Official URL: http://www.jceps.com/archives/6398

We focus on describing some of the effects of austerity capitalism in the public educational sector in Poland, a country that was a part of the Soviet bloc from WWII and experienced dramatic transformation after 1989. This transformation from “communism” to “democracy” involved all spheres of the life of society and individuals and meant a dramatic re-orientation of the social, political and economic imaginary. We see the current post-transformation moment in Poland as characterized by the dominance of three fundamental tendencies: predatory neoliberalism, creeping authoritarianism and nationalist neoconservatism. For the purposes of this text, we will begin with a short discussion of neoliberalism as it took over post-communist Central Europe during the last decade of the 20th century and onwards. We will focus especially on privatization as a key dimension of neoliberal transformation intertwined as it was with strong neoconservative tendencies, centering in our discussion on the effects of these trends on Polish public education.