On the haunted ‘public’ in public education in Poland

Abstract

I investigate what is ‘public’ in public education, mostly in Poland, discovering in its sense something elusive, difficult to capture in the traditional way, that nevertheless has a noticeable impact – the specters. The text is framed by Derrida’s hauntology. Whereas traditional ontology provides taxonomies of things that exist, hauntology references those things that do not exist, but which nonetheless exert an influence. Thus my ‘conducting’ hauntology means attending to the non-existent/unacknowledged phenomena upon which our positive categories rely for their existence. I show first how the ghost of the public haunts the present situation in Poland and causes a strange return of elitism thanks to (or in spite of) a discourse of egalitarianism and democracy. Then I link it to a discussion about the kind of global society we live in today (‘the post-social’), and how our collective lives (the bubbles in which we are trapped) are haunted by a misunderstood idea of humanity (which we refuse to face). The ever-recurring ghost of humanism, in relation to the public in public education, requires a new perspective. The idea of cosmopolitan learning, which is associated with the ethical postulates of posthumanism, seems to be promising in this context.

Introduction: on the haunted nature of the ‘public’

In this text, I investigate what is ‘public’ in public education (mostly in Poland but also against the wider European and global contexts), identifying in its sense traces of the past as ‘something’ that remains not only vague but also strange, not coming from today’s world, while strongly influencing it. For example, how can one understand that, under the anti-neoliberal banner of a better school for everyone, in 2016 the Ministry of National Education in Poland introduced ‘more elite and more difficult’ high schools, thus reversing the trend of the 1990s reforms when the vocational training path was limited to make room for comprehensive general secondary schools, which gradually resulted in a large proportion of general high school graduates taking up university education? ¹

Writing about the ‘public’ in this context is like meeting something strange, or talking to spectres, so the frame created by Jacques Derrida’s (1994) hauntology seems apt here. By re-conceptualizing Marx from the perspective of the spectral presence of his work, Derrida explained his haunotology as follows:

But if the commodity-form is not, presently, use-value, and even if it is not actually present, it affects in advance the use-value of the wooden table. It affects and bereaves it in advance, like the ghost it will become, but this is precisely where haunting begins. And its time, and the untimeliness of its present, of its being ‘out of joint’. To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology. Ontology opposes it only in a movement of exorcism. Ontology is a conjuration. (1994: 178–179).

Hauntology is, therefore, an ontology of a specter, a being whose existence is not clearly defined, and its presence – like its absence – is uncertain. This kind of uncertainty, when we do not fully know whether something is there or not, is a feature of the so-called ‘weak thought’ (pensiero debole). Hauntology thus joins a chain of expressions of ‘pensiero debole’, the term introduced originally by Gianni Vattimo. As Vattimo argued, ‘(w)eak thought accepts and develops the heritage of dialectics, conjoining it to difference’ (2012: 48). Accordingly, weak thought expresses different presence, not that, or not only that, assumed in traditional ontology (White, 2000). It is in weak thought that a place for – so to say – the ‘spectral public’, that does not appear in the reflection of ‘the public’ normally, is assured.

Reaching for Derrida is also justified by the fact that justice is a goal here. My discoveries about the sense of the public in the present mean that, on the one hand, one wants to free the present from the haunting, from seduction by the ghosts of the past. On the other hand, one wants to reclaim the sense of the public that comes from the past. In both cases, the conversation with the inheritance from past generations – which is the specter of the ‘public’ – takes place in the present and for the future in the name of justice. This ethical postulate underlies Derrida’s thought. As he wrote about ‘Specters of Marx’, ‘one must, magically, chase away a specter, exorcise the possible return of a power held to be baleful in itself and whose demonic threat continues to haunt the century’ (Derrida, 1994: 120). To do this we should learn justice ‘from the ghost’;

(we) should learn to live by learning not how to make conversation with the ghost but how to talk with him, with her, how to let them speak or how to give them back speech, even if it is in oneself, in the other, in the other in oneself: they are always there, specters, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet. (221).

