Schools in Poland to strike tomorrow

I think the problem with the teachers is that there are too many of them. There are not enough hours of lessons for decent pay. As a result they expect to earn huge salaries on small amount of school hours. If it was in private company someone would be redundant or hours would be reduced as part time. Teachers demand full pay. Sorry but I find it ridiculous.

Remember that they have to write the lessons, mark assessments and a whole lot of other things; it is not by any means an cushy number.

Yes, but also vice versa - a great school in a wealthy area might just have thick kids, especially if the area becomes fashionable with wealthy buraki.


Someone tried it with me once. I agreed, but on condition that I had full freedom to conduct the classes as I saw fit, without external interference. I especially pointed out that payment on results meant that I no longer agreed to allow kids to attend the stupid 'rekolacja' in the middle of the school day, and that any kids off sick would be expected to return the school completely prepared and caught up on their missed work.

The idea was quickly dropped.

The crass difference between the public vs. private sector, Iwonko! Those who can't do, administrate. Those who can't administrate, teach. Those who can't do either,

become entrepreneurs so they can get paid for screwing everybody else over, above all, their employees. Trust me on this one, I've done both, and both have their downside.

See post #116:-)

A parents of school children would decide who is great or not so great voting with their wallets.


That worked for the most part of the history of Western civilisation.

I myself studied in private Uni (worked part-time and paid for it myself). That's to that I don't have to strike and hold school children as hostage because I got paid for my skills by satisfied customers on a free market.

@jon357
I know they do but it is not just my opinion.I have friend she comes form teachers' family and as she supports strike she admitted this surplus of teachers. I think teachers are very different some prepare themselves for lessons but some do minimum and more experience ones use preparation from previous years.

I still remember geography teacher in my grammar school. She was sitting reading somethink and asked us to read lesson from book. from time to time there was test which she had to check. I woukd not say she was overworked with any preparations.

It's very good if there are sufficient; to have a lower number spells disaster.


This shows the virtue of having an effective (and well-staffed) inspectorate.

Good old PiS-rhetoric.


Which are widely regarded as a joke in Poland with the exception of a handful of courses. As for part time studies, they're even more of a joke.

Don't forget, school inspectors are also easily bribable:-)

I've had some very strange experiences with them in Poland. I wish I could give details, but needless to say, they're useless.

Shows again how much you "know" about Poland :-)

Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology is one of the top Technical Universities in Poland

To be honest Spike - Opinion about lots private academies in Poland is not very good.

I heard this opinion that lots 'not very clever people' go there and pay to finish.

Except it isn't. It's perhaps not as much as a joke as some private universities, but it's still not exactly an elite institution, and it's still a private university. It's actually ranked 48= in Poland with a score of 40.4, on par with Politechnika Opolska and slightly worse than the world-famous Uniwersytet Przyrodniczo-Humanistyczny w Siedlcach. In other words, it's a pay-to-pass school.

perspektywy.pl/RSW2018/ranking-uczelni-akademickich

Meanwhile, I did my MA at UAM, which is fourth in Poland, and there was definitely none of that nonsense there.

@Iwonka, I can assure you that Polish-Japanese Academy of Information is not one of them :-)

It scores good results when compared to public schools, even the most famous, and heavily subsidized, ones.

So in this case you don't "pay to pass" (which is meaningless because the job market will quickly verify your skills) but for well equipped IT classes and courses crafted for proving student with useful skills and not just teoretical knowledge which happens very often in public schools .

In the US the top Uni's are private and I hope that we will achieve the same results in Poland.

Now now, do stop telling fibs. It actually does very poorly compared to public universities.

There's nothing wrong with wanting a practical as opposed to theoretical education, but don't try and pretend that it's anything other than a not-very-good private university.

@Spike31
I don't know this Academy so I can't comment.

Of course job market verify your skills but ( am not sure if it so strong demand now) you could hardly find any decent office job in the past without certificate of finishing University.

I am not abut USA but I Europe Oxford, Cambridge, Sorbona.....they are not private.

