Poles Seek to Overcome Gap in Math and Sciences

The newly opened science and technology center here was conceived not only as a place to excite young minds about science and discovery, but also as a chance for Poland to overcome at least one piece of its tragic past, to set aside one legacy of war and occupation — the decline of math and science education.
Families and schoolchildren have filled the Copernicus Science Center in Warsaw since it opened last month.
“I see this as a vanguard in a revolution in education,” said Prof. Lukasz Turski, a physicist with the Polish Academy of Sciences who lobbied the government to build the Copernicus Science Center, which opened in November.

The idea is to overcome a view of the hard sciences as inferior to the arts and humanities, a lingering perception that is today hampering Poland’s efforts to advance. It is a concrete reminder of just how much history shapes and defines the present.

Many nations have struggled to excite their children about math and science. But in Poland, it is different. In a nation that struggled to remain a nation even while it did not exist, geographically wiped off the map for more than a century, the arts proved to be a thread that bound generations of Poles together, preserving an identity and a rich language.

“The only form to create national identity was literature,” said Janusz Reiter, a former ambassador to Germany and the United States, who now lives and works here in the capital.

So the humanities were important to Poland’s survival, while math and the sciences languished.

“The reason we had a poor mathematical tradition is rather clear,” wrote Wieslaw Zelazko, a mathematics professor with the Polish Academy of Sciences. “In the 19th century, a period of great development of mathematics in Western Europe, Poland was not an independent country.”

Poland, Professor Zelazko continued, did have a period of math excellence that began after World War I, though in the sweep of history it was a relatively brief period, cut off by World War II, when the Nazis silenced, drove out or killed Poland’s intellectuals. Schools and universities were shut down. (In Nazi ideology, Poles were “subhumans,” fit only to work as slaves on the farms that Germans would establish after the war on Polish territory.)

Later, after 40 years of Soviet domination, when the Iron Curtain fell, Poland moved quickly to overhaul its school system. But it failed to change the mind-set toward math. In 2001, the Education Ministry ruled that math was not an obligatory part of the series of tests needed to graduate from high school, Professor Turski said.

So lots of people just skipped math — a legacy that Poland’s fledgling high-tech sector is struggling with today. Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, a Polish daily newspaper, recently reported that job opportunities in these areas outnumbered applicants by 10 to 1.

Economists say that Poland lags far behind other nations of comparable resources in patent applications, and that in 2012 Poland will probably lose out on European Union financing for research and development.

“I am not qualified to be considered intelligentsia in this country,” Professor Turski said, shouting with the enthusiasm of a man on a mission. “It is more important to sit and discuss Plato than to know how the chip in the computer works.”

The decision to make math studies optional was finally reversed this past May, Professor Turski said, part of a long, slow process of trying to persuade Poles to forge values relevant to the modern world, and to get past values that evolved in very different times.

But that struggle is not just relevant to math, because it is essentially about reconstructing an identity free from suffering, free from occupation, free from the moral certainty that resistance is always the moral choice.

“The traditional assumptions of who we are no longer are useful,” said Mr. Reiter, the former ambassador. “Who are we? What is our mission in this world? What holds us together?”

These questions are a constant undercurrent in politics here, in attitudes toward the Roman Catholic Church and its role in society, and in how people view patriotism, in addition to attitudes toward learning.

The undercurrent is not the focus of debate, but it is often the context of the debate, said many academics and political scientists. The main difference between the two primary political parties is less about policy than about how to incorporate the past into the present: whether to continue searching for Communist collaborators, for example, or how closely linked national identity should be with religious identity and allegiance to the Catholic Church.

“One of the main divisions between political parties in Poland is not connected with the economy,” said Pawel Spiewak, a sociologist at the University of Warsaw. “Much more important is the attitude toward the sphere of culture, toward church, toward morality, toward the past.”

It is not even clear, Professor Turski said, that there is a general understanding and agreement on the need to improve education in science and math, if for no other reason than to help propel Poland’s already successful post-cold-war economy.

“The only way for this country to move forward is for it to educate its own people, and our politicians don’t understand this,” Professor Turski said. “You cannot move a country without great ideas.”

He is hoping that the Copernicus Center can at least inspire people, if not the system itself, to embrace science and math. The center has been open only a few weeks, but it has sparked a glimmer of optimism. It is always filled, with families on weekends and schoolchildren during the week.

“I think we see now there is a great need to learn mathematics and science,” said Maja Topolnicka, a schoolteacher who was visiting the Copernicus Center with her students recently. “I don’t know why we did not see that before.”

Ms. Topolnicka watched as her 12-year-old students ran from exhibit to exhibit, pushing buttons, cranking handles and having a grand time even if they seemed to be missing the science behind what made the pistons go up and down, or the balloon shoot into the air. But that did not necessarily matter, because in the end, the science center might just find that it has a head start with a generation weaned not just on history and tradition but on video games and the Internet.

“I like math and science,” said one student, Borys Kozdak, using English he said he learned from playing online video games.

Ilona Rusin was watching as her son, Sebastian, 10, dropped marbles into a long maze. She said he had made her promise to take him to the museum as soon as it opened, and they made it within the first week.

“No,” she said, “when I did my studies, I did not take math.” Her son looked up from his activity and said with a shy smile that he loved computers and added, “Everything in the world has something to do with math.”