the less intellectually capable - to teach everybody calculus is simply uneconomical

But your mother did not make that choice. She was allocated a place at a vocational school which prevented her from taking the first step in that process, which was Matura. If your mother was satisfied with that then why did she subsequently study for the Matura off her own bat?


The state shouldn't have been offering 'rote material' as preparation for higher education. But that's a separate matter.

she wasn't ALLOCATED a place in school - she chose her vocational school maybe her parents were partly responsible for this choice I don't know - never asked my mom about that - I don't know either if my mom was able to pass a Matura - she started a weekend school but quit along the way and I never asked her why - maybe she was overwhelmed by the home chores and work - anyway the vocational school system gave people real skills which nowadays system often does not

What? It was and still is the kids/parent choice what kind of school they apply for. It's the same as kids not doing A levels in UK. Some do, some don't. My mum was in high school in the 50/60's and she passed mature because she wanted that. Others chose to go to vocational school or technikum.

No she didn't. She was lucky that she managed to get a place in the one she wanted.


Exactly. She should have that chance automatically during her schooldays and not had to make any choice in the matter in her early teens.


No it wasn't.

'When the recruitment to lyceums was completed, no places were available in popular vocational schools. Underrating their abilities, many primary school leavers did not try to take examinations to a secondary school, fearing they might fail and be deprived of the possibility to choose their own further education route. One can hardly say how many of them were entirely wrong in the assessment of their own abilities and thus lost a chance to receive a better education.'

(Jerzy Wiśniewski, Secondary Education in Poland, 18 Years of Change)

By the way as a teacher with many years of experience in disadvantaged communities, I know quite well that not every child is cut out for higher education and is much better suited to an apprenticeship but I also know that there are many bright ones whose parents do not realise how capable their child is and the child can hardly be expected to judge that. In the west, in the old days many very intelligent working class children were steered into vocational schools because if your dad worked in a factory, you were expected to be a plumber or an electrician and the same thing happened in the east.

that's the role of the teacher to find out the bright ones and communicate the fact to their parents - I am a child of working class people but because my teachers realised I was quite bright they made an effort to inform my parents about it and because of that I was able to finish a faculty in a state-run university (oh well to be honest I realised that I was more intelligent than my school friends myself - I was more intelligent - I am no more that very intelligent) -

Absolutely. But it's important that the teacher is supported by an education system that recognises and is committed to developing a child's potential. Look, as a teacher myself, I can tell you that in Ireland where we have children in formal education from the age of four, the majority hold their own up to about the age of seven, and then you begin to see them diverge. As the work becomes more challenging it begins to become very obvious which ones are academically inclined (not to be confused with intelligence which is quite different) and which ones less so. By the time they're nine or ten years old, some children are really struggling and it's clear that the best route for them is definitely not going to be into any kind of further education. I really feel for those children under the present education system, which nowadays, pretty much worldwide, has academicsized if I can coin a word, every discipline, skill and craft under the sun and loaded it with pointless theory and written work. One of the most ludicrous degree options I saw was a Masters, yes a Masters, in Advanced Painting and Decorating. Now certainly there are advanced painting and decorating techniques, but I don't want my decorator to present me with a thesis on the subject.


This is the crux of the matter Gumi. Take a group of twenty students and if you're teaching for any number of years, you'll soon find that about five of them are below average in everything, five well above average. It's the middle group, about half of the children, where students vary in their abilities the most widely and can be steered either down the more academic path or the more vocational. Under the old Communist system, more than half of primary school students (and that's a statistical fact) were assigned to general vocationals schools. Many of those were perfectly capable of sitting Matura but didn't get the chance to complete their general education. Vocational schools were not managed by the Minstry of Education, did you know that? They were administered by the various branches of industry which they represented. You can be absolutely certain that primary schools were given quotas to fill by central government for the different types of secondary schools. The vocational places had to be filled to supply a steady stream of workers. When marking the end of primary school exam, it was very easy for a teacher to tweak the mark in one direction or another of a child who fell in the middle group to make it a pass or a fail.

By the early 1990s only 10% of students finishing their secondary education were going on to third level education. That was certainly partly a choice which they made. The Communist system which elevated the status of 'the worker' provided no incentive to aspire to a higher educational level. A plumber could earn the same, or indeed more, than a doctor or a college professor, so what was the point, thought many a young person, of putting in all those years of additional study.

this is not true as far as I know

All Communist countries had certain factors common to their education systems. Education was very much 'managed' and had specific goals in mind. There was what was known as a planned manpower approach which focused on training people to fill a range of roles as they were required for society and the economy. A certain number had to be trained for agriculture, industry, education and so on. Now that is a recognised and well accepted fact amongst educational researchers. At the end of primary school the students were divided up for the purpose of training to fill those pre-determined roles. For example in Czechoslovakia as it was then, up till 1990 the number of students allowed to enrol in university was set by the State Planning Commission. Enrollments were further capped in each subject area. Central planning and party priorities determined access to higher education during the Communist regime (Kocucky, 1990 ; Mitter 1990).

It's a very interesting area of research.