Discourses of socio-political transition and economic modernization often adopt educational terms and metaphors. Social transformations are accompanied, and legitimized by extreme forms of educationalization/pedagogization of social issues (Depaepe & Smeyers 2008) – where those issues are interpreted as a result of learning deficits of some part of a population undergoing change, and where education is seen as a primary tool for solving social problems (Depaepe 1998; Simmons & Masschelein 2008; Szkudlarek 2013). In the social pedagogy of transitions, people that would not normally be targeted by pedagogic interventions, are seen as pupils needing instruction (Czyżewski 2013). The result can be what Bernstein (2001) called the total pedagogization of society.  

One of the main features of pedagogization is that it requires an establishment of a hierarchical relation within or between societies. One side of this relation is construed as a morally superior “teacher” that possesses practical knowledge about how the social system should look and work like, and the other as a “pupil” ” (Rancière 2010, 1991; Biesta 2010a, 2010b) that ought to conform to the norms that teacher imparts in him or her, and shed his or her identity that is considered as an obstacle to social transformation. Social pedagogy of transition is thus a form of banking education (Freire 2000; Bauman 2013), by seeing the learning process as hierarchical it legitimizes social hierarchies that are present or are to be established in the course of social change.

The same structure, that presumes moral and intellectual superiority of some population or part of it, was present in the “white man’s burden” view of colonialism, the Victorian plans for the moral education of the poor (Johnston 1970), the post-communist transformations and the present economic crisis (where the differences between countries are framed in moral terms to legitimize some less then perfectly democratic interventions).

The aim of our research is to analyze, how the notions of moral and intellectual inequality were established in the discourse of polish sociology and pedagogy of the early 90s. We chose academic discourse as a subject of our research because, in the early phases of Poland’s democratic transition, social science and humanities publications were often written with an aim of answering political rather than scientific questions, were normative rather than descriptive (Pickel 2002) and had a large impact on the language used in the nascent public sphere. According to Eyal, Szelenyi and Townsley (2000) the intellectuals of the post-communist countries, took an active role in the process of class formation, wishing to become organic intellectuals for the new dominant strata of society. They legitimized a hierarchical view of social change, as a process of one-way transfer of knowledge and values, from the enlightened few to the masses that were corrupted by socialism, and needed to be civilized before becoming true democratic subjects. The terms introduced in the discourse of social science and humanities – such as “homo sovieticus” or “learned helplessness” became a part of a popular discursive toolbox, used to justify the destruction of the state funded safety-net, and to disarm the political discontent of those who were marginalized and pauperized during the transition.

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