Abstract
The twofold aim of this paper is to describe the specificity of education in Poland and to explore the potential and the limitations of the concept of cultural codes for investigating this specificity. With reference to Max Weber’s methodology of ideal types, and following the inquires of Sowa (2011), Leder (2014) and Hryniewicz (2015), as well as with reference to contemporary research on education in Poland, I distinguish three types of cultural codes: the folwark, the totalitarian and the modernisation code. The analysis using the concept of cultural codes consists of reinterpreting the existing empirical data on education in Poland. Its potential lies, therefore, in providing a framework for gathering and understanding diverse phenomena, analysed separately in many dispersed studies. The argument conducted in the paper leads to the conclusion of the exhaustion of educational imaginary in Poland. However, the concept of cultural codes is found to be useful in the work leading towards rejuvenation of this imaginary.
Keywords
My aim in this article is twofold. I intend to describe the specificity of education in Poland as well as to explore the potential and the limitations of the concept of cultural codes for investigating this specificity. These two aims are interrelated. Studies recently published, and intensely discussed in Poland, on the collective identity of Poles by Jan Sowa (2011) and Andrzej Leder (2014), together with the findings of other independently undertaken research on diverse social phenomena in Poland (cf. Hryniewicz, 2004, 2007, 2015; Santorski and Michalik, 2016), seem to lead towards the concept of cultural codes as an essential intellectual tool for research addressing that particular territory. Although this concept is not commonly used – even in the case of the aforementioned studies that have led me to it – it seems to be necessary for understanding the way in which Polish locality was formed in relation to diverse global (i.e. universal) discourses. It functions in this way because the concept of cultural codes speaks of a code, and hence, drawing from the tradition of structuralism, it refers to structures powerful beyond any local context, but at the same time it speaks of a code being an effect of locally influential longue durée processes that form the culture of a particular territory (cf. Smith, 1991).
Regarding education in Poland, I propose to look into three types of cultural codes: the folwark, the totalitarian and the modernisation code. These will be distinguished with reference to Max Weber’s (2004 [1904]) concept of ideal type. After giving the conceptual and methodological underpinnings of my research some consideration, I will describe the three aforementioned codes and how they function in the field of education in contemporary Poland. In the concluding remarks I will explore the limitations of the concept of cultural codes in educational research by applying the distinction developed throughout this article to the situation in Poland after the transition to democracy and capitalism.
The ideal types of cultural codes
By cultural codes I mean particular, distinct systems of beliefs, assumptions, cognitive schemes and behaviour scripts, as well as institutionalised social arrangements, procedures and norms, that evolved through longue durée processes 1 to become intersubjectively shared and naturalised ways of being, acting, perceiving and thinking about reality.
Basil Bernstein (2003) investigated similar structures in the form of linguistic codes, which he held to be responsible for shaping class cultures and for determining the educational success of individuals. What I find significant in Bernstein’s concept for my own understanding of cultural codes is that the development of linguistic codes was linked with two particular types of structure of socialisation interactions in families (positional and person oriented). Therefore, it seems that Bernstein relates a code to the ways people interact with each other over a relatively long period of time, as well as with how an individual perceives, conceptualises, experiences and expresses herself.
Furthermore, Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron (1990) indicated the twofold nature of such codes when introducing the notions of cultural arbitrary – a selection of signs forming the culture of a particular group or class – and habitus – an individual embodiment of such a code, i.e. ‘[…] the product of internalisation of the principles of a cultural arbitrary’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990: 31, thesis 3), which forms a ‘[…] system of […] schemes of perception, thought, appreciation and action […]’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990: 35, thesis 3.1.3.).
Something quite similar may be found in the phenomenological tradition of sociology and ethnography, especially in the work of Erving Goffman (1986), where he constructs the notion of frame.
When the individual in our Western society recognizes a particular event, he tends, whatever else he does, to imply in this response (and in effect employ) one or more frameworks or schemata of interpretation (Goffman, 1986: 21).
What seems to be unique in the analysis of Jan Sowa (2011) and Andrzej Leder (2014) is that they show how these ‘schemata of interpretation’ or ‘schemes of perception, thought, appreciation and action’ are shaped through economic, political, demographic and other processes over long-term periods, taking place within a particular territory: Poland. What I propose is to draw from the aforementioned frameworks and to construct a notion of cultural code that refers to an amalgam of intersubjective, common-sense cognitive structures that shape/determine a range of possible meanings given to behaviours, roles/positions, rituals/definitions of situations, responses and actions. Thanks to this structure, we can understand the world as a whole, other people, their actions, situations we/they are in, ourselves, our deeds and so on.
