Capabilities in the Context of Education and Whole-Day Schooling: The Situation in Poland

The recent amendments to the 1991 Act maintain this tendency. For instance, since 2008 a new meaning of "the kindergarten", significant for the aim of this analysis, has been introduced into the Act. According to this amendment, a new form of pre-school education called "small kindergarten", as well as other alternative forms of education at this level, have been recognised. They must employ qualified teachers, but other requirements, for instance those pertaining to building facilities, may be less rigorously observed as it is in the case of typical kindergartens.

Such institutions may operate in a far more elastic manner. The obligatory curricula may be realised in whole or partially, and the subjects who run them may comprise e.g. non-governmental institutions. This should be understood as a step towards further integration of formal, informal and non-formal education, and as an effort to solve the problems of pre-school education in Poland. This stage of education is a responsibility (an own task) of local governments, which means that maintenance of pre-school institutions and employment of teachers must be covered from own resources of those governments. Financial restrictions common to many local communities in Poland resulted in closing 30 % of kindergartens between the years 1990 and 2001.

For several years, many small kindergartens (often part-time, with one teacher travelling between several communities) have been created to repair for this loss. They are often supported by EU funds. Presently there are ca. 800 such institutions, and they enroll ca. 9000 children. Those alternative forms of pre-school education are actively organised by the Comenius Foundation and Federation of Educational Initiatives.

In the light of the 2008 amendment, local governments gain rights to support such forms of organisation of pre-school education and to increase the number of children having access to education at this stage. Presently, the rate of schooling for children aged 3-5 in Poland is the lowest in the EU and amounts to 30 % (for the sake of comparison, it is 100 % in Hungary, Belgium or Ireland, and over 90 % in Czech Republic, Italy or Switzerland)  [2] .

Other recent amendments to the Education Act involve those pertaining to the role of parents in education of their children and in the functioning of the schools. As we read in an Eurydice report,

“As of the 1st of September 2007 the following changes were introduced in the primary schools and lower secondary schools: the obligation to set up the parents’ council in each schools. The councils comprise the elected representatives of parents. They have the right to submit opinions and requests to the schoolhead, school running body and superintendents (regional educational authorities). The parents’ council together with the teachers’ council will define the school preventive programme and school education and care programme. They will give opinions on the programme and timetable of the school performance improvement, as well as on the financial plan submitted by the schoolhead”  [3] .

Those tendencies to broaden the scope of societalization of the school and transforming it towards a shared value of the community can be seen as well corresponding to the process of democratization of social life. Opening the school for parents and local communities contribute to the integration of the different forms of education as well. The school that offers learning possibilities together with the parents begins to involve whole families and communities not only as subjects, but also - to some extent - as "targets" of education. It is education "with" the community and "for" the community, where formal, informal, non-formal and accidental aspects of learning may merge; it has a chance of becoming a significant factor in the life of the community, contributing to individual development of its citizens and to its development as a whole.

Such schools may easily form local partnerships. Linking all local environments, it creates school – family – local community partnerships and many institutional joint-ventures linking all types of education: formal, informal and non-formal.

Such school, family, and community partnerships seem to be evoking prospective possibilities of changing societies towards more community-like ways of life. Teachers, who are responsible for developing those partnerships, may therefore become key figures in inverting the tendencies that undercut community lives. Their approach to the issue of school-family-community collaboration may directly influence the quality of relationships between the potential partners. (Mendel, 1998, 2001, 2003, 2007). Unfortunately, talking of Poland as transforming society one could say that these approaches are grounded in former system and make barriers in building bridges between school and families.

The selected results of a study in which prospective teachers, studying in a Polish and an American university, were asked about their ways of understanding school, family, and community partnerships tend to suggest that both groups are deeply involved in discursive practices that reproduce power relations in their respective countries, which brings a question of their ability to play the role of agents of social change in their future work [Mendel, 2001]. The results show a tendency of school teachers in Poland to dominate over the sphere of local activities by excluding parents from school and community life (a trace of the communist heritage). On the other hand they disclose a discourse of professional expertise as an American version of similar domination.