My essay, sensitive to this ethical call, contributes to the knowledge about the ‘weak’ presence by analyzing returns of the public as specter(s). In this way, I engage such specters within an educating conversation. This conversation may make us more sensitive to the fragility of what is the public. Using Derrida’s way of exercising weak thought, I present a sort of hauntology of the public in general. It concerns elitism, whose ghost – to paraphrase Marx’s well-known caption – circulates over the world. This ghost haunts not only numerous places, among them schools, but also politicians who promote, establish and implement these elite structures. It can also be said that I therefore present a haunted ontology of the egalitarian public. When describing this hauntology in Polish realities, it is not difficult to note that it forms an intersectional story in which ghosts intersect. The essence of what I see as strange lies at these intersections. For example, I ask about the spectral presence of crisis, which haunts the reality in which we act today and which intersects with spirits of elitism or of equality. In other words, I present a version of intersectional studies focused on the ghosts of the past haunting the present, on the terrain of education in Poland. Moving with/in the spectral aura of appearing, returning, and haunting Polish public education by the ghost of elitism, and that of equality, and that of the public, I follow their intersections, remaining open to all other ghosts that would appear there. The analysis of what is taking place in Poland leads to the conclusion that there are similar conditions elsewhere in Europe (and beyond). For example, the nationalist and populist strains in education and politics in Poland are echoed in England (Clarke and Mills, in this issue, p. 13) and in many other countries (Westheimer, 2019). Therefore, I take a more general perspective and – writing from a particular stance of indignation that ‘there is something wrong with the world’ (Tokarczuk, 2019) – I create more a speculative and personal essay than a rigorous analysis of the present situation. Finally, I try to come to a prospective reflection, mainly as part of the concept of ‘the post-social’ world, in which the spectral aura of ‘moral actors’ acting now in the nation states is still with us when we think about the current meanings of what is the public in public education. Structurally, I show first how the ghost of the public haunts the present situation in Polish education and causes a strange return of elitism thanks to (or in spite of) a discourse of egalitarianism and democracy. Then I link it to a discussion about the kind of global society we live in today (‘the post-social’, explicitly described with examples from France and other countries (Touraine, 2014)), and how our collective lives (and the bubbles in which we are trapped) are haunted by a misunderstood idea of humanity (which we refuse to face). The ever-recurring ghost of humanism, in relation to education and to the public in public education, absolutely requires a new perspective. The idea of cosmopolitan learning, which is associated with the ethical postulates of posthumanism, seems to be promising.

From where the ghosts come: Polish public education after World War II

Public education from 1945 to 1989 was defined in Poland through the prism of the ideas of equality and social justice characteristic of the socialist system understood in Soviet terms. However, despite the system’s assumptions, the processes of class segregation and school selection flourished in the system of mass public education then created. These processes remained unquestioned; they were concealed or denied as politically incorrect. In the late 1970s and the 1980s, researchers began tentatively to write about them as ‘hidden curricula’ of the school (Janowski, 1989). Although the ancient ghost of elitism circulated around socialist Poland, and shaped its reality at that time, in the official discourse, the school promoted equality as evident in its public nature and openness to every student, regardless of the status of their parents or place of birth and residence. The works of education sociologists examining inequalities in access to education were not meant to uproot the socialist system and the authors spoke from the position of its concerned reformers (Kwiecinski, 2002). These were the conditions in which new, post-war elites of the new socio-political system were created and in which they gained strength after 1945. Old, pre-war elites were decimated by the war and the cruel post-war time in Poland. Survivors were discriminated against as ‘strangers and foes’. When a survivor of the pre-war elite flaunted the opposition to the new government, (s)he ended up in prison or exile in Soviet Siberia. In the face of staff shortages, the communists necessarily reached into a less educated part of the society, full of injuries from the past and ready to cooperate with the new authorities. System officers were sought among these groups, offering individuals unimaginable social advancement and at the same time an elite position. By the turn of the 1950s there was an evident change in the composition of civil service staff, which resulted in the formation of a new elite (Zaremba, 2005). The communists, implanting and embedding the socialist system in Poland, were convinced that one can effectively govern only one’s own people by making them absolutely obedient and willing to carry out all orders. Thus, the people of the ruling (and only) party, and those subordinated to them for the sake of benefits, became the new elite of the Polish People’s Republic (PRL). One could say – an elite bought by the promise of a better world, based not on high competence, education or origin, but on loyalty to the authorities.

In these circumstances, on the one hand, the dignity of ‘ordinary people’ was practically violated by educational inequalities. The research on parental identity after Polish upheaval in 1989, during a period of political and social transformation, clearly indicated this (Mendel, 2013). Parents raising children in the 1990s were authoritative and reproduced patterns from their own past in the times of the PRL or denied them altogether by practicing class-sensitivity and expressing determination to strive for social justice. One of the characteristics of bureaucratic systems, including communism, is secrecy and confidentiality. In communist Poland, there was anxiety about what the authorities could do, with the assumption being that they could do anything. One of the respondents in that research (Mendel, 2013) confessed as a 50-year-old that she still did not know why she was not allowed to take the high school diploma. She just did not get the information (Mendel, 2013: 11). This kind of absence and ignorance of citizens’ rights was the norm in the PRL.

