Minsk Resident Describes Fundamental Difference Between Polish, Belarusian Education Systems

The set of museums for excursions is not accidental.

At the beginning of the year our family moved to Bialystok, Poland, writes Charter97.org reader Andrei. We were forced to leave our homeland, as we were threatened in Belarus.

Now we have to arrange both our adult life and the life of our children in Poland. Our eldest daughter Yanina is already in the 3rd grade of one of the schools in Bialystok. The Polish school and education system differs from the Belarusian one in many respects, a whole article could be written on this topic. But I would like to share my impressions about how Belarusian and Polish schools differ in terms of where schoolchildren are taken on excursions.

Yanina studied in one of the gymnasiums in Minsk. First, children in the 2nd grade were taken to the Museum of Transport to look at old cars. Then they were offered the museum of the Ministry of Emergency Situations, but we didn't let our daughter look at the firemen's equipment. And the other day we talked to the parents of a former classmate and learnt that this academic year the children will be sent to look at tractors - to the MTZ museum. They joked that there are also MAZ and MZKT in the capital, and there are plenty of car depots in general - they could take the students around every week and show them all kinds of machines and mechanisms for their parents' money.

In Bialystok, Yania and her classmates recently went to the cinema. The pupils were shown, for example, how films are dubbed, about which the daughter told us with delight. And a month ago, in October, the pupils had a trip to the folk architecture museum near Bialystok (like the one we have in Aziartso). There the children were shown how bread was baked in the olden days.

Hence I can conclude that more emphasis is put on humanitarian education in Poland, so that children understand their place in the world, realise the connection of generations, feel their responsibility to society.

In Belarus, more attention is paid to exact and technical sciences. This is a Soviet tradition. At first glance, there is nothing wrong in it, because technology is very necessary for a modern person. However, we see what a humanitarian catastrophe has happened in the Russian Federation, where many people with formal higher education approve of the murder of Ukrainians. And Russian programmers are now not developing computer games, but calculating the trajectories of missiles that killed children in Odesa and Mykolaiv.

We know very well how the Lukashist authorities try to envelop the Belarusians with their ideology from childhood. So such a set of museums does not seem to me accidental. They say that starting from school you should get used to ploughing the soil with a tractor, not thinking about anything, not knowing any languages (even your own Belarusian). Well, such an unconscious person can be quickly transferred from a tractor to a tank and sent to fight for someone else's interests.