This structure is imposed via symbolic violence in the course of pedagogic work. In that regard, this structure cannot be ‘used’. It is neither a tool one can intentionally use nor a subconscious drive. 2 It is, rather, a fully transparent air that we breathe, the prose that we speak without noticing.
However, cultural codes cannot be reduced to the way people speak. They are not only about the language we use that makes us think, perceive and act in a particular way; they are also about usual ways of doing things, relating and interacting with each other, imagining and designing things, and so on, that make us appeal to a particular language. The concept of cultural codes, therefore, emphasises the interactional, ritual or performative fundament of a code (cf. Smith, 1991), which is formed within relatively long periods of time on a particular territory. Cultural codes are local and specific. Hence, any attempt at translating them into more universal terms (including the attempt presented here) means a loss of meaning.
In order to bring some clarity to the analysis of cultural codes in Polish education, I will refer to the methodology of ideal types as developed by Max Weber (2004 [1904]). According to him, an ideal type is an intellectual tool generated but not deduced from empirical data. Being distinguished from its empirical content, This construction brings together certain relationships and events of historical life into an internally coherent conceptual cosmos. This construction has the substantive character of a utopia arrived at by the conceptual accentuation of particular elements of reality (Weber, 2004 [1904]: 387, emphasis in original).
In what follows, I will distinguish three types of cultural codes crucial for understanding education in Poland. In each case I will begin with the historical background of the development of a particular code and its central opposition. Next to this, a description will be provided of each code’s internal trend and of social roles, relationships and interactions that it produces. Each time I will relate my analysis to an exemplary Polish educational manifestation of each code.
The empirical studies used to explore the possibility of applying the notion of cultural code for understanding education in Poland are selected purposefully. Naturally, the effectiveness of this selection can always be discussed; however, my aim in the following exercise is not to make any final claim about education in Poland or to indicate the (right) way to interpret it, but to explore a possible way of understanding phenomena widely discussed in empirical research on Polish education, that is, phenomena disclosed and discussed also outside the selected studies. Works chosen for the purpose of this exercise consist of quantitative and qualitative projects, led by mid-career as well as top national researchers throughout the last 15 years, investigating issues that range from early childhood and didactics to gender and socio-economic inequalities, and educational policy analysis.
The folwark code
The peculiarity of Polish history lies in the fact that until the second half of the 20th century, it was a country still based on an agricultural economy (Sowa, 2011: 226–228; cf. Kochanowicz, 2006; Leder, 2014: 117). However, the predominance of a rural population is not the most significant factor of this peculiarity. 3 What is essential about this period is the unique kind of feudalism that was formed in this country (Małowist, 1973). More exactly, the king held a weak position, and hence the country was dominated by the nobility. The gentry did not have the status of vassals to whom the king had entrusted the fief. Instead, they were themselves owners of feudal property (Sowa, 2011: 113), with their own private armies (Sowa, 2011: 148–149), and there were even cities they controlled that were their own private property (Sowa, 2011: 125). Starting from 1573, the gentry elected kings, whose treasure, army and influence were less significant than those of the nobility (Topolski, 1994). 4 The economic position of the gentry, and their political hegemony, was sustained by an active anti-urban policy (Sowa, 2011: 121–127, 182) and a special kind of organisation of production: ‘an aggressive system of manorial demesne farming [the folwark]’ (Kula, 1986: 127, italics in original). What is essential here is that the absolute majority of the population in Poland (around 80% in the 17th century, according to Sowa (2011: 130)) lived and worked as serf peasants in folwarks. It is this special kind of serfdom that constitutes the national Polish habitus – as Sowa (2011: 204) names it, and which I try to conceive here as the folwark cultural code.
The specificity of demesne serfdom (folwark) in Poland was based on the unlimited power of the landlord over illiterate, pauper peasant-slaves. In order to fully acknowledge this power, Sowa (2011: 128) and Leder (2014: 108) use the Foucaultian notion of bio-power and Agamben’s notion of bare life. The lord of the manor could lease or sell peasants and their families (Sowa, 2011: 129), and when s/he killed a peasant, the punishment was to pay a fine (Sowa, 2011: 265, 339). Naturally, peasants’ survival over winter was dependent on the landlord’s claim on the amount of corvée s/he required from them (Kula, 1976: 48). The landlord was limited only by the physiological conditions of the peasants’ death (Kula, 1976: 51, 64–65). With the power over the bare life of serfs came the pride of the nobles and their contempt for the peasants (Leder, 2014: 129).