On the other hand, the dignity of ‘ordinary people’ was maintained in the ideological sphere as a manifestly supported ethos of social order based on absolute equality, as mentioned above. This maintenance took place under the umbrella of ideals such as ‘people’s republic’, ‘politics of equals’ and ‘society of equals’; yet the meaning of these terms was far from those proposed by Jacques Rancière (1999) or Pierre Rosanvallon (2013) years later, perhaps as a kind of retro-activity aroused by the ghosts of the PRL and other experiences of post-Soviet countries. This was pointed out by Marcin Zaremba (2005), describing the nationalist legitimacy of the communist governments in Poland. It seems that Rosanvallon’s ‘society of equals’, as emphasizing real commonality and participation, could not be represented there due to both the influence of the spirit of Leninist communism and the spirit of Polish nationalism, which were eagerly mobilized for the integration of the nation after World War II. It was the same nationalism that was stirred at the time that forced Jews to be expelled from Poland in March 1968 as non-Poles. Similarly, Rancière’s ‘politics of equals’: although this ideal lived in communist reality as a propaganda slogan, reality actually turned out to be politics as police (Rancière, 1999), focused on protecting the status quo. In a country shimmering with fantasmatic appeal of a workers’ state, actual workers’ revolts were resolved bloodily; for example, a strike in December 1970 that arose for social reasons and ended with a massacre involving tanks. To paraphrase, one could say that there were not enough ‘politics of equals’ in the construction of a purportedly equal society at that time.

After the upheavals of 1989, which initiated the social and political transformation and market-oriented reforms, the ethos of equal society disappeared in Poland, as it was to do in Europe more widely. The demands for democratization of social life, including schools, turned out to be more significant than the demand for equality. Although close in meaning, in practice this meant replacing the rhetoric of equality, as if out of place in the face of the struggle against the previous system that operated along the egalitarian rhetoric in excess, with the rhetoric of liberal democracy. From then on, freedom was emphasized, not equality.

The demand for freedom was mobilized in the 1990s, among other agendas, as a justification for the increased activity of parents who founded non-state schools operating on the basis of tuition fees, so therefore class-selective. Parents – particularly middle-class parents – deploying the rhetoric of breaking the state monopoly in education, demanded freedom, not equality (Mendel, 1998). And it was the middle class, rapidly growing at that time, that first felt free and responded to the call of the ghost of freedom, spectacularly silencing the call of the ghost of equality. Following Jacques Derrida, who recommended to the ‘scholar’ of the future, the ‘intellectual’ of tomorrow, learning from and talking to ghosts, listening to the specters of the past in the name of justice (1994: 221), one could say that the channels enabling communication with the specter of equality were clearly blocked then. Politically, a middle class was planned, developed and promoted in Poland during this time of transformation as the engine for a market economy on which Poland entered the global capitalist circuit in the 1990s. Among the middle class, the spirit of freedom probably spoke to parents most strongly. Parental movements at that time – a novelty in the Polish socio-educational landscape – were gaining strength, and their activity resulted in the clear diversification of a previously homogeneous, state-run public education. A new type of school began to appear in 1989, no longer ‘state’, although not only or entirely private either. In addition to schools run by private investors and for profit, there were diverse specialized schools run by associations, foundations and other non-governmental organizations (NGOs). In the 1990s such schools accounted for around 2% of all Polish schools (Jung-Miklaszewska and Rusakowska, 1995). Most of them are the work of middle-class parents who were moving towards democratic participation and civic freedom through the provision of ‘alternative’ education for their children. Different from that offered by traditional, public mass schools, they distinguished their newly acquired social status.

This was not surprising. Unlike in the 1990s in Great Britain, where middle-class parents’ educational consumerism grew (Ball et al., 1996), in Polish conditions of social and political solstices, ideas of democratic participation gained a new lease of life and could be captured by parents representing the middle class. They could re-define the conditions of schooling which they view as the field of their own subjective agency (Mendel, 1998).

In two moments of the Polish transformation this dynamic was particularly vivid. First, in the early 1990s, permeated with the idea of new, post-PRL education (Jung-Miklaszewska and Rusakowska, 1995), with the spontaneous establishment of non-state schools; and second, in the years after Poland’s accession to the European Union in 2004, when intensive catching up with the West was accompanied by strong class polarization and distinctions built on educational criteria that have become key to the growing aspiration of the expanding middle class (Dolata, 2008).

Privatization tendencies in the education sector were intertwined with this second moment (Dziemianowicz-Bak and Dzierzgowski, 2014; Szescillo, 2013). The school, responding to particular needs specific to the time, began to run away from public control, while continually drawing on public resources. Characteristically, the school began to lose its previous name, or change it; for instance, by adding specific adjectives (Mendel, 2018a). Parents from the middle class – by engaging their time and paying tuition fees – have since been co-creating numerous ‘adjective’ schools: so-called ‘academies of good education’ ² or ‘democratic schools’, ³ etc. In addition, encouraged to use the right to home schooling, parents finance the activities of educational institutions that generally offer what a ‘traditional’ school gives, but without giving in to the rigors of open recruitment or public control.

