De-privatizing the Public in Poland: Education, Inequality and the Legitimacy of Governance

This chapter engages with the legitimacy of governance and inequality through the prism of publicness. It builds on ethnographic research among parents of children with special needs in Poland who had been pushed out of the public education system and who attend schools referred to as “non-public”. We consider the meaning of “public” and “non-public” education under the specific sociopolitical conditions of the post-socialist Polish state and show how the public/non-public-private dichotomy serves as a tool of appropriation of the public sphere and legitimation of governance. Participation in and the building of “non-public” schooling, we argue, can be seen as a counter-hegemonic action, which expands the public sphere beyond state’s control, a process to which we refer to as “de-privatization of the public”.