The structure of the code
The opposition between the landlord (the master) and the peasant (the slave) is of a vertical character. It structures the repertoire of possible positionings into binary cells of superiority/inferiority, which are repeated in diverse configurations. Therefore, the same person usually takes both possible positions (the landlord or the peasant) in different social constellations. The line between the master and the slave is defined by ignorance. 5 The inferior peasant position is the position of an illiterate, uncivilised ignorant, who, being undignified and unworthy, cannot be trusted. S/he has to be instructed and controlled with precision and meticulousness. However, no high-quality outcomes of his/her actions should be expected. The peasant is still unable to think, design or create, and therefore compelled to obey.
Conversely, the superior position in the folwark code is exactly the reversal of the inferior position. The master is therefore defined as knowledgeable, infallible, creative and civilised. However, not only does s/he control, command and manage those inferior to her/him, but the landlord is also a sovereign in a Schmittean sense (cf. Agamben, 2005). That is, the lord establishes the law of her/his manor, but s/he moreover has the power to introduce at any time a state of exception. S/he has the power to suspend any kind of law that is being applied on her/his territory. In other words, in the feudal code, the superior marks his/her territory as his/her own private kingdom. 6
According to Hryniewicz (2007), one of the most fundamental problems of the Polish economy stems exactly from the fact that the internal trend of the folwark code is persistence. The folwark does not grow. Distrust towards inferiors doesn’t allow the owner/manager to cede responsibilities/permissions and supresses any potential need for development; the only desire of the owner/manager is to maintain the superior position. In other words, the interactions induced by this code are of a ritual character. Thanks to repetition, they simply reiterate the structure of the code – suppressing any attempt at its transformation.
The presence of the folwark code in education
One of the most influential types of educational belief shared by Polish primary schoolteachers, distinguished by Dąbrowski et al. (2008; cf. Dąbrowski and Żytko, 2009), is what they have named ‘educational pessimism’. This is to say that teaching is based upon the assumption of ‘limited intellectual abilities and skills of primary school pupils […] lack of cognitive self-reliance of children, and of the ability to develop a creative solution to a problem’ 7 (Dąbrowski et al., 2008: 10). Furthermore, distrust of pupils’ intellectual abilities is documented by Marzenna Nowicka (2010: 163) as the most frequent attitude taken by teachers. Nowicka and Dorota Klus-Stańska (Klus-Stańska and Nowicka, 2005) have gathered an extensive amount of empirical data regarding teaching strategies deployed by Polish teachers based on the aforementioned assumption. In line with this, Katarzyna Gawlicz (2009b), when speaking about ‘hegemonic educational culture’ in Poland, has claimed that in Poland there is a ‘discursive construct of [the] incompetent child’ (Gawlicz, 2009b: 92, cf.: 85).
Since the child is ignorant, unable to reason, unperceptive and disruptive in behaviour, the genuine task of a teacher is to direct pupils’ actions and to control their behaviour (cf. Gawlicz, 2009a: 204, 2009b: 94). As observed by Nowicka (2010: 165), a lesson on Renoir’s painting is conducted as follows: Teacher: You see…, here we have a picture to paste. What is on it? Pupil: A girl with an umbrella. Teacher: Exactly. And now we begin pasting from the top – that is starting with the umbrella. Whatever colour you like, but remember: starting from the top. Then we paste the girl. And at the very end we paste the puddle she stands in. Everything in order. […] When finished – sit straight. A teacher is bigger, she can do what she wants. [And when one is smaller] one cannot do what one wants. When one is in pre-school, one cannot do what one wants […] The Teacher has to say. The Teacher has to say: yes you can play. Then we play. And when The Teacher says: sit down – we sit down. And when we are to sit at the table, the teacher says: we shall sit at the table. And when the soup arrives, the teacher says: in a minute the soup will be served […] Only when you are about to vomit, then without permission you are supposed to rush to the bathroom. He said: ‘Such earrings are worn by cows on a pasture, not students in my class’, or ‘in such boots you can work in a quarry, but not to enter my classroom.’ (Kopciewicz, 2011: 133, emphasis in original) Once a teacher threw me out of the classroom, because – as she has said – in her classroom no one will have a makeup, especially not someone at my age. She started to shout at me in front of everybody. She told me to go to the bathroom and wash this shit off my face. (Kopciewicz, 2011: 135, emphasis added – P.Z.) During the geography lesson the teacher […] started to make fun out of my looks. Boys started to laugh, some of the girls too. At the end she gave me giant scissors and told me to cut my nails in the front of the class. I didn’t do it. So she took these scissors and started to cut my nails herself. And she did it very hard on purpose. (Kopciewicz, 2011: 135) The teacher started to check the look of girls, because that was her custom. Unluckily, that day I had really heavy makeup. […] She told me to get up and go with her to the bathroom, where she told me to wash off the makeup. When I refused, she wetted her hand and started to wash my face by herself. She held me and strongly rubbed my face. That was awful! (Kopciewicz, 2011: 137, emphasis added – P.Z.) – Couldn’t you go to your personal tutor, when the teacher threw you out? – No, everyone knew what are the rules of this teacher. (Kopciewicz, 2011: 130, emphasis added – P.Z.) – Did you tell your parents about this? – Yes, I told my mum. I asked her to talk about this during the parent-teachers meeting at school. But she didn’t want to have any trouble with the teacher herself. She said that these are the rules in that school, and that I chose that school by myself. (Kopciewicz, 2011: 138, emphasis added – P.Z.)
This is, of course, an extreme illustration of the presence of the feudal code in Polish schools. The sovereignty that teachers display like lords over their manor (i.e. over classrooms, over teaching subjects, or – in case of the head teacher – over a whole school) is performed in many other and much more sophisticated forms. These include didactic arrangements and procedures, hidden curriculum, the quality of the relations with parents, or the structure of university courses. All of these phenomena have been interpreted in different ways, for example as testifying to a behaviourist way of thinking endemic to teachers’ personal educational theories (Klus-Stańska, 2006), to neoliberal regimes that are currently structuring the realm of education (Potulicka and Rutkowiak, 2010) or to the obscurantism typical of a half-peripheral country’s educational system (cf. Kwieciński, 2012; Nowicka, 2010). I believe that the ideal type of a folwark cultural code, which I have introduced above, offers the possibility of analysing all these phenomena not as separate tendencies, but as tightly interwoven. 10
The folwark code first took form in the 15th century, if not before (cf. Sowa, 2011). This explains why it is very deeply imprinted in many of the fundamental cultural forms of Polish society. Compared with this, the totalitarian code seems to be a rather recent invention. Perhaps this is why it is easier to find its effects in official and institutional settings than in common, interpersonal relations and interactions.
The totalitarian code
Between 1945 and 1989, Poland was on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain. These 44 years don’t seem much compared with the longue durée evolution of the feudal code. Nonetheless, as Leder (2014: 7) argues, from the beginning of the Second World War in 1939 to the end of the Stalinist terror in 1956 a social revolution took place in Poland, which ‘incredibly severely transformed the social fabric of Polish society […] making way for, perhaps, the deepest change in the mentality of Poles in ages’. In line with this, the event of transition to democracy in 1989 is still commonly considered as the reference point of most public debates – including those related to education. It seems that Poland is still struggling with totalitarianism, and that mere institutional changes haven’t been followed by a transformation in mentality and social imaginary (cf. Tischner, 1992).
The structure of the code
When it comes to conceptualising totalitarianism, one usually turns to Hannah Arendt’s pioneering analysis, according to which Total domination, which strives to organize the infinite plurality and differentiation of human beings as if all of humanity were just one individual, is possible only if each and every person can be reduced to a never-changing identity of reactions, so that each of these bundles of reactions can be exchanged at random for any other. (Arendt, [1951] 1979: 438)
Unlike the folwark code, the totalitarian code is not driven by the desire for persistence, but for expansion: it requires more and more domains of human life to be appropriated 11 until a perfect unity is achieved. Nevertheless, it shares with the feudal code the requirement of obedience. However, this is not so much about subordination to a particular master as it is about obeying a universal, overwhelming project of eternal unity/sameness. Such a form of obedience requires faith in this dream (at least in the case of its protagonists), and hence it needs to appropriate even the most intimate dimensions of the life of an individual.