In any case, the climate of changes in the Polish school in the 2000s, more or less until 2015, was an expression of both the persistence of neoliberal trends in education management and the active search for new solutions that somehow reconcile privatization and elitizing tendencies with concern for the common good, embodied by the public, open school. It seems, therefore, that the end of such a school, although proclaimed, is not coming (Mendel, 2018a). The overwhelming majority of schools are still public, run by local governments, and these schools continue to enjoy high social respect.

Unfortunately, although local governments are doing their best to maintain high standards of education in their schools, their possibilities are currently shrinking. They are weak in financial, organizational and program terms. Local governments, meanwhile, are targeted by the populist national government which, interested in centralization, systematically – since the parliamentary elections of 2015 – limits their possibilities. In 2016, the reform – often also called the ‘deform’ – of the education system began (Biedrzycki, 2016). The reform / deform restores the two-tier structure of compulsory education. ⁴ Local governments were charged with the costs of this undertaking, which weakened them financially and organizationally. Consequences at least as serious as changing the organizational structure, however, may result from changing the curriculum. As experts say, the implementation of this new curriculum is a backward step for Polish education:

Teaching content is either infantilized or too difficult for a given age. The effectiveness of teaching is based on rote learning (the entries about memorizing texts are repeated several times); student activity, referring to student interests, respecting and shaping internal motivation for learning and reading, and developing skills in relation to the child’s own experience, are neither assumed nor valued. Only external motivation, or coercion, is important. (Biedrzycki, 2016)

Teachers say that the new core curriculum is taking away their professional judgment, agency and subjectivity. In the spring of 2019, they went on strike for several weeks regarding wage increases and in protest against the reform, yet without result. The core curriculum they were protesting against is a program containing very detailed teaching content. In effect, teachers have been deprived of the right to adapt the teaching process to the needs of students or to their own didactic conceptions. Now the teacher can only compose an annual plan and choose appropriate teaching methods, as the content of teaching has already been completely defined. The Polish government knows what students are to learn in Polish schools, and teachers are merely there as technicians of a homogeneous knowledge, subordinated to the vision of the world represented by the right-wing populist party Law and Justice (PiS), which has been ruling in Poland since 2015. The new curriculum is thus proprietary knowledge; it is also guarded knowledge, because content selectors that shape this approach to knowledge (authors of the core curriculum for schools), contrary to public demands and applicable law, were not disclosed until that was explicitly ordered by court two years after the implementation of the reform. ⁵

In view of these events and changes, the question arises about the ‘public’ in public education in Poland. Reaching out across time and space to engage in dialogue with a ghost from the past, an interesting criterion in relation to this question may be the two-part test devised by the US court precedent of 1945, when the Connecticut state court was to decide whether the school was public. Researchers involved in the study of charter schools, which similarly arouse controversy regarding their public nature, have helpfully cited this ruling: first, the school must be under the ‘exclusive control’ of the state; and second, the school must be ‘free from sectarian instruction’ (Miron and Nelson, 2002). The fact that the Polish school, as a result of the last reform, works on the basis of detailed curriculum content established at the governmental level seems to indicate that the first condition is being over-fullfilled, while the second condition is not met. By creation of proprietary and guarded knowledge, by highly specifying the curriculum content and taking away agency from teachers, the state does not provide the school with freedom from ‘sectarian instruction’. What does this say about the ‘public’ in public education nowadays in Poland?

Ghosts seducing Poles: on giving up the idea of public school and showing no resistance to the dismantling of egalitarian education

All the ‘specters’ which have filed before us . . . were representations (Vorstellungen). These representations – leaving aside their real basis . . . – understood as representations internal to consciousness, as thoughts in people’s heads, transferred from their objectality (Gegenständlichkeit) back into the subject . . . elevated from substance into self-consciousness, are obsessions (der Sparren) or fixed ideas. (Derrida, 1994: 160–161)

Derrida, recommending sensitivity to the specters, learning from them and talking to them, warns against seduction. Obsessions, established ideas and ideologies are expression of the fact that we have been seduced by the specters and they, instead of us, speak using our voice. ⁶ Poles who first deafened equality and heard only the spirit of freedom now seem deaf to the public.

