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Poland The Education Tradition
The education of Polish society was a goal of rulers as
early
as the twelfth century, when monks were brought from
France and
Silesia to teach agricultural methods to Polish peasants.
Kraków
University, founded in 1364 by Kazimierz the Great, became
one of
Europe's great early universities and a center of
intellectual
tolerance
(see The Medieval Era
, ch. 1). Through the
eighteenth
century, Poland was a refuge for academic figures
persecuted
elsewhere in Europe for unorthodox ideas. The dissident
schools
founded by these refugees became centers of avant-garde
thought,
especially in the natural sciences. The Renaissance and
Enlightenment periods in Western Europe brought advanced
educational theories to Poland. In 1773 King Stanislaw
August
established his Commission on National Education, the
world's
first state ministry of education. This body set up a
uniform
national education system emphasizing mathematics, natural
sciences, and language study. The commission also stressed
standardizing elementary education, integrating trade and
agricultural skills into the elementary school curriculum,
and
improving textbooks at all levels.
Data as of October 1992
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