The number of secondary-school pupils choosing religious education is in sharp decline in Poland, informs the Polska daily.To the Polish Catholic Church’s dismay, in some Polish cities, especially in central and western Poland, RE attendance has dropped to 50 per cent compared with last year’s average of 90 per cent.
Experts, including Catholic priests, quoted by the newspaper explain that the reasons for this trend may be manifold. A philosopher, Professor Zbigniew Mikolejko from Warsaw University thinks that Polish pupils opt out of religion in favour of ethics out of “laziness”, as RE is “too much hard work” and is not a compulsory subject.
Father Krzysztof Kantowski, however, the Episcopate’s education consultant, claims that the generation of young Poles born in 1990s, “do not appreciate the role of the Church” and think that the Internet will provide them with all necessary knowledge about life.
Polish men make poor soldiers, informs the Dziennik daily and quotes statistics from the Defence Ministry showing that only one in five males volunteering to join the army in Poland are intelligent, healthy and educated enough to satisfy the army’s criteria.
Instead, the information campaign encouraging people to sign up conducted by the Ministry recently, has mainly appealed to “losers, misfits and criminals”. As a result, the Polish military is short of 42,000 soldiers.
In Dziennik’s opinion, the Polish Defence Ministry’s ambitious plans to boast a 120,000-strong professional army by 2010 will come to nothing if the Polish Army does not find ways to improve its image and attract the crème de la crème of the Polish youth.
The left-wing Trybuna daily calls for a national referendum to ask Poles if want introduction of the common currency in Poland in 2011.
Many Poles are afraid of the euro, writes the newspaper and quotes a poll by GfK Polonia saying that 79 per cent believe the adoption of the new currency should be put to a popular vote. According to Trybuna, Poles fear in particular the so-called “cappuccino effect” - an increase in the costs of services and food prices.And although the countries that adopted euro in the past got over the initial shock after a few months, their societies were much richer than Poland’s, the newspaper points out.
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(Source: Polska)