The discourse of freedom and the politics accentuating it, combined with neoliberal ideology, have been questioned in Poland during the parliamentary elections of 2015, won by PiS – as mentioned above. PiS is a populist party which promised ‘good change’ and dignity to the long-ignored ‘ordinary Poles’. One could expect that the previous educational policy, favoring middle-class clients, would be replaced by PiS with an egalitarian one, preventing unjustified selections and exclusions which limit the chances of ‘worse-born’ children. It did not happen. The PiS reform expands selection strategies, while the privatization of education is not clearly addressed at all. Contrary to the declared priorities, and in common with other European contexts such as England, the new policy serves the strong development of non-public or quasi-public schools and the privatization of the public education sector (Mendel, 2018a). Never before have there been so many private, non-public schools in Poland. According to the Ministry of Education, since the introduction of the education reform in the 2017/2018 school year, the closing of junior high schools (gimnazjum) has been accompanied by a 22% increase in the number of private elementary schools operating, while the number of public elementary schools increased by only 6% at the same time. The number of students in private primary schools increased by 62%. ⁷ Parents, refugees from the chaotic ‘deform’ of public education, flee with their children to private schools.

It looks as if Poland nowadays is giving up the idea of public school and there is no resistance to the dismantling of egalitarian education. ⁸ One reason may be the aforementioned rhetoric of the return of the dignity of ‘ordinary Poles’, disadvantaged and subordinated to the only party that wielded power during the PRL, and forgotten during the liberal reforms after the Polish upheavals in 1989. In this context it is worth asking a question: how might this dignity relate to the return of elitism (elite high school, elite higher education, etc.)? Why is the ghost of elitism so influential today? And how – in a more general social context – can it be explained that Poland has become haunted, and Poles have been seduced, by this ghost? One of the reasons may also be that we are dealing with a ‘returning of a return’ of the specter of elitism. It seems that all this has been done before.

A feature of the specters, thanks to which they can be ‘caught’ in their ‘deeds’ and thus recognized for what they are, is return. Derrida wrote that ghosts are coming back, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father; the specter of capitalism is circulating around the world, which Marx described, or the specters of Marx, which teach, among others, that history repeats itself (Derrida, 1994). As I mentioned, a feature of the bureaucratic system in the People’s Republic of Poland was secrecy and confidentiality, which in fact constituted the basis of loyalty, as a personnel criterion which – like education or descent – allowed the construction of our own elites and the power apparatus they support. The management of education belonged to this system (Grzybowski, 2013). This elitist trio of loyalty-secrecy-confidence, like a ghost, has returned. The PRL spirit of formation for the elite returned.

Those loyal to today’s power apparatus – as Marcin Zaremba, analyzing this phenomenon, claims –

use some amazing code. They describe reality through slogans, though they cannot define it; they do not use logical, rational elements, they use epithets in describing opponents. They have problems with formulating what they mean . . . We are dealing with ruling by secrecy, secretive actions, the magic of services that ensure that citizens can sleep peacefully and not interfere . . . – as Stefan Kisielewski used to say, we are dealing with the dullards’ dictatorship’ with the power of rigid-thinking people (Podgórska, 2017: 23; emphasis in original).

Zaremba, presenting his own and many other researchers’ findings, believes that all reforms carried out by PiS, including the reform of education and the judicial (constituting a reason for EU reservations regarding the rule of law in Poland), are used to exchange elites (Zaremba, 2005). This is done using a mechanism very similar to the one we observed in Poland between 1945 and 1950. It is about exchanging legal elites – judges, prosecutors, lawyers; exchange of school superintendents, school heads, theater or museum directors, hospital networking, etc. For instance, the 2018 higher education reform introduced the almost unlimited power of the rector, who decides on all aspects of university life, including nominations and academic degrees. On the other hand, based on the reform of education, as I have already written, not only the old division into elementary and high school, which was the structure of compulsory school in the PRL, is returning. Today – as then – teaching is to be consistent with the imaginations of the majority ruling party, PiS. The core curriculum provides for ultra-Catholic upbringing focused on family life, Polish history and culture, as based on an iron, impassable canon of reading, a mythical martyrdom and a heroic-tribal tale (Mendel, 2018b, 2019; Szkudlarek, 2018). Most Poles chose the ruling party (approx. 43.59% in parliamentary elections in autumn 2019). Most do not oppose the party’s decisions or the ways it exercises power. Popularity polls keep it relatively high.

It can be said that in Poland the spirit of what is ‘public’ does not speak in a strong voice and this also applies to public school. People show no resistance to dismantling egalitarian education. The parliamentary majority means ruling for the majority, and the majority is not interested in others, in minorities, in opposition that ‘unnecessarily interferes’ in this dismantling. Populist governments, not only in Poland, use such a strategy, whilst simultaneously maintaining the façade of being democratic (Clarke and Mills, in this issue, p. 13; Mendel, 2019; Westheimer, 2019). It is a truism to say that democratically elected governments mean ruling the majority with concern for minorities, but this sounds like a waste of time to those who know what is good ‘for the people’ and what good change means (Müller, 2016; Weale, 2018). A similar reality can be observed in the USA under Donald Trump or in Hungary under Victor Orbán (Mendel, 2019; Westheimer, 2019).

