Destruction of Polish Education (3)

“Today we receive 3 different or conflicting educations: parents, teachers, and the world... The birthing people do not breed: they die only erstwhile adult husbands are contaminated“, Montescius, On the Spirit of Rights”

"A household that does not control whether it can control the children's information environment is not actually household at all", Neil Postman, "Technopol"

“My children are divided into those before and after the invention of the smartphone”, Father of a multi - kid family

A summary of the changes the minister's squad wants to make at school Barbara Nowacka is the alleged postgraduate profile. Consultations on its form are presently underway. An example profile presented by MEN, which is intended to be the mark of the education process, is built so as not to rise large objections. The centre is cognition and skills, and what an emphasis on the digitisation of life, then competence, affluence and areas of education, all immersed in alleged education to values specified as truth, good, beauty, but besides justice, responsibility, respect and solidarity. Sounds good, but in the post-truth era, fighting canons of beauty and any manipulation of meanings and meanings of words you can put everything under these noble slogans.

It is besides worth noting that there are no concepts specified as character, virtue (e.g. cardinal virtues: valor, prudence, justice and moderation), will, patriotism, nation, homeland or just Poland. This is related to plans to include Polish education in European Education Area and preparing specified formatted graduates to easy change their place of work and residence. alternatively of patriotism, only “identity and sense of belonging” has been entered, which in connection with the alleged wellness education programme depending on fashion may mean, for example, feeling like a man or a woman.

What is truly revolutionary is the fact that minister Nowacka declares clearly his intention to play a decisive function in shaping the worldview and the value strategy of the graduate. This represents a extremist departure from the existing regulation enshrined in the Education strategy Act, according to which the school's task was, in addition to teaching and caring, to support parents in the process of education, and these had the constitutional right to decide its form and direction.

In the context of immense social and worldview divisions, specified interference of ideologically motivated authorities will mean gathering the concerns that the educational expert Jolanta Dobrzyńska spoke about and making the school a place of cultural war, which will besides make an atmosphere that negatively affects the learning process. This is accompanied by an expanding number of legal regulations, increasingly aggressive interference in relations between adults and young people, teachers and students, as well as parents and children.

Reducing the level of education of public schools and eliminating the work and assessing household tasks will clearly contribute to deepening the distribution based on the wealth and cultural capital of parents. Rich people and those affected will send children to private schools, smart people will take care that the kid captures the school material and does his homework at home. Others will give their children extra lessons.

However, all these considerations ignore the most crucial educational problem that we are dealing with today, which can be seen by observing Polish youth on a walk, in means of transport, during a conversation with their peers and in almost all another life situation, which we do not want to notice. Indirect approval for its existence is placed in the heart of the planned postgraduate profile. George Orwell In his celebrated 1984 novel, he predicted that televisions in the homes would follow us and give instructions, but he did not imagine that people would carry them in their hands like smokers erstwhile and would willingly watch the content of the singing and mass specialists. In the case of Polish youth, this occurs for an average of more than 5 hours a day, so weekly at least as much as school classes. What happened with smartphones for 17 years since they appeared on the market, a celebrated German neurobiologist and psychiatrist Manfred Spitzer He called it an epidemic. Before that, he pointed out the havoc that digitalization of education and many hours of contact with screens makes. His first sold in Germany in hundreds of thousands of copies was entitled "Digital dementia" and dealt mainly with the impact of spending time and learning through various types of screens; primarily computers, but besides alleged interactive tables.

It was followed by “Cyber of Disease” and yet the last “Epidemia of Smartphones”. All were comparatively rapidly translated into English (2013, 2015 and 2021). Spitzer cited in them a wide spectrum of investigation confirming the full scope of negative effects that digitalisation has on young people. Physical wellness statistic are alarming, starting with myopia, which in South Korea has increased from 5 to 90% over a short period of time, through prediabetic conditions, increased pressure, sleep disturbances and obesity in teenagers. Even more havoc is caused by online intellectual wellness and so, for example, in the US, the number of suicides among girls has doubled over 7 years, depression among young people has become a mass phenomenon. Digitisation in character formation, exercise of willpower and self-control, and thus those factors that find a successful life, do large damage.. Many teenagers and even children show signs of strong behavioral addiction and respond to taking a smartphone with rage or at least any kind of drug hunger. The dependence on smartphones entails further addictions, among which the addiction to pornography comes first. The NASK study (Scientific and Academic Computer Network Coordination squad at the University of Warsaw) of 2022 states that all 4th Polish teenager watches pornographic content all day, doing so besides all 5th child. What will be the consequences for future relationships, household life (if any)? In addition to authors and owners of pornographic sites, Polish youths are raised by alleged influencers who empathize with profanity, primitive content and forms. Even parents who take care of their children and can block specified content are helpless, for in school, all blocks and bans are avoided by peers whose parents are either not curious or incapable to block specified content, and whose children are willing to give it to their friends.