In other words, we are dealing here with a typical large-scale modernistic project – a grand narrative (cf. Bauman, 1991; Lyotard, 1984) that is realised with the use of the machinery of genuine modernistic inventions, including its greatest means: bureaucracy (cf. Bauman, 1991; Lefort, 1986). This means, however, that unlike the folwark code, the totalitarian frame does not involve humiliation and open violence as an instrument to reiterate social hierarchy. Instead of this, it uses procedures, indexes, archives, regulations, circulars, and all sorts of mediated, institutionalised forms of violence (including physical violence – albeit always executed in the name of the law/state/Party, that is, in line with the grand narrative).
Totalitarianism in education
Following the 1989 transition to democracy, a new bill on education was introduced in 1991 by the Polish Parliament. The basic idea of this law was decentralisation and de-etatisation of the Polish educational system. This wasn’t, however, a shift from a state-owned and bureaucratic system to a marketised and privatised system, but a shift from a system managed by the oligarchy of one legal party to a system organised by the state and collaboratively governed by citizens, including local communities and governments, non-governmental organisations, teachers, parents and pupils. In other words, this law was the expression of a cultural code that was the exact opposite of the totalitarian code. More exactly, it refers to the modernisation code, which I will describe in the next section.
What is crucial here is that all the legislative transformations that followed gradually led to a restoration of the centre–margin opposition (Śliwerski, 2009). In 1999, the introduction of an external testing/examining system as the central mechanism of the educational system has – for that matter – reinstalled a new, indirect form of central curriculum (Zamojski, 2010: 149–167). The latest bill (2016) on the general superintendence in Polish education restores the practical control of the central government over the establishment, transformation or closing down of every individual public school in the country.
On the other hand, there are still possibilities for particular local/school communities to establish school boards, or local boards. However, as Śliwerski (2008, 2013) and Mencel (2008) have analysed, these attempts are suppressed either by the school authorities and local governments 12 or by citizens (parents, local community) themselves – believing that only the central power of the Ministry of Education can have a significant influence on education. The move of authorities towards re-establishing central control over schooling is, therefore, paradoxically strengthened by the beliefs, convictions and actions of citizens themselves.
Another example of this would be the public debates on education I organised and/or conducted myself in Gdańsk from 2009 to 2015. It wasn’t exceptional to see some of the participants trying to convince others that it is pointless to discuss any educational issues unless the Ministry of Education is not present and listening (cf. Zamojski, 2011).
Indeed, the desired position for a teacher under totalitarianism is the role of a mere executor of the external will of the central power (e.g. the Party and the Ministry). On the interactional level of school life, this surveillance by the centre of power expresses itself in so-called ‘educational formalism’ (Dąbrowski et al, 2008). By this I mean that teachers assume the sameness of pupils, and define their own teaching in purely bureaucratic terms (i.e. the application of generally valid procedures to cases). This thread is largely explored by Klus-Stańska (2002, 2010), who has argued that a whole set of arrangements unifying pupils 13 is not only dominant in Polish schools, but also naturalised in the educational imaginary of Poles.
An example I would like to explore further in that regard concerns activities of pupils/students in unison, which are planned and introduced by teachers in order to establish unity of understanding, unity of opinions, and unity of human qualities (knowledge, skills, attitudes). However, on a very practical level, in terms of classroom interactions, this unity is performed in terms of sameness. All pupils/students are obliged to perform the same actions, to express the same thoughts (or rather, the same utterances) and even to take the same body positions. Here is an example from a Polish preschool observed by Gawlicz (2009a: 122): Girls have finished eating. They rhythmically ask in unison: “Can-we-move-from-the-ta-ble?” The teacher tells them to stay Malec gets up. The teacher: “Please, sit down, everyone. Malec, why are you standing? Has anyone allowed you to stand up?” Teacher asks to do one more exercise in the workbook. S: But which one is it? T: Exercise 4, page 99. [Student is nervous, covering the workbook with their hand. Teacher approaches and checks] T: And what – you have it done? S: [Ashamed]: Yes, I thought this was homework. T: Erase this and do it again. T: If everything is clear and understood, then let me repeat: we summarise what was said, what we have said, fragments, articles on previous lesson … If everything is clear, in the second rubric, where Nietzscheanism is … We write enumerating with hyphens. First hyphen, theory of overmen, overmen in inverted commas. Theory of overmen, theory of overmen. Comma, an individual, an individual, situated beyond good and evil, situated beyond good and evil … Theory of the will to power, will to power in inverted commas … S: Is it Bergson? T: Yes, all the time it’s about Nietzscheanism. We refer to Nietzscheanism. Is anything unclear Bartek? S: Tomek made a mistake. What theory? T: Theory of will to power, in inverted commas, comma, superiority over mediocrity. S: How was that? T: After comma in the same rubric! Superiority over mediocrity and weakness. I have explained what will to power theory is. Is that clear Ela? S: Over mediocrity? T: One more time. Theory of will to power, comma, superiority over mediocrity and weakness. Yes? Yes? Everybody have written down? Everybody understands? It’s in the third rubric, where we have Bergson. (emphasis added – P.Z.)
