In addition to its teaching and educational duties, a school should teach the ability to express what one feels, thinks and experiences. Because, in truth, people differ from one another in their ability to formulate their experiences. However, this is possible only when the school has the opportunity to open itself up to various creative proposals. This concerns both preparing students for conscious participation in culture and creating opportunities for artistic self-realization.
It is common knowledge that the state’s financial situation does not allow schools to support the development of cultural education. This role should therefore be fulfilled by cultural institutions. But they, too, have found themselves in a very difficult situation (less than 1 percent of the state budget is allocated to culture). Nevertheless, neither schools nor, all the more so, the cultural centre should feel exempt from this duty.
Since there is no single universal cultural policy that one person can impose on another, we must adopt some important criterion and look at what possibilities each party has. One such criterion may be concern for cultural identity (that is, how to act and what to choose in order to preserve our cultural heritage and also enrich that body of work).
For, as the Hungarians put it, we are too small a nation to allow ourselves to disregard this attribute of our national “being”. We can also easily be absorbed by behemoths and trampled by a uniform mass culture. Another criterion may be the pursuit of a change in lifestyle to one that will make it easier for people to develop their creative abilities in the daily struggle of life.
To speak about the lifestyle of Poles, most of whom begin and end their contact with art with consuming television productions, is to speak of the immense cultural devastation of our society.
Reading poetry, looking at paintings, listening to music—indeed, admiration for a human being and delight at the beauty of the world—are not abilities granted once and for all. They must be developed, and people must be prepared to receive a work of art.
A teacher, although often unaware of it, is a cultural animator not only when organizing contact with a work of art.
The cultural centre, on the other hand, makes this contact possible (and this is our cultural offering). It also proposes ways of pursuing one’s own artistic interests (and this is our creative proposition).
In designing cultural activities, we would like to oppose the increasingly widespread accultural attitude of society. I am increasingly concerned that we may lose some important value in educating the younger generation by failing to appreciate cultural proposals and failing to make efforts to satisfy higher-order cultural needs. The phenomenon of growing aggression in social reactions, everyday rudeness and the brutalization of our lives provide more than enough evidence that these concerns are justified.
We know that high culture has always been and will always be an elitist phenomenon, and this is understandable. However, providing society with a basic preparation for making use of cultural goods is the duty both of the school and of cultural centres and institutions—perhaps above all the latter. And so I am approaching the formulation of a conclusion that is best captured by the title of this statement (“a marriage of education and culture”):
- the cultural centre can serve as an agency of the school, provided that teachers are willing to cooperate with it, and can also act as a cultural animator on school premises, or entrust such a task to artistically gifted young people,
- through clubs promoting young people, the cultural centre enables them to present their own artistic explorations: it brings together people from the worlds of art and science; it creates opportunities to publish and disseminate their most interesting achievements,
- the cultural centre takes individual and group projects and proposals into account; it is always happy to accept and respond to them,
- the cultural centre carefully ensures that the offers addressed to schools are genuinely artistic (rather than hackwork, which is all too easy to find today).
We closely observe contemporary trends in Polish and global culture, promoting those that propose a new lifestyle based on healthy eating (courses and lecture series), building ecological awareness (environmental movements), and contact with art, which teaches concentration and facilitates encounters with other people, giving our civilization a chance not to become a civilization paved with tin cans and Coca-Cola cans.
Finally, I turn to the schools with a strong request to specify their own concrete expectations, which we will strive to meet.