However, what is most crucial from the point of view of the school is the fatal impact of digitalisation on the learning process and cognitive capabilities. All available studies show that already having a child's own computer and electronic gadgets has a fatal effect on the results in discipline and the general improvement of the child. This peculiarly has a negative impact on children from families with lower cultural capital, so it increases, and does not reduce, as lobbyists and politicians falsely preach, social differences, de facto harming the children of poorer parents, having little free time and little educated. On a broader scale, this is seen from the PISA (Programme for global Student Assessment) test, where the results and studies show that, as Spitzer writes, “the relation between spending on computers in schools and the mathematical achievements of children is negative, which is the more money spent in a given country on computers in a school (as per student) the faster the students' achievements (OECD 2015) worsened... Finland little than 20 years ago, in the first analysis of the PISA test data, was its winner (which many countries envied); present the results of Finnish students are in the mediate of a stake.” It should be added here that from 2003 onwards, the results of Finnish students in all 3 areas studied; mathematics, reading, widely understood nature have steadily declined and averaged 20% in the 2 decades of the 20th century. any countries that initially submitted to digital lobbyists began to draw conclusions from these facts and, for example, "Australia, after its fall in the PISA ranking in 2008, invested around 2.4 billion Australian dollars in equipping schools with laptops. Since 2016, laptops have been taken. The students did everything with them but 1 – learning.” Scandinavian countries return to pen and pencil writing, which, as investigation has shown, gives much better results in learning than utilizing keyboard buttons.

In South Korea, where Spitzer quotes: “There, the Ministry of discipline says that the percent of young people aged 10 to 19 who are addicted to smartphones is already over 30%. For respective years now – for the first time in the planet (...) there is simply a law limiting and regulating the usage of smartphones by people under the age of 19. For this purpose, software is utilized to block access to pornography and violence, evidence the time of usage and study to parents erstwhile certain words (...) are inserted on the smartphone keyboard. In addition, parents are informed erstwhile the regular usage of the smartphone (...) exceeds a certain set limit.” After Spitzer's work followed China, as well as more and more Western countries. The Hungarian Prime Minister is simply a large supporter of the restrictions on the usage of smartphones in schools Victor Orban.

In 1990 erstwhile I defended Polish railways, collective transport and spatial governance on 1 of the banners we had the inscription: "Learn from the mistakes of the West”. I was confronted with 2 phenomena: the activity of lobbyists of the automotive manufacture and with the comfortable ignorance of officials, journalists, railway trade unionists, with the full indifference of a society stupidized by sold experts and unlearned ones holding advanced positions in politics and offices. In the case of digitalisation, the situation is identical.

Minister Przemysław Czarnek for inexpensive applause and most likely due to full ignorance he gave children laptops for taxpayers' money, and the curator of education with whom I spoke in 2022 had never heard of Spitzer's books. Social organizations at the time of the Law and Justice governments asked MEN to ban smartphones in schools. In response, they have always heard that it is the work of schools, and besides, the MEN's responses were simply predominately convinced that we would not escape from the alleged development, and only adequate to take care of the fresh miracle technology in the right way.

I know from my own experience that it has always been hard to intervene with Members in the substance of taking into account the negative effects of fresh technologies in political decisions due to their concerns about the accusations of "return to a tree", "to caves" or "to the mediate Ages", but in the case of digitalisation, I heard from the honourable otherwise Members that she simply wants to live, and so she will not do anything about it. The money that flows with the digitization from the state budget into the pockets of corporations is so immense that even countries with stronger democracy and more mature public opinion are having problem subjecting this process to control and besides to its dark sides. In addition, digitalisation is an essential tool for control and surveillance, and this in turn makes the full elite of power and bureaucracy curious in its progress. In Germany, Spitzer's books were bestsellers, he himself hosted in mainstream media, where there was an authentic debate about this.

However, the activities of public and hidden lobbyists made it possible, as he wrote, to say: “The gathering of the committee (the expert committee on youth at the German Bundestag) lasted twice as long as usual and MPs seemed very curious in the subject. At the end of the six-week meeting, a long protocol was drawn, which was concluded with the conclusion that no action was required." Spitzer was besides invited by the Parliament of the Land of Hessen to attend the meetings of the expert group on media, but he writes: “It turned out that the expert group was not; it consisted of twenty-nine lobbyists and representatives of various organizations – the only expert was me.” So far, only Bavaria has introduced a ban on smartphones in schools in Germany.

Spitzer in his works focuses primarily on the effects of digitalization of teaching in the field of health, neurobiology, psychology, cognition and consequences for the wider social life. Only occasionally gives an example of inventions from the past, the usage of which proved to be harmful, and despite cognition of, for example, the negative effect on health, their usage took place for many decades after the discovery of this dependence. This issue is much broader than that of the late American philosopher and medical scientist Neil Postman, which in subsequent books dealt with the influence of technology on the form of civilization with peculiar emphasis on education and the learning process. His most celebrated works translated into Polish are “Technopol”, “To play to death” and “Towards the 18th century”. He wrote them inactive during the reign of television, but already he saw the disastrous effects of the unreflective cult of fresh technologies and indirectly the Scientism behind it. This was inscribed in a long list of classics and reminded that this relation was seen as the first no 1 another than Plato, which he expressed in Faidros by quoting the communicative of King Tamuza of Egypt and God Teuta, in which the erstwhile indicated that the invention of the writing had negative effects because: “This is not a cure for memory, but a means of remembering. You will only give your disciples the appearance of wisdom, not actual wisdom. For they will have large reading without learning, and they will think that they know a lot, and in most parts they will know nothing, and it will only be hard to deal with them, they will be wise by appearance, not wise people truly.”

