Friday, June 01, 2007

School reading list changes proposals, not decisions

Education Secretary Roman Giertych has denied the reading list for school pupils will certainly be without works by classic writers such as Franz Kafka.

He told Polish Radio today that claims by Gazeta Wyborcza on Thursday that the education ministry will remove such leading writers as Gombrowicz, Goethe and Dostoyevsky from the reading list are untrue.

Minister Giertych said that the new list is just a proposal of changes, which will now be consulted with the public.

The changes were originally proposed by teachers from all over Poland, he claimed.

But Minister Giertych stipulated that the list should feature books by and about Pope John Paul II. Lack of knowledge about the Polish-born Pope among young Poles would give them ‘a distortion view of history’.
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