Most Polish students (85%) perceive parents “as a trouble" as something common. The American group did not see this role as dominant (no indications on the right side of the scale). Seeing parents as “a trouble” implies, on the one hand, a tendency to avoid them, and on the other a notion that “something should be done about it”. Polish students feel that they have to do “something” about parents, most likely they should master them. They take a position “above” parents, in an unequal relationship that cannot be identified as partnership. A teacher who feels professional in the way that was presented earlier, who sees not a real parent but a “problem” instead, will probably use procedures of control, manipulation, and management called “practices of repartition” in Michel Foucault’s writings (1977, p.211).

Thus a discursive power/knowledge structure becomes visible. Teachers’ knowledge about parents translates itself into power over parents who become objects of discursive practice.

Polish professionalism of prospective teachers originates from the ethos of teachers’ service to the society in general (unfortunately, rather than a local community). It expresses itself in the feeling of mission to improve the world and mould reality into expected, ideal forms. The lack of expert knowledge on school, family, and community partnerships (there are no courses on this topic) is compensated for by the emphasis on legal issues and the dominant position of the teacher that is guaranteed by the law.

Basing on empirical studies and common observations one could say that teachers in Poland prefer limited parents’ involvement and resort to the law (their status quo as well educated graduates who obtained the MA degree) if their relationships with parents are not fully satisfactory (Segiet, 1999; Mendel 1998, 2000).

Perhaps more attention should be paid to parents, namely to the possibilities of the animation of their parenting culture that could generate leaders of social change rather than merely speakers active in situations of school conflicts. Here we come to the universally controversial issue of parental education.

It is typical, also in well-developed countries, that parental education is not supported by public funds. One can hear of local initiatives in this area, but they are scarce  [4] . Parents are, thus, perceived as an important part of the system of education, but this recognition is not translated into financial initiatives. We do not perceive the problem of parental involvement in economic terms, and it is not practically connected to the ideas of life-long learning (generally seen, due to the pressure executed by the world of work, as part of economic rationality  [5] ) or to ideas of investing in human and social capital, well recognized in diagnoses of social policy  [6] .

There clearly seems to be a lack of systemic solutions that would enable parents' or parents-teachers' associations to share the responsibility for running schools. There is no system of recruitment of parents to the bodies that decide on the functioning of education. There is no parental representation in the system – beginning from the school level, through the local to the national one. The legal framework that makes it possible for parents to form Educational Councils, together with representations of teachers and students, at all these levels, remains empty. In spite of the efforts undertaken by various organisations, like the Civic Educational Association (Społeczne Towarzystwo Oświatowe – STO), it mostly groups parents involved in non-public schooling) which has introduced Poland into European Parents' Association and has remained the sole representative of Poland there – no organisation capable of representing all Polish parents, regardless the type or location of the school. We do not have anything that would match, for instance, the Parents-Teachers Organisation in England or the Swedish Hem og Skola (Home and School) that gather parents from all kinds of schools and represent them on all levels of the system (from school, through local and national, to European) and who elect their leaders in clear democratic procedures. The Polish STO, which started as a broad social movement who played a vital role in linking education to local communities after 1989, nowadays itself runs ca. 200 non-public schools and it is mostly composed of parents whose children attend them  [7] . Therefore it cannot be considered a proper representation of all Polish parents.

The present situation is dramatically different from that before 1939, when there was a strong self-governmental movements of parents. School councils that operated on all levels of the system, were supported by two national parental associations: the Union of Parental Associations and the Grouping of Parents connected to a political organisation called „Zręb”, and School Patronages or Committees of Parental Care operated in a vast majority of primary and secondary schools. The Parents’ Committees called “Parental Threes” acting in current reality in Poland could remind them. But in order to perceiving them as quite similar, one should foster the contemporary ways of parents’ influence of school life. As Krzysztof Jakubiak says, those organisations operated according to their own, legally registered statutes, and they strictly co-operated with school managers and pedagogical councils  [8] .

It is impossible to state how the above tendencies would develop if it had not been for the Second World War and the subsequent Soviet domination over Poland. The pre-war achievements in this are were undoubtedly significant, but the post-war ideas of "societalization of the school", of "open schooling" or "community schools", in spite of noble intentions of their proponents, invariably led to further subordination of the school to the socialist state  [9]. Therefore it was only after 1989 that those ideas gained new impetus and started to have some influence on the democratization of the educational reality.