More than 2 1000 years later, these words prove amazingly relevant. Spitzer writes: “Searchers are mostly utilized to get information only erstwhile the searcher already knows a lot.” My experience at school confirms this: students are asked to find answers to a question on the Internet, and they are having problem doing it, unless they have knowledge. In another words, to find it, you gotta know first. Postman argues according to experience that “every technology is both a burden and a blessing; not either—or, but both.” However, as he adds at least since Francis Bacon's time, our civilization has lost consciousness of this phenomenon and granted technology an equivalent function to improving intellect, spirit and character as the means needed for a happy life. Over the centuries, both worldviews continued in parallel and in any conflict.

A breakthrough minute erstwhile he writes Postman conventional worldview and hierarchy of values went to the background were times and actions Henry Ford and Frederick W. Taylor (achievements of the second admired Lenin, and Aldous Huxley did not accidentally place the “New Wonderful World” in the “Ford era”). The technological management they introduced was a manifestation of a change in the full social reality, including household life and education. Technocracy in Postman's opinion turned into technopoly, or totalitarian technocracy. How much the strategy subjected our lives to small is as good as shifting the age of having a first kid by women by an average of 10 years or the fact that today's grandchildren teach grandparents to usage technology alternatively of drawing from their experience. Elders thus lose authority and consequently affect young people.

Even the critics of the postgraduate profile do not see whether or not they are afraid to pay attention to the central place that digitalisation occupies in the postgraduate profile, and this means that technology, as well as its reflective cult, has become the center of our hierarchy of values. And not many people want to announcement that according to Marx's correct reflection of the invention of stirrups, which created feudalism and steam device which spawned capitalism, this affects the full social life and the psyche of individuals. Who and what strategy will the “digital world” put in the center of the postgraduate profile no 1 asks, everyone guessed? It is this change, the importance of which escapes our attention, that we do not see the real causes of our problems and alternatively of effective action, we are amazed and outraged.

If you add that the introduction of fresh technologies always involves the profits of its suppliers and the losses of others, then we will see how much forces are active in this process and how much the game is about. Postman devoted quite a few space to the alleged tv learning kind by watching educational tv and playing. He wrote: “It is entirely justified to say that most of the educational task undertaken in the United States is carried out not in school classes, but in front of the tv screen and not under the supervision of teachers, but network managers and comedians.” In the age of smartphones, they execute it as defined Andrzej Zybertovich Cyberpanes from Silicon Valley, and Minister Nowacka is simply a insignificant figure in their power and influence. Postman besides gives examples of a number of changes that fresh media have made not only in schools, but besides in the kind of people that we choose for the most crucial positions. He describes presidential debates from a century and a half ago: “According to the agreement, Douglas spoke first for an hour, Lincoln’s consequence lasted an hr and a half, and Douglas reacted to Lincoln’s consequence for half an hour. This was a much shorter debate than those to which both of these men were accustomed."

The current students are not only able to focus on a longer lecture, but even the movie on you tube becomes boring for them after a fewer minutes. The same besides applies to an expanding percent of adults. Politicians and intellectuals were replaced by actors, and teachers haunted by perverted schools. Both appeal to emotions, words, and logic of speech have been replaced by images and impressions that are easy to manipulate. Lincoln and Douglas listened to blacksmiths, shopkeepers with basic education, but they had the ability to focus and realize longer discourses, then it was not known to read without understanding.

All of this shows that changing school programs, introducing indoctrination or even sexualisation are possibly little crucial to what young people are teaching digital life today, as well as the example of the first generation of digital parents who are themselves governed by cyberpanes. It is besides the first generation of students, who are mostly only children, frequently raised by single mothers. Many children are chronically ill, and as a generation they are incapable to match the achievements of erstwhile generations in fitness tests in WF classes. alternatively of a noble invisible hand as a model of action for others, a red heart for the show is offered to them. The first case of introducing the concept of alleged student in the Polish school's statutes has already been noted. Most of the general parents of the council were in favour of this record.

Therefore, the program of the fresh school, matching the times and situation of the Polish school, cannot be separated from the state and imagination of society, from the authentic reflection of the real threats, and education must be embedded in the overall model of life. specified visions or even a catalogue of national flaws that require working so far are missing. The current dispute over education could be a good starting point for specified a debate, as it was 3 centuries ago in the face of the collapse of the Republic.

Olaf Swolkień

Photo: Wikipedia

Think Poland, No. 47-48 (17-24.11.2024)