Coming back to the question of why we are giving up the ‘public’ and the public school, and why this is occurring with no resistance, one can say that it seems to be a feature of contemporary society on a larger global scale beyond Poland and hence requires reflection that goes beyond Polish reality.

Coming to the (not apocalyptic) end: on the post-society world

The global crisis that occurred at the end of the first decade of the 21st century has left many ghostly characters who, as specters typically do, keep coming back to haunt the world that cannot free itself from crisis. The ghosts of unemployment, homelessness, poverty, exclusion, lack of access, forgetfulness, etc. saturate our world with fear. The symbolic moment of the spread of this global fear is the fall of a pillar of global finance, Lehman Brothers bank, in 2008. Then it came to light that that people around the world, who lost their jobs and were cast out on the streets, would not be saved by either government or any other money. Timothy Snyder (2017) sees this crisis as, on the one hand, the end of the idea of progress and the presumption of predictability; on the other, as the beginning of a policy that is basing on deterministic thinking, which destroys historical time (. In regard to education policy, it ‘remains fixated on fantasies, in the shape of purported education “revolutions” ’(Clarke, 2019: 144). Instead of progress, we now have politics of eternity whose circular structure entails a constant return to the past (Snyder, 2017). The principle of the world ‘after the crisis’ becomes the principle of a ghostly, neurotic return. For Zygmunt Bauman (2017) this is the principle of ‘retrotopia’, according to which we bury ourselves in the past and – not only mentally – buy everything that resembles pre-crisis solutions.

Against this background, it is timely to turn to After the Crisis, a book by Alain Touraine (2014) that helps to understand the sources of the lack of social resistance and the indifference to the dismantling of the ‘public’ discussed above. Touraine notes that all previous systemic crises generated significant responses, including the mobilization of resistive action, while the last crises resulted in nothing. Three years after 2008, the spontaneous Indignados and Occupy Wall Street movements arose, but ultimately they neither expressed nor activated the millions of impoverished people around the world. Touraine responds to this astonishment by recalling his earlier, and now confirmed, thesis: ‘la société n’existe plus’, society no longer exists, as if Margaret Thatcher’s claim – ‘There is no such thing as society’ – had materialized itself. We are dealing with a ‘post-social situation’ and Touraine (2014: 4) explains that the crisis does not create a new society, but contributes to the destruction of the existing one. What we may call ‘post-social society’ (e.g. Marody, 2017). is a world in which global economic forces have become alienated not only from the social sphere, but also from the rest of the economy. This power is not controlled by social actors of industrial and post-industrial society; they are paralyzed. Joseph E Stiglitz (2012) calls them passive victims of financial capitalism. The end of the social world rupture destroys its industrial logic; that is, interdependence, involving a fusion of economic and social categories (Touraine, 2014: 209). Post-social society is therefore a ‘society’ in which the main social actors defined by economic relations – classes – disappear, and their place is taken by non-social, ‘moral’ actors, by groups or forces defined by values they recognize. Touraine believes that moral actors would stand ‘on the side of the rights of all people, refusing to accept the actions of those who only consider their own profit’ (2014: 4), prompting people to waken from passivity and re-empowering them by making them aware of their inalienable rights, thereby restoring them to the role of actors shaping our common world. To make this possible, we should find a rule that is as supra-social as the global economic system is. Touraine sees a chance for this in a morality based on human rights and the activities of moral actors.

It is therefore about strengthening humanism, understood as a process in which common foundations are built for the actions of people of various worldviews for a better world. Terrified of the post-social world, this sociologist entered – as Derrida recommends – into a conversation with the ghost of humanism, realizing the presence of its heritage in the present. It can be said that the specter of humanism circulated around the world, haunting it in the various forms embracing production of knowledge (Ball, 2020). ⁹ This required an epistemological turn and an idea of a new cosmopolitan learning (see Mignolo, 2010; Rizvi, 2008; Todd, 2008). As if in conversation with the spirit of humanism, Sharon Todd asks: ‘how do we imagine an education that seeks not to cultivate humanity . . . but instead seeks to face it – head on, so to speak, without sentimentalism, idealism or false hope?’ (2008: 9). Should the social be conceived in cosmopolitan terms nowadays? It is a challenge that is like a ground for Touraine’s human values-oriented moral actors, capable of changing the post-social world and rebuilding the social. However, Touraine’s ‘after the crisis’ prophecy from 2010 proves prophetic only in part.

