Understanding Foreign Future and Deconstructing Polish Past: The Experiences of Schooling Under a Communist Rule Recollected by Contemporary Polish Migrants

Abstract

The article elaborates on the recollections of schooling under the communist rule in Poland as presented in biographical interviews with contemporary Polish migrants living in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Norway. An analysis of childhood and schooling nexus is elicited on two platforms, specifically as (1) interviewees’ first-hand experiences of school life and (2) through the picture they paint by comparing their education pathways with those of their children growing up abroad. The focus is on how the need to reflect on one’s past of an upbringing under a communist rule is necessitated by encountering the contrasting schooling systems abroad. The analysis can help deepen the understanding of Polish socialist childhood.

Notes

¹David Riesman argues that an “inner-directed” personality type is characteristic of modern societies (1950). Inner-directed people attain an internalized set of aims and values at an early life-stage and tend to follow these directives throughout their life-course, gaining a sense of control over their lives. According to Riesman, this type of personality has replaced the societies and individuals directed by tradition and stands in opposition to the other-directed personality, which conditions self-acceptance on other people’s expectations.

²Paula Pustułka’s PhD study was supervised by Prof. Howard Davis and funded by the 125th Anniversary Research Scholarship awarded by Bangor University for 2010–13. Note that findings from Germany are omitted from this analysis. Supplementary funding for PhD fieldwork was obtained from the DAAD grant (2011).

³The research leading to these results received funding from the Polish–Norwegian Research Programme operated by the National Centre for Research and Development under the Norwegian Financial Mechanism 2009–2014 in the framework of Project Contract No. Pol-Nor/197905/4/2013.

⁴For each quotation we provide a coded name of a respondent, their year of birth and destination country (UK for the United Kingdom, DE for Germany, and NOR for Norway).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paula Pustułka

Paula Pustułka has a Ph.D. in Sociology from Bangor University in Wales. She has worked as a researcher for Transfam project at the Institute of Sociology of the Jagiellonian University before becoming a post-doctoral researcher at the SWPS University in Warsaw in 2016. She has extensively published on Polish migrant families settled in the EU, with a strong focus on family practices and parenting, as well as particular positionalities of women and children in mobility projects. Currently, she is co-editing an anthology titled Transnational Polish Families in Norway. Social Capital, Integration, Institutions and Care. Her research interests revolve around gender and family studies, migration research, and qualitative research methodologies.

Magdalena Ślusarczyk

Magdalena Ślusarczyk holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the Faculty of of Philosophy, Jagiellonian University (2005) and Bachelor of Arts in German Studies (2002) and is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Population Study in Institute of Sociology at the Jagiellonian University. Recently she worked in a project “TRANSFAM: Doing family in transnational context. Demographic choices, welfare adaptations, school integration and every-day life of Polish families living in Polish-Norwegian transnationality” as a WP leader and Researcher. Her main research interests are: migration, family and educational systems.