In terms of what? Out of all of my high schools friends who went to public Uni's even as famous as UW or WSH that I'm still in touch with I've got the best paying job and the most in demand skills :-)

Public Uni's may be best place for "humanists" or some future unemployed sociology adepts yet for IT technologies you go to private sector

Except you don't. You go to computer science at a top ranked politechnika, not informatyka at a third rate private university. Private universities might be good for getting a junior dev job working on tediously dull SaaS products, but interesting jobs and salaries need a solid theoretical comp sci background.

As for humanities, there's a reason why a degree from something like Sorbonne followed up by a MBA at a top tier institution is the gold standard. IT is a bubble, and those jobs will end up in Asia anyway simply because of the lower price.

You must be a humanist then :-) Nothing wrong with that. Society needs them too, maybe not in a such vast numbers.

And thank you for sharing your extensive knowledge about IT with me. I'll take your advice and downgrade myself to junior dev from now on and I'll ask my "boss" to pay me 1/3 of what I'm making now :-)

With some knowledge of IT ;) Though I agree, I'd also cut funding to many pointless humanities courses and focus on things that actually make money. I might be dismissive of private universities, but society simply doesn't need thousands of history graduates every year, not to mention all those useless pedagogics graduates who only did it because "children are cute" or whatever.

Without a thorough grounding in philosophy, modern languages, classics or composition, the only practical "profession"
one might hope for is juice man for the mob. Hear it pays real well too:-)

Seriously though, the number of successful lawyers, physicians and other non-academic professionals who ended up as philosophy
majors in college is more than I can shake a stick at, with both eyes open!!

All that talk about which school is better is pointless. In engineering, only MIT registers as something super exceptional. Polibuda does not.
The shelf life of a diploma is probably three years. After five, nobody cares where it came from but what you claim you have actually done. Lying can be detected almost immediately.

The best engineer I ever hired did not even have a degree - just two years of a vocational school. Nobody ever asked me to show mine except when applying for immigration.

If within three or so years you are not working in your profession, you can roll that diploma and .... you know the rest. That is why taking time off to see Africa for a couple of years is so stupid.

Not actually the name of any institution....

The strange thing is that the teachers' strike is less about who the best teachers are or what they do or how many hours they work.

The strike only goes to prove that if you pay peanuts you get monkeys.
Any person with the same qualifications as a teacher can get a better-paid job. If all teachers who could leave did go, the school system would collapse. The whole system has collapsed and this should have been sorted properly 3 years ago and not now.

If I was a teacher I would seek a job somewhere else, even as a cashier in a supermarket till I got what I wanted. Any sentiment towards teaching goes out of the window when you cannot pay your bills.

I was talking with some students and one had been in a teacher training program (she'd wanted to be a teacher since she was a small child). The program was in turmoil because of the last stupid senseless reform and more experienced people kept telling her to 'uciekać' and she finally decided she would.

The government can spend vast amounts of money to carry out a unnecessary 'reform' but doesn't want to pay teachers... PiS in a nutshell throwing good money after bad with no thought of the future... (to be fair previous governments weren't much better)

Teachers, like any other groups, should be evaluated by free market. Do we have "national" or "public" restaurants or grocery stores? No. Yet, the quality of the food is satisfactory, and the more you're willing to pay for a restaurant - the better the service.

Once the restaurant lose it's reputation with clients it goes bankrupt and the competitors takes over and the system works well.

And eating is one of the most basic human needs, so why would we make an exception for an education?

poor people don't _deserve_ to learn to read!

@Spike31
Unfortunately you can't verify teachers the way you can verify chef in the restaurant - it has been already raised here before.

But I think that their hours should be more defined - how many lessons per week- if they have to prepare or check tests they should do it at school. Maybe should be some rooms provided for it.

Yeah, right. Trust the money making 'free' market with health, education etc :-D


Yes, in a lot of places.

Agreed.

State run sectors are nothing more than monopolies which only benefit select ideological crony government bureaucrats who run them; eventually into the ground.