The ghosts of the crisis circling the planet ensure that the anxiety plaguing millions of people is not easily overcome. In a climate of fear of a future that does not exist, the most significant moral actors are groups displaying populist values (see Müller, 2016). Touraine (2018: 60) later wrote that authoritarian actors could strengthen their position during a difficult transition period; but his hope for the strength of moral actors, standing on the side of ‘the rights of all people’ and rebuilding the social sphere through their ability to oppose other moral actors who bet on their own profits, seems to be utopian today. The breakup resulting from the crisis, and the destruction of interdependence between economic and social categories that Touraine aptly described, means that instead of class society today we live in a world of ‘bubbles’, ¹⁰ in which ‘truths’ and values, endlessly repeated through social media and other information systems, bind individuals and groups (Pariser, 2011). Against this background, one may also speak of powerful nation-states bubbles intensively fueled in the times of national branding – the accumulation of national values that make up commercial packages such as ‘Poland’ or ‘Hungary’ or ‘the USA’ (Mendel, 2019).

Moral actors, blowing our bubbles, are interested in maintaining the crisis anxiety in which we live. The apocalypse aura seems immensely powerful at this moment. Indeed, and ironically, notions such as ‘the Anthropocene’, ‘the end of the world’ and Touraine’s post-society remain well and are thriving today, even if recent ruptures have led to the polarization of moral actors around the nature of their values. Political profit, which is also economic profit today, defines the nature of the most powerful bubbles, including national ones; and profit in any form requires losses in the form of those who are excluded, objectified and demonized.

This dynamic can be seen in the contemporary moral condition in Poland disclosed by Górnikowska-Zwolak (2018) in her analysis of the long-lasting strike of mothers of disabled children who occupied the parliament building. That lost strike, and in particular the cruel reactions of deputies and other people entering the strike stage, showed not only the terribly ‘low class of the political class’, but also the ‘moral level of the society’ (Górnikowska-Zwolak, 2018: 23). She wrote: ‘If the politicians had not felt public support, they would have behaved differently’ (23). Citing sister Małgorzata Chmielewska, who fights for the dignity of the excluded, she said: ‘Polish society is not willing to help, the stronger are willing to objectify the weaker’ (23). And asking about the attitudes of the intellectual elites, especially those who teach about sensitivity to human harm, she presented the various forms of silence which were performed by them (Górnikowska-Zwolak, 2018: 23–26). This may be an expression of the exhaustion of morality in the post-social world of bubbles created around moral actors no longer playing fair. And in this light, Touraine’s book After the Crisis has a wrong, premature title. The crisis is not over.

Today, every bubble seems to scream in a spirit of crisis, in the name of values that it spectacularly embodies. Justice is no longer a value around which moral actors gather people to create a common world. Hence this almost universal indifference, passivity, lack of resistance, when these values are questioned, and when what is public, which is always a fragile common good (Rosanvallon, 2013), requiring care and cultivation in social practices, is lost.

Michal Kosinski, who developed an algorithm, used by Cambridge Analytica, that allows for a precise analysis of the behavior of millions of social media recipients (Youyou et al., 2015), said that ‘autocrats from various countries, from Arabia to Poland, came to me to help them win the election’. ¹¹ Bubbles have political power.

Interestingly, populism pierces bubbles, appealing to the so-called common sense and using the logic of the herd: we are all in this together, all of us are concerned. However, this differs from democracy whose discourse develops around humanistic values: equality, freedom, solidarity, etc., which, in the conditions of fear of the future and the struggle for survival, appear to be demanding and – as a consequence – are perceived as more exclusive than inclusive. Today, democratic programs only seem to stabilize bubbles and secure their surfaces, making them relatively resistant to populism, but also extremely closed.

In Poland, this is confirmed by studies on political polarization (Gorska, 2019). The attitudes of democratic opposition party supporters towards supporters of the ruling, populist PiS are more negative than the attitudes of PiS supporters towards opposition supporters. Moreover, PiS supporters have more frequent contact with opposition supporters than opposition supporters with PiS supporters. The report also shows that voters of opposition parties have more negative feelings towards, and even dehumanize, their political opponents, when compared to supporters of the ruling party in former governments (Gorska, 2019: 2, 8–13 ). Therefore, the populist groups referring to democratic values concentrate the electorate in isolated and mutually hostile bubbles despite the humanistic declarations with which the programs of their interest are saturated. It is interesting that what is common to polarized groups is dehumanization. It appears as the criterion for assessing the opponent and predicting their behavior. The report states that both ‘among PiS and opposition party supporters, negative feelings about political opponents are predicted by the belief that political opponents do not like and dehumanize the group to which the respondent belongs’ (Gorska, 2019: 2). Today more than ever, everyone depends on a sense of legitimate belonging to the human world, so confirmations of this affiliation are important, while the fear that such legitimate belonging is under threat arranges political reality. Humanity became important on all sides of the political scene. However, it is not enough to be human, you have to be named so. You are human when you have this confirmation and when there is a bubble that confirms it. That’s why you stick to them.