The present Polish law, although it does create real foundations for the partnership between parents and schools, seems to remain in the realm of declarations. What is still missing are broader organisational solutions that would let the parents actually feel involved in the system of education. Even though the Education Act of 1991, and the bill that set the blueprint of educational reform in 1999 consider parents as "rightful members of the school community", "partners",etc., the every-day reality shows a totally different picture.

A serious obstacle to the full implementation of the idea of "societalization"of the school, of turning it into a real "community education" institution, including the involvement of parents in the every-day functioning of the school and integration of various forms of education and learning, is the lack of parental leaders and a stereotypical image of the parent represented by all actors on the educational scene.

We still think of parents along the lines set in the previous political system. A way to overcome this inhibition is education.

However, as we said before, political declarations are rarely translated into financial obligations. Definitely rarely in Poland. The Ministry of Education clearly works towards the change of school by way of its societalization (that was the main target of the Education Act of 1991), but, on the other hand, it uses public money first of all to support teachers, then the students, while parents and other adults are totally omitted in the distribution schemes. We may put it sharply and provocatively that the Polish system of education excludes parents, and other adults in general, from the field of its interest. Ministry of Education in Poland is oriented towards children and teachers, and the money devoted to education is almost entirely used for schooling children and supporting their teachers.

In 2020, „the citizen of Gdansk” is supposed to be a happy person enjoying a good psycho-physical condition. The document that is meant to describe the desired condition of education (sic!) concentrates – in its large part - on leisure time, as we can see in the following passage:

The possibilities of active recreation are provided in Gdansk by numerous clubs and sports centres: The City Sports Hall and OLIVIA Sports and Entertainment Hall, fitness clubs, snooker and bowling clubs, swimming pools and gymnasiums, two horse-riding clubs and golf clubs situated nearby the city. The city quickly expands the network of cycling roads, already stretching over 30 km. The effort of the city to promote cycling has been appreciated internationally and in2002 the city, as the second town in the world, gained a 1 million dollar grant to build cycling roads from the UN Global Environment Facility Fund. In the summer, the main attraction of the city are sea beaches on the Gdansk Bay. The amateurs of water sports may enjoy the facilities of the Gdansk Bay, on Motlau River perfectly fit for kayak trips, or on numerous lakes surrounding the city. The very centre of Gdansk hosts a sailing marina capable of mooring 85 yachts. Between may and september 2002, 714 sailing and motor yachts visited the place.

In 2002, Gdansk was classified sixth out of [...] 732 gminas in the national youth sports competition  [11] .

This, and many similar passages of the document show that education in the city means various forms of activity being part of the system of formal education, but also – and that is strongly emphasised in the document – other than formal, diversified activities of leisure, family life, clubbing, sports and entertainment. Education seems tobe understood here, after some of the leading pedagogues in contemporary Poland, as „the whole of factors that form life capabilities of the human  [12] ” and, as such, it cannot merely take place in schools. Not schools, but the whole community becomes the place of individual and collective self-creation practices. The title of the document – The Citizen of Gdansk – seems significant in this context.

The document contains numerous examples that illustrate this way of understanding education and of political decisions that result from it. Political goals are defined through the lens of education. The description of the strategic goals of The Model... starts with the following sentence:

The aim of educational policy is to create proper educational conditions that will make young people able to participate in public life, in social and cultural activities. The fundamental strategic goal is higher quality and unrestricted access to education. (...) The obligation of the state in the area of education has been declared as preparing young people to adult life, and to vocation in particular. There is a need of connecting education with the demands of the job market, and of inspiring motivation to permanent learning adaptation to the changing world in young people. Therefore it is necessary to act towards increasing the access to higher education, to create conditions for life-long learning and to promote distance learning  [13] .

Further can we read about ways to achieve those goals, clearly integrating formal education with in- and non-formal ones. For instance:

The possibilities of sports activities in schools are not satisfactory. Modern facilities are scarce. Promoting intellectual development of children and youth must be accompanied by caring of their physical growth. Therefore the sports infrastructure of the city must be developed, and proper funds must be devoted to extracurricular sports activities and rehabilitative gymnastics. Obligatory swimming lessons should be introduced in all schools.

