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.