The modernisation code
According to Sowa, it is not the case that Poland ‘has never been modern’ (cf. Latour, 1993). What is unique to this country is the fact that the rise of modernity has coincided with the disappearance of Poland as an independent state (Sowa, 2011: 202). However, what Sowa doesn’t take into account is that discourses of modernisation have been present and vibrant in Poland since at least the 19th century. 14 This weak but persistent discourse, although marginalised first by the folwark and then by the totalitarian code, finally, for a certain time, became powerful enough to transform the symbolic universe of Poland.
According to Ireneusz Krzemiński (2013: 13), it was precisely ‘the social movement and the workers’ union “Solidarność” [Solidarity], active officially from 1980 (and from 1981 as an underground movement), that have created and attempted to practice a specific and original model of democracy’. This model is interpreted in terms of direct (Świderski, 1996) or performative democracy (Matynia, 2009), as it is framed by a set of practices of common decision making based on the assumption of universal dignity and intelligence of every single person. In this regard, the event of the so-called ‘carnival of solidarity’ (1980–1981) 15 might be seen as the eruption of the modernisation code, which before that time was suppressed, marginalised, but present in the Polish symbolic universe: an eruption that had ameliorated the social fabric in Poland in a way that – against subsequent historical events of martial law and repression – led towards the Round Table Talks and the transition to democracy.
The structure of the code
The central opposition structuring the modernisation code consists in a tension between reason and violence (cf. Siemek, 2002). Either we believe that all humans are rational beings, and therefore we can persuade each other in finding the best possible decision concerning all, or the strongest has to impose her/his particular rationality on all the others. Here, there is no centre of power. Nor are there masters and slaves. There are only diverse and equal interlocutors aiming at rationalisation of the social world in general and every human life in particular. Rationalisation means exhausting the potentiality contained in the gathering of diverse intelligences when they argue and try to convince each other with the explicit goal of gaining an intersubjective insight in the subject or issue they are disputing, and starting from the willingness to overcome in such a way the partiality that comes with every individual position.
The internal trend of this code is the phantasm of progress: there is always a space to be better, to improve the world and ourselves, to overcome all existing evil, and to go beyond the boundaries set by the present.
On the interactional level, the modernisation code means the seriousness of listening and speaking required in all social situations where interlocutors desire communal learning rather than violence. They might disagree with one another, but simultaneously they are making a relentless effort to understand each other and to gain some temporary consent.
The modernisation code in education
‘Alternative education’ is the expression that in Polish educational theory functions as a proper, and often used, name for all these educational theories and practices that are opposed to the dominant one. The commonality of this expression is significant, and it means that in the Polish educational imaginary there is always some dominant pedagogy and its alternative. In the communist past, another term was used as well: ‘pedagogy of the margin’/‘marginalised pedagogy’. This refers to educational ideas that were not in line with the dominant communist ideology, but that nevertheless were given a chance to be investigated and put into practice on a local scale. 16 After the transition to democracy, the name ‘alternative education’ gathered together conceptions that could be seen as an alternative to the still dominant totalitarian public schooling (fully controlled by the state, authoritarian and transmissive in style, and uniformalising pupils). ‘Alternative education’ was therefore a set of heterogeneous ideas (including the New Education Movement, the ideas of humanist psychologists such as Maslow and Rogers, Gestalt, constructivism, dialogical concepts and so on) that had one thing in common: they were displacing the power over the educational processes from the centre to diverse, multiple agents hic et nunc taking part in education (pupils, students, parents, teachers, local community), giving them back their dignity and autonomy as rational human beings.
