Life> Kaleidoscope

Arts-loving Poland turns to math

By Michael Slackman (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-12-13 09:23

Traditionally math and science have not enjoyed high esteem in Poland, but the Copernicus Science Center draws crowds. [Photo/Piotr Malecki/The New York Times]

WARSAW - 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 legacy of war and occupation - the decline of math and science education.

"I see this as a vanguard in a revolution in education," said Professor 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.

In a nation that struggled to remain a nation even while it did not exist, wiped off the map for more than a century, the arts proved to be a thread that bound generations of Poles together.

"The only form to create national identity was literature," said Janusz Reiter, a former ambassador to Germany and the United States.

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. Later, after 40 years of Soviet domination, Poland moved quickly to overhaul its school system. But it failed to change the attitude toward math.

In 2001, the Education Ministry ruled that math was not 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. "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 it is still not clear, he said, that there is a general understanding of the need to improve education in science and math.

He is hoping that the Copernicus Center can at least inspire people to embrace science and math.

The center is always filled, with families on weekends and schoolchildren during the week.

Ilona Rusin was watching as her son, Sebastian, 10, dropped marbles into a long maze.

"No," she said, "when I did my studies, I did not take math."

Her son looked up and said with a shy smile that he loved computers.

"Everything in the world has something to do with math," he said.

The New York Times