Twenty years ago I taught English in a small town located in southwest Poland called Gora. At the time the country was just beginning its political, economic, and social transition away from communism. I was in Warsaw the night Lech Walesa gave his acceptance speech in 1990 as Poland's first freely elected president since before World War II. Over the last two decades I have made extended visits to Poland and have had the good fortune to be in the country when it was officially accepted as a NATO member in 1999, when it entered the European Union in 2004, and this month when Poland assumed the role of the presidency of the European Union for the very first time.
Today is my last day of a three week visit to Poland and as I travelled to big cities (Warsaw and Gdansk), midsize cities, and to the village where my wife grew up, I asked family, friends, and acquaintances for their views on what's happening in Poland. The best summary I can think of after my time here is the title of this post: young, under construction, and on the move.
Poland is a country for young people. The opportunities for smart, energetic, educated 20- and 30-somethings are enormous. Poland's economy is the only one in Europe that did not slide into recession in 2008-09. In the last three years its economy has grown by 10 percent, while the European Union overall saw a contraction of two percent. The country of 38 million is pulling in serious private investment capital, and the place looks like one giant construction site. According to a 2010 European Attractiveness Survey by Ernst and Young, Poland is the top location for foreign direct investment in Europe.
This investment is not limited to just big cities. In the village where my wife grew up, two young Polish entrepreneurs (both had lived in the US and Canada as students and moved back to Poland to pursue economic opportunities) had raised more than $2 million to build a big-time trout farm. They expect to sell 300 tons of trout a year across the European Union.
The country's infrastructure is undergoing a serious upgrade. Almost every train station we went through was receiving a face lift, and the country is upgrading its rail lines to improve the speed of its widely used passenger trains. According to Poland's Ministry of Transportation there are currently 1,400 kilometers of national roads under construction and in last year contracts were signed for the construction of more than 1,700 kilometers of additional road construction and improvements in coming years.
Schools across the country have also been upgraded. I saw many new school buildings in both the cities and small towns, as well as old buildings that had been substantially upgraded, and new sports facilities and playgrounds. More importantly, Poland is expanding educational opportunities for its young people. In 1989, Poland had 400,000 students in post-secondary education. In 2011, there are more than two million young Poles in one of the country's 500 colleges or universities. Almost 50 percent of those aged 19-24 take university courses, a figure that is certain to continue growing as more and more Poles understand the importance of education. In 2009, 91 percent of Polish adults told pollsters in a national survey that "it is important to get an education." This number was up from just 40 percent in 1993.
The quality of education in Poland is steadily improving. On recent PISA exams it ranked 9th among all countries in overall reading scores, and is just one of 13 countries that has shown constant improvement in reading performance on PISA since 2000. Poland was listed earlier this year as one of 13 "sustained improvers" by McKinsey and Company in their report, How the world's most improved school systems keep getting better. Other sustained improvers included nations like Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, and American school networks like Aspire Public Schools and the Boston Public Schools.
Over the past two decades Poland's education system has gone through a serious set of reforms that have included:
- delegating school management to local authorities;
- introducing an external system of national assessments;
- adopting and implementing a core curriculum and rigorous national academic standards; and
- overhauling teacher preparation and development programs while increasing teacher salaries.
The opportunities and excitement in Poland were captured in a conversation I had last night at dinner with a friend from graduate school whom I hadn't seen for a decade. He grew up in Poland, left for studies in America in the early 1990s, and is now a tenured professor at a major state university in the United States. He has been bringing American students to Poland for the last seven summers for study abroad opportunities. He told me at dinner he is thinking seriously about moving back to Poland because there is more opportunity for him here than in the United States. Such a conversation would have been unimaginable just a decade or two ago.
??- Terry Ryan