On the level of classroom interactions, this would mean, for example, the possibility of a teacher–student discussion as a conversation between peers, aiming at exploration of the subject matter. Dorota Klus-Stańska (2002: 360) observes this during a history lesson on the Black Death, when the fact that more young than old people died in the period is being explored: T: Now: why young people …. Rather young, than old? We don’t know that. S: Children have less strength. T: Maybe. But this concerned 20-years old people. So it concerned people that seemed to be the healthiest. S: Wait a minute Richard, wait. Please think. If you had contact with diverse disease transmitted by animals, if you would attend hunting often, you could get infected with something and so on. Or you would be other 20-year old, which still attends school, and so on, then you would …. always … even here you would have contact with the ill people.
The case when teaching does not assume obedience but is an expression of mutual intellectual effort that requires mutual recognition of intelligence (of the students and the teacher) can be found in Boryczko (2015: 252): [Teacher is handing out a copy of Picasso painting.] S: Strange proportions. S: You can see the hand. It’s all disproportionate. T: Please make notes. What else do you see in Minotaur posture? S: Like he tries to defend himself against some attack. Like he is trying to defend himself. T: So, defence against attack. [The teacher writes down answers on the blackboard]. Is this a defence? Is this reaching or covering with hand? What is happening further? S: There is a woman. S: Half of woman’s body on a horse. S: These are human remains. T: We have woman’s body, an animal, a horse. How the horse looks like? Is it asleep? S: Like running. […]
Concluding remarks
Cultural codes and the rise of neoliberalism
After a period of making diverse attempts at modernising public schools, scholars advocating an alternative started to diagnose the corruption of the modernisation code. Schools built as ‘alternative’ seemed to introduce more and more direct authoritarian strategies (as they became a subsystem of education for the middle class, who are in need of securing educational and economic success for their children), and public schools used modernisation vocabulary to support their own folwark and totalitarian practices (cf. Klus-Stańska, 2010: 259–360; Potulicka and Rutkowiak, 2010). This may be considered paradoxical, as since 1989 political transformation has resulted in delayed success of the ideas and values of the Solidarity movement, due to the introduction of the modernisation code as a commonly shared idea, both officially and unofficially.
However, as analysed by Sowa (2010), this desire for modernisation also implied an acknowledgment of the inferiority of Poles and Poland (i.e. of their periphery). Modernisation was, therefore, seen to be in line with the logic of colonisation, that is, as if it were about imitating the West. In other words, modernisation was defined by means of genuinely Polish schemes of interpretation, that is, in terms of the structure of folwark and totalitarian codes: Poles were denied either the intellectual or the political ability to control their own country themselves. This happened at the exact same moment when the Western world became increasingly dominated by a neoliberal logic (cf. Piketty, 2014). This neoliberal shift was seen in Poland during that period as ‘the way’ to modernise the state, the economy and – of course – education (Potulicka and Rutkowiak, 2010; Sowa, 2011). However, neoliberalism itself – with its requirement for uncritical, insatiable consumers and competitive workers dedicated to the flourishing of the knowledge society – seen in Poland as the incarnation of modernisation, in fact relies on the social and educational practices run by the folwark and totalitarian codes (cf. Hryniewicz, 2015; Santorski and Michalik, 2016). And so, paradoxically, modernisation as such was discredited.
Therefore, we are currently at a moment when the global crisis of political imagination seems to be even more severe in the case of Poland. There really seems to be ‘no alternative’ to the interpretation schemata developed by the folwark and the totalitarian past. Although there are many alternative discourses and theories, it seems that all actions, enterprises and understandings almost inevitably slip into one of the two codes (or a mixture of both). Therefore, there is an urgent need to make a common effort in attempting to develop a new educational, political and social imaginary in Poland.
This is exactly the point where the limit of the potential of the concept of cultural codes can be found. It is a suitable tool for analysing, interpreting and to a certain extent also debunking the status quo of a particular territory, but it fails when we face the necessity to design and change, to rework and renew that hic et nunc. However, the concept of cultural codes provides us with a clue that redesigning the educational imaginary doesn’t only mean theorising, building new languages and finding new forms of expression. It is about renewing daily practices in a way that enables us to understand (ourselves, each other and the world) differently. This, of course, is not an instant process. Thinking in this different way will not have an immediate impact, nor will it deliver instant outcomes to be measured. What is required is humble and persistent, and perhaps stubborn, mundane work through which a new way of relating with each other and acting together may be established (cf. Zamojski, 2014).
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to express his gratitude to the anonymous reviewers of this article, as well as to Joris Vlieghe, Naomi Hodgson, and Katarzyna Gawlicz for comments and suggestions that have significantly contributed to the development of the argument presented above.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.