‘Total Pedagogisation’?

Abstract

The analysis of life on the housing estate and its educational and emancipatory character can lead one to suspect some form of total pedagogisation. One cannot ignore the fact that these modern social reformers and founders of the cooperative used the neighbourhood newsletter to diffuse the model of ‘a new man in the new housing estate’. In the context of the criticism of modernity, I wonder whether education really had an emancipatory character. I use Jacques Rancière’s concept of education and stultification. This is why the categories proposed by Gert Biesta, who studied the culture of learning and education, turned out to be vital for my analysis of the Żoliborz estate. The founders and teachers of the WHC school (Wacław Schayer and Stanisław Żemis) also pointed out to the difference between learning and education. The Żoliborz model of education, based on John Dewey’s concepts and the assumptions that social practices are experienced by the body, confirmed Gert Biesta’s thesis that civic education is the matter of organising democratic development conditions and a democratic living environment, and not the matter of implementing models of a perfect citizen, specific skills or competencies. I ask, however, the question whether the rather specific, experimental and hermetic educational model was beneficial for children and youth? Wasn’t this model too detached from the Polish social and cultural context?.