The organisation of leisure time of children and youth should follow the diagnosis of their needs based on their own demands, as well as those articulated by their parents and teachers. The data concerning participation of the young in social life show that too rarely is leisure time used for the enhancement of intellectual, emotional and physical growth. Action should be taken towards increasing the access to various forms of recreation in the place of living, as well as increasing mobility of the young in recreation.

The shift from the so-far dominant model of leisure organisation to the one of leisure animation, commonly accepted in Europe, will make it possible to increase the number of young people involved in extracurricular and extra-school activities, particularly in sports and culture, including those with social problems.

The next important task is promotion of healthy lifestyle and freedom from addiction. Health promotion should be connected with the City's programme of popular sport and physical education.

The success in realisation of the strategic goals depends on how we tackle the activities aimed at children and youth. It is necessary that we prepare teachers and educators for this purpose  [14] .

The focus on preparing professional educators in the last paragraph maybe seen, on the one hand, as a sign the City aims towards an integrated model of education, but, on the other, it may show that local politicians tend to take total responsibility for quality of education in their place of living. Educational priorities of the City seem to support this view:

Gdansk self-government is the subject of educational policy running schools and other educational institutions. Therefore it is responsible for the creation of optimal legal and organisational conditions to realise the goals of public access to education, instruction and care for children and the youth, as well for creating conditions for life-long education of the adult citizens. This responsibility demands that the following priorities are observed:

Those priorities undoubtedly define education as learning taking place „always”, in a life-long span of time, and „everywhere”, in a life-wide setting. On the other hand, all forms of learning are seen as possible to integrate, organisationally coherent, broadly open to local environments and connected with educational goals of the City. Undoubtedly it is a rational and economically sensible way of designing education.

Somehow in the background there is „a must” that all these activities are preformed within the limits of the budget, which is a prerequisite of local governments' responsibility.

This economic rationality and ethics is ideologically supported and it bears marks of the transforming social thinking, where market liberalism (everything „must be profitable”) meets some form of „Christian liberalism” which once was defined by Jozef Tischner in terms of „the miserable gift of freedom” that hit Poland after 1989. Free people are what they are. They do what they do – says Tischner. Freedom in Tischner, and freedom in the educational bills of Gdansk self-government, is not merely a freedom of choice, but also the power of acquiring goods and making one's life healthy, brave and hopeful.

In the pages of the document, as well as in many debates in the council  [15], a strong role is played by the rule of subsidiarity. It seems to be strictly observed by the city authorities, who seem not to notice that in many respects it contradicts the goals written in „The Citizen of Gdansk 2020”. For instance, the idea of equal access to education is sometimes questioned by the councillors in their debates, even though it is absolutely fundamental for the realisation of the goals of the strategy. The understanding of subsidiarity as narrowly limited interventionism is in a stark contrast with the presumption of the „Model”.

The awareness of this conflict reflects in some debates, where ethical issues are subordinated to economic rationality in the name of political responsibility. For instance, one of the councillors says that „Gdansk cannot afford unrestricted access to pre-school education”, even though she had signed the document saying that The basic strategic goal is providing for higher quality and accessibility of education (...) Early years are the most important in the development of the child. Therefore pre-school education is of great importance. All children should have equal chances of harmonious development of skills and talents  [16] ”.

Interestingly, the rhetoric of economic rationality, of „husbandry” imposing stinginess in the conditions of permanent lack of sufficient resources and making proper use of the assets of the place, in more or less coherent way present at the local level, is almost completely absent in national policy documents of the Ministry of Education, the state Centre of In-Service Teacher Training, etc. It is characteristic only of the local declarations, documents and plans where education „for ourselves”, of „our children” in „our place” is discussed. It explicitly shows that it is only at the local level, where – in the conditions of Poland – lies the burden of supporting educational facilities (the state provides only for the money covering teachers' salaries), that a model integrating formal and less formal dimensions of educating may emerge.

