Poles in Lithuania - Education

Education

As of 1980, about 20% of Polish-Lithuanian students chose Polish as the language of instruction at school. In the same year, about 60-70% of rural Polish community chose Polish. However, even in towns with predominantly Polish population the share of Polish language education was less than the percentage of Poles. Even though, historically, Poles tended to strongly oppose Russification, one of the most important reasons to choose Russian language education was the absence of Polish language college and university learning in the USSR, and during Soviet times Polish minority students in Lithuania were not allowed to get college/university education across the border in Poland. Only in 2007, the first small branch of the Polish Białystok University opened in Vilnius. In 1980 there were 16,400 school students instructed in Polish. Their number declined to 11,400 in 1990. In independent Lithuania between 1990 and 2001 the number of Polish mother tongue children attending schools with Polish as the language of instruction doubled to over 22,300, then gradually decreased to 18,392 in 2005. In September 2003, there were 75 Polish-language general education schools and 52 which provided education in Polish in combination of languages (for example Lithuanian-Polish, Lithuanian-Russian-Polish). These numbers fell to 49 and 41 in 2011, reflecting a general decline in the number of schools in Lithuania.