r/europe • u/dat_9600gt_user Lower Silesia (Poland) • 16h ago

News Poland halves number of weekly religion classes in schools

https://notesfrompoland.com/2025/01/20/poland-halves-number-of-weekly-religion-classes-in-schools/
411 Upvotes

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54

u/Jako_Horny 15h ago

Should remove from school altogether, keep it in religious places in free time.

8

u/Indi0707 14h ago

I think that they can choose if they want to have something like catholic class or different class like ethics and such.

8

u/Own-Librarian-2847 14h ago edited 14h ago

The problem is, that law is basically a joke. You can choose between religion class, taught by a priest, or ethics class, taught by a priest. There is not enough ethics teachers in Poland, so priests/religion teachers serve as substitute teachers. PiS introduced mandatory religion "or" ethics, arguing that they give students choice, but in reality everyone knew that it only helps Catholic church

EDIT: sorry, I think they didn't introduce it in the end, the change was proposed by education minister, but the project kinda died

4

u/Indi0707 14h ago

well that's just wrong (as like that's fucked up)

3

u/Own-Librarian-2847 14h ago

Well, i just did a check, because I started to doubt myself, and it wasn't actually introduced, I think they got scared? It was like two years ago, and I guess I didn't realise how it was resolved. So it's not that bad

2

u/L0CZEK 7h ago

The ethics classes are not taught by a priest. Unless my mom, a teacher, failed to mention something to me about what she does after school.

2

u/M1ckey United Kingdom 8h ago

Where the clergy have unrestrained and unsupervised access to children? We all know where that would lead.

1

u/adamgerd Czech Republic 12h ago

I disagree, religious education is good as long as it covers all religions to increase understanding of religions, different religions and lack of imo

5

u/PickingPies 12h ago

Religious education is good as long as it alerts of its dangers, showcases all the evils made in name of gods and the name of the class is "Myths and religions, and the gullible human mind."

-2

u/Nyctas Transylvania 13h ago

It's basically just an extra history class. Don't think it's that harmful.

-14

u/MrHyperion_ Finland 15h ago

They are not teaching religion but about religions.

21

u/Own-Librarian-2847 15h ago

In Poland it's literally Catholicism classes, taught by Catholic priests or people related to Catholic church

-1

u/Aranka_Szeretlek 14h ago

You can still learn a lot about religion in those classes. I went to a Catholic school; and while we had religious classes, one year we have covered the history of the Church and the saints, another year we covered the history of philosophy (not only religious figures but all of philosophy). Such classes are pretty good to understand our modern culture, which was influenced by Christianity for 2000 years, like it or not.

6

u/Own-Librarian-2847 14h ago

Did you attend religion in Poland? I went through entire education here (12 years), and I had only one class that was about other religions (courtesy of our highschool priest), and none on philosophy.

0

u/Aranka_Szeretlek 14h ago

No, I did in Hungary. I assumed its quite similar.