In the post-social, haunted world, the spirit of humanism vividly reveals that the category of human which it brought from the past – from Enlightenment and later – serves constant dehumanization which polarizes divisions, loses the common good and destroys the public. As Rosi Braidotti (2013) notes, it is through the use of the category of human that we can deny humanity to others, diminish them, naturalize, ‘genderize’, ‘racialize’, etc. Moral actors – unlike Touraine wanted – create bubbles of humanistic values, but in their commitment to human rights discourse, they work on negative selection, on the elimination of political enemies. Post-society haunted by the spirit of humanism has no chance to reclaim or create what is common and public. How can we free ourselves from this haunting; from the specter that possessed us, making us passive towards destruction of the public school and other forms of the public, hidden under the claims for better education and greater wealth that finally work only for new populist elites? Under what conditions is it possible to give up a humanistic obsession which serves to create and consolidate inequalities? The posthumanist discourse, although dissolving the human and the public alike in the overwhelming notion of zoe, formulates such conditions. It offers the ethical postulate: ‘we are all in this together’ (Braidotti, 2013). As I mentioned, my ‘haunted’ essay is sensitive to ethics which build indeed doubtful knowledge about the ‘weak presence’ (such that it is difficult to definitely conclude that there it is, but it is impossible to say that it does not exist either). In being part of everything, postulated in an ethical exclamation, as used by Braidotti, I see a clear expression of weak ontology (Vattimo, 2012; White, 2000), a weak being. Posthumanist ethics expresses both the fragility of a weak existence and its unimaginable strength of sustainability; sustainable duration of living matter of which humans are a part. Part, not masters.

With this type of ethics in mind, one can pay attention to the educational vision of freedom from oppressive humanism operating in it. It may be worth striving for new cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitan learning (Mignolo, 2010; Todd, 2008) that could become an ‘infectious’ lifestyle, ‘infecting’ moral actors who are today an undoubted force, as Touraine predicted. To paraphrase Todd (2008: 9), one can ask the question whether we imagine an education that seeks to face humanity. If humanity means violence and people do not face it, then something is wrong. And this is probably the essence of the commonly felt premonitions, verbalized in a Nobel Prize lecture by Olga Tokarczuk, when she said:

The flood of stupidity, cruelty, hate speech and images of violence are desperately counterbalanced by all sorts of ‘good news’, but it hasn’t the capacity to rein in the painful impression, which I find hard to verbalize, that there is something wrong with the world (emphasis added). Nowadays this feeling, once the sole preserve of neurotic poets, is like an epidemic of lack of definition, a form of anxiety oozing from all directions. (2019)

Finally, it can be said that the ghost of the public haunted the present education – not only in Poland – and causes a strange return of elitism. While living our collective lives in the bubbles in which we are trapped, one could see that the post-social world with its education is haunted by a misunderstood idea of humanity. We constantly refuse to face that the specter of humanism serves constant dehumanization which destroys the public. This situation, in direct relation to education and to the public in public education, necessarily requires a new perspective. This perspective seems to be drawn by the educational vision of freedom from oppressively haunting humanism, which means the idea of cosmopolitan learning grounded in the posthuman ethics. Such a vision – on the one hand – regards the fragility of the public good and a weakness of our existence in a world where social bonds have become exclusive (Todd, 2008). On the other, it regards the unimaginable strength of sustainable duration of living matter; the power of the community uniting humans and non-humans.

Living in our bubbles we should learn from Derrida’s hauntology and somehow give up ourselves, part with the sense of ourselves that we find in the bubble with its negation beyond it serving as its constitutive outside, because apart from life in the bubble, beyond the humanity that is felt and recognized in the bubble, there is nothing that matters today:

What Derrida helps us see is that the dream of grammaticalization and discreditation of movement, image, and sound associated with the apotheosis of digital media is just that – a dream. But it is a dream whose opposite is not some form of authenticity or presence typically associated with analog media; rather it is a dream haunted by the spectrality produced by any media, any archival technology whose iterability and repeatability anticipate and in some sense forecast our eventual absence, our death. It is, however, precisely on the basis of that fact that the possibility of the future depends, a living-on or to come, as Derrida puts it, that can only happen because (to quote his beloved Hamlet) the time is out of joint. Only, that is, because we are not we. (Wolfe, 2010: xxxiv; emphasis in original)

Perhaps we can go beyond ‘we’, and, in making this journey, perhaps a liminal pandemic experience with a dynamically operating virus, that is not human, can help. ¹²