When a hero is lost to history, it matters that his work and name should be discussed. Such is the case for Janusz Korczak or Henryk Goldszmit, a courageous fighter for democracy in Poland during the first half of the 20th century. Korczak, the pen name he used for his writings, founded two orphanages where he provided an environment for all the…

The Right-wing populism in Poland faces multiple challenges with respect to Religious Education. This is a complex issue, given it is not only about school education supporting pro-democratic positions in the modern generation of students, but also the fact that today's populists have participated in long-term and complex educational processes of…

In this paper, we are juxtaposing the notions of cosmopolitanism and koinopolitanism, to sketch a theoretical perspective in which local productions of knowledge, as a binding force of local communities, can meet more abstract regimes of knowing and more global concerns of democratic elites. We see this issue as politically significant in light of…

The article is a report on a qualitative study conducted among 703 students from Warsaw/Poland public universities. The purpose of the study was to identify projected behavior in the face of the threat scenario--the so-called "neo-totalitarianism," created by experts of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The survey was carried out using a…

This brief discusses cases of neo-nationalist violations of academic freedom in Hungary and Poland. The most prominent case of neo-nationalist violation of academic freedom in Hungary is the fate of the Central European University (CEU). The circumstances of CEU's forced move out of Hungary came before the European Court of Justice regarding it a…

Civics courses have a great significance -- they are supposed to train new cohorts of citizens to engage in multiple public roles in (democratic) society. How it is done depends on a multitude of factors, and teachers' performance and program contents are among the most important. In post-authoritarian order like Poland, civic contents of…

This paper draws upon data from two youth-focused, ethnographically informed inquiries--one in Poland, the other in Guatemala--to describe how historical memory can conflict with both state historical narratives and with globalized approaches to democratic citizenship education. This analysis helps us to better understand the ways that, in…

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…

Reviewing existing literature and policy documents concerning leadership of parent and student in school councils after World War II, up to the present day, the goal of this paper is to examine how to have parent and student council policies developed in Poland, what solutions exist in the area of educational policy concerning student and parent…

The article analyses a new educational development in Poland, that is, free democratic schools, which are grassroots initiatives of parents seeking an alternative to the traditional pedagogies of the public schooling. These schools form a broader network. Based on ethnographic research carried out at eight such schools over five years, the authors…

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the shape of current civic education in Polish schools. Methodology: The results of the analysis presented in this article are based on the following research question: What shape of civic education can be reconstructed on the basis of the researched sources? The method of collecting data is finding…

The paper examines school meetings held in a small democratic school in Poland in order to explore how school communities are formed. Drawing on Foucault's concept of power, the authors analyse fieldnotes and interview excerpts to reveal how voice and scripted bodily expressions accompanying verbal utterances are privileged in these school…

Democratic practices have their places; democracy is spatial in its very nature. From this perspective, the study of democracy can be developed as an analytical description of the places where democratic dialogue is practiced. The issue of dialogue practices, which are of educational character and become one of the versions of public pedagogy,…

This paper aims to explore transformative learning processes of parents involved in informal, parent-established democratic schools, which are novel educational initiatives in Poland. The author argues that the distinctive educational ideology and the practice of such schools expose parents to new understandings of education, the child and the…

Although much has been written about the process of party system institutionalization in different regions, the reasons why some party systems institutionalize while others do not still remain a mystery. Seeking to fill this lacuna in the literature, and using a mixed-methods research approach, this article constitutes a first attempt to answer…