The reason behind such integration is merely that it „works” and „pays”, and therefore local governments will be emotionally attached and devoted to the idea of using all possible resources. In a way, what plays here an important role is the increasing social capital of local communities expressed in emotional attachment to the Heimat , and strict awareness of economic limitations. Anyhow, it seems possible to answer the key question of this report saying that under the present circumstances in Poland, it is only at the local level where integration of education, understood in terms of broadening its scope behind the walls of the school and opening it to social forces in the community, is possible.

Another question addresses the issue of forms and the scope of extracurricular activities of the school and its openness (or its lack) to forms of non-schooling education.

In the Gdansk document we read that The number of extra-curricular activities will be gradually increasing, beginning in September 2005, so that in 2008 it amounts to 2 hors a week per class (2005- 0.5 hour; 2006 – 1 hour; 2007 – 1,5 hour)  [17] This means progress in comparison to the situation from the beginning of the political transformation in early 1990s, when schools were pushed into poverty and forced to survive in extremely harsh market environment. The extracurricular offer was then based on tuition and almost entirely directed towards gaining extra funds, which meant that they were only accessible to students of good financial standing. The present policy means a retreat from that condition and a planned, systematic return to the idea of open accessibility of extracurricular work of the school.

The possible scope of activities within this form of educational work can be seen, for instance, in the section on physical education, where the following requirements have been identified:

What we can see here is that the will to open educational facilities to non- and informal forms of education is subordinated to the needs of curricular work of the school. It seems that an elastic approach, different from standard forms of work, is still difficult to imagine for the economically cautious councillors and overwhelmed by the scope of changes of teachers. Why not seeing schools as dispersed places where various activities of the city take place, and why not seeing the city as a community that realises its various cultural, social, educational and recreational activities in schools?

So far we can see that the mutual connections between the different forms of education hardly take place in schools' extracurricular work. Still, the document is somehow promising a tendency to connect those forms, to create a complex network of social activities, here illustrated on the example of sports and recreation.

Paragraph 2 in the above fragment, where we read of „queuing” to sports facilities in the schools, may be an example of this tendency. It addresses one of the problems in the present functioning of schools – the insufficient recreational infrastructure on the one hand, and financial shortages experienced by schools on the other make them rent gym halls to closed groups of users in the evening hours, which makes the facilities closed for the school community in the leisure time of children and parents.

This way of integrating formal and informal education is a mark of poverty rather than educational mission, and interest in sponsoring rather than communal life.

The Warsaw Educational Policy, like The Citizen of Gdansk, is an element of a broader liberal-democratic discourse in which the basic tenets, well represented in the text, are:

In the light of those categories, the whole document is marled by a certain lack. It is not entirely clear to whom and about whom it speaks. In many places we read of "diversified" addressees of the educational offer, nowhere can we read that education proposed in the text is addressed to all citizens of Warsaw, regardless their age, socio-economic status, cultural capital or rank in social hierarchies. Even though one of the sections (Chapter Four - Extra-School education and Life-long Learning) clearly refers to "different" subjects, it does not seem to put the issue of accessibility strongly enough. Reading the text, one has an impression that in spite of scattered references to diversity, what is really in focus is formal education taking place in various types of schools, and non-formal, extra-school education - but both of them are mostly addressed to children and school-age youth together with their teachers.

Educational Policy of the Polish capital city seems to hardly notice the families. and local neighbourhoods. Perhaps sociological diagnoses that gave ground to this document did state a lack of such communities, which in a large city like Warsaw may be a fact. But also in that case, it seems crucial that politics of education should address the problem of communities. It is through education, provided that it links its formal, informal and non-formal aspects, that such communities can be created - even if we start in a "concrete desert" of a large city; people live in certain neighbourhoods, and it is some form of education that may turn those formal areas of residence into active communities. Who are, after all, those mobile people, who often come to Warsaw on a temporary basis - if while living in Warsaw, they do not have a place they could call theirs, they have no local space that is a condition of being a citizen, of forming an identity of someone belonging somewhere?

Another group of addressees, briefly mentioned in the document, are self-help groups. The idea of self-help is, in general, hardly present, or marginalised in the text. And that is a valuable idea: self-help is a vehicle of social cohesion, and an opportunity to learn how to solve problems collectively. Self-help can easily be integrated with formal education, where, for instance, teachers can invite parents of children with special needs to work together in the school setting.

