Education and biopolitics: deconstructing authority in Polish textbooks

Abstract

The article examines the mutual relations between education, biopolitics and authority. The objective is to deconstruct authority in relation to three biopolitical issues: abortion, sexual orientation, and IVF. This deconstruction is performed by analysis of the manifestations and strategies of authority employed in Polish textbooks for four subjects at secondary school: social studies, family life education, ethics, and religion. This provided an answer to the question both about the significance of biopolitical issues in the education process and about the role of authority in their construction. The main rhetorical practices for the construction of authority were science, using the strategy of “stating facts”; law, with the strategy of “establishing order”; and religion, whose strategy is “initiating opposition”. In the article, I conduct a qualitative analysis of each of the three rhetorical practices and make conclusions on the role of authority in the process of teaching biopolitical issues in school.

Keywords:

• Education
• biopolitics
• authority
• legitimation
• textbooks
• Poland

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Irena Borowik, Inga Koralewska and Katarzyna Zielińska for their valuable comments on the first version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Although textbooks are authoritative (in the sense that they are “beyond criticism”, Luke et al., 1983), this does not mean that teachers and students are deprived of agency towards them. Research carried out regarding the issues of textbook consumption within the classroom setting (Pakuła et al., 2015; Pawelczyk et al., 2014) shows that it is possible to contest, re-appropriate and negotiate the ideologies conveyed by the textbook. The purpose of this article is to analyse the very message of the textbook, with which teachers and students can interact in a variety of ways.

2 Even though, the results of quantitative and qualitative research in Poland clearly indicate the authoritarianism of teachers and passivity in acquiring knowledge by students, it should be emphasised that this is a description of the dominant model, and there are possible alternatives. The possibility of resistance to various forms of power is admitted by Foucault (1982), although this possibility is regulated by discourse itself (e.g. by the rhetoric of emancipation).

3 It is important to highlight that the textbooks under study are aligned with the core curricula approved by experts from the Polish Ministry of Education. Consequently, the authors of these textbooks possess limited autonomy when it comes to selecting and interpreting the topics that are covered.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Centre in Poland under Grant OPUS [number 2014/13/B/HS6/03311].

Notes on contributors

Marcin K. Zwierżdżyński

Marcin K. Zwierżdżyński Assistant Professor at AGH University of Krakow. Graduated from Jagiellonian University in Cultural Studies and Sociology. His main areas of research and interests include sociology of education, knowledge, religion, biopolitics, and educational technologies.