Life /
Individualism in Polish culture...Is it almost Nonexistant? [170]
(I still doubt that Kuba na wsi would've had an English teacher but he most definitely had a Russian one)
This is not consistent with my own experience. First, if you want to use an example of "Kuba na wsi", then compare him with "Jake, farmer's son". Neither is expected to be an Einstein. But when you move a little higher in the social strata (let's make it the high school, "liceum" level), then the education in late PRL was more than decent. Teachers were university graduates, having 4 or 5 years of rigorous training leading to the
magister degree. Moreover, language programs were highly selective, and you were expected to be already fluent in English to be admitted. This produced competent teachers, and you didn't have to live in Warsaw to be taught by one. I lived in £ódź, and went to an average high school. Then, I had ONLY NATIVE SPEAKERS as teachers at the university (the Technical University of Lódź). So, based on my own experience, English was widely taught in the late 1980s, and the quality of the instruction was good. Naturally, no instruction can produce native speakers.
Generally, people in the West (and perhaps also the younger generation of Poles too) tend to confuse two things: the cultural sophistication with the economic achievements. Based on the sorry state of the Soviet-style economies they tend to believe that people who lived in Communist states were inept, uneducated, rustic simpletons, looking at the world behind the iron curtain with awe. In fact, the opposite would be justified. Imagine my "awe" when, during my first visit in the United States I went to a university bookstore, opened a
math textbook for college students (sic!) and found a chapter dealing with
simple operations on fractions!I bet, most of your countrymen would strongly disagree with you.
25 years ago I would disagree with myself too. Living in the United States, having read all the founding documents (happy 4th July, btw.) and treating them seriously, not just as obscure, historical papers written by long dead white people, and seeing what I see in the context of what I remember from being a citizen of a "totalitarian, Communist country", enables me to make educated comparisons. You guys have been downgraded to such a state of obedient sheeple that our old Communist "masters" could only dream of.