Pedagogy or Antipedagogy? Towards the Crisis of the Contemporary Education

Abstract

The article is an attempt of a diagnosis and criticism of the state of the contemporary education, in particular in Poland but not only, as at the level of the lower education as – but to a lesser extent – higher education. It is made in view of the declined through all the cases in the public sphere crisis, with whom a native system of education is today faced. The author of this text collects and enumerates some key, in his opinion, reasons of that crisis, trying to avoid in its description easy labelling, radicalism or utopianism. The author’s criticism is raised in particular by: lack of a far-reaching, non-particularist and nonpoliticized vision of the educational system in Poland; permanent, experimentative, ad hoc and superficial reformism as well as following from it instability and – as a consequence of it – disfunctionality of the system and bodies responsible for education; paralysing and thus patologizing the education, uncritical (or [too] less reflective) attitude towards bureaucratization, standardization and some different control systems. The article puts also a question if the crisis of the contemporary education that also consists of the crisis of the contemporary pedagogy as science. Consequently it culminates in a question if the solutions and strategies applied to the contemporary education, infected by the crisis, do not transmute into their antipedagogic opposite.