The similar can be said about pre-service and in-service teacher training concerning teachers' community work, also almost absent in the document. Co-operation of schools with local communities, and training teachers' abilities for this co-operation, should also be understood as vehicles of social cohesion and links between various aspects of social life. We can read of teacher training in the report, but nowhere can we see references to the goals defined in terms of educational partnerships; not much on communication between teachers and parents, on learning to bridge schools with social forces present in the school's environment. It seems that there is a need for a very deep re-orientation of teacher training policies, and it concerns Poland in general, not just Warsaw and the document we are referring to now.

Another issue is social inequalities. Educational Policy sets the goal of providing for equal educational opportunities, but it does not say anything systematically how to bridge the rapidly expanding gap between the social strata. There are declarations that it should be done, but there are no hints of concrete directions or actions to be taken. For instance:

The Warsaw Educational Policy refers to several fundamental values. As the most important ones we see the creation of the open school that is friendly and creative. The Warsaw self-governmental school should be an autonomous and creative community aware of its responsibilities in the area of growth and development of children, youth, teachers and parents, and providing for the highest possible quality of education. The school will use the state-of-the-art achievements of science and technology and will educate in the values of civic society, in the awareness of national history and in the openness to the world. The Warsaw school is the place of on-going debate on the questions important in the life of its students. It is also a place where children with special needs and threatened with social exclusion will find support. It is also a school that supports the gifted, talented and highly motivated students. We acknowledge the diversity of the Warsaw schooling system a value. Aiming at promoting quality, we appreciate more than instruction results. As equally important we see the results of moral education, social activism, and the achievements in other domains of school activity. (p.3)

If Warsaw was in fact to take up those activities, we believe it should consider education as an integrated activity taking place in the community rather than merely in schools; it should see it as a system of criss-crossing spheres of formal, informal and non-formal education. Then it could be possible to reach a situation when education becomes a process of building reciprocity and liquidation of labels that segregate people according to their place of residence and geographic location of the school. As the above fragment sais, and as many researchers maintain, the main factor that determines school success is the PLACE where children live and learn. The passages in Education Policy that refer to this issue (p.41, about forms of work towards preventing social exclusion) do not seem to address the problem sufficiently. The same can be said about numerous references to special educational needs, where we cannot read anything about marginalisation or social exclusion. "Special needs" people in Warsaw are pre-schoolers and students with developmental disfunctions. This clearly positions special needs education within the rigid framework of the school, and addresses it to just several of the many cases where "special" approaches (that is, extending the standard mode of teaching "everybody the same stuff") are needed. Again, this remark pertains to Polish educational practices in general rather to the Warsaw document specifically.

We can read nothing about systemic solutions of the problem of reproduction of social marginalisation on the grounds of place of residence ("bad" districts, streets, pubs, etc) or education ("bad" schools, kindergartens, and even higher education institutions) in the chapters on budget provisions. Interestingly, also in that document can we see that education considered in terms of place shows its integrated nature. "Bad places" universalise both formal and non / informal aspects of education, and the socially constructed distinctions between these domains. It may be perhaps difficult to envisage positive incarnations of the ideal of integrated domains of education (formal / informal /non-formal plus accidental learning), but when we encounter a "bad place" we can immediately see how all these domains interact in a vicious circle of total impossibility, how they fully integrate in a significant learning experience that fixes and immobilises the identity of the person in the place. It is intriguing to ask why we do not use this knowledge in designing strategies of inclusion while we can see it work in the "non-strategies" (marked by inaction rather than purposeful action) of exclusion. In these experiences we can see that the locus of education automatically integrates all its forms: one can learn anyhow, but not anywhere. The forms of learning give way to its places. This observation may, however, be extrapolated to places far extending not only Warsaw, but Poland and Europe as well.

Owing to the "extensive" nature of these conclusions, easily overcoming the local character of the document, we will present the following analyses of the Warsaw policy in a broader context. It seems worthwhile that in Warsaw, as well as in Poland in general, attention is paid to the "disquieting subjects" in the process of educational planning. Those subjects are always rhetorically displaced, or "moved" in the policy planning, while in practice they tend to be condemned to stay where they are. Those subjects are: students and their families, teachers, schools - and politicians as advocates of change.