While the literature on comparative and international education have been extensively discussing the ways in which neoliberal education policies have travelled (Halpin and Troyna 1995; Giroux, 2014; Jones and Alexiadou, 2001; Mayo, 2015; Steiner-Khamsi and Waldow 2012), either with the mediation of transnational organizations or by borrowing policy and disseminating best practices between nation states, there has been scarce discussion on similar processes with regards to neoconservative, nationalist and populist education policies (Cervinkova and Rudnicki 2019). This paper aims to contribute to the literature on policy mobilities in education (Lewis, 2020) by exploring the characteristic processes of right-wing conservative and populist policy borrowing through the lens of the recent education policies in the two Central-Eastern European countries, Poland and Hungary.

Since 2010 in Hungary and 2015 in Poland, right-wing populist governments have been in power and therefore in full capacity to design education policies. Our comparative study aims to explore the convergences and divergences between the education policy agendas of the two governments and seeks to understand processes of policy borrowing and the characteristics of the work of governing in populist education policy-making (Clarke, 2012).

The Hungarian and the Polish government have been allied forces in accelerating de-Europeanization and positioned themselves as freedom fighters against the oppressive powers of the EU. However, it has been scarcely studied so far how right-wing populist forces challenge European education and use an anti-colonial discoursive frame to perform difference and propose an alternative vision of education. These policy discourses entail scepticism and negligence towards the widely studied knowledge-based tools applied to enhance policy convergence such as OECD’s PISA study and the EU benchmarks in education. While there is a palpable convergence between the education policy processes of the two countries, policy borrowing often remains unreferenced and educational governments tend to apply an inward-looking, nationalist rhetoric and policy practice with a focus on traditional conservative concerns such as elitism and traditionalism in the taught content (nationalist canon and emphasis on history). At the same time, there has been influential transnational knowledge production in conservative networks lately which support knowledge-exchange especially regarding themes described by the concept of the politics of morality (Heichel et al., 2013; Mourão Permoser, 2019; Hesová, 2021) such as the traditional family and anti-gender policies. Our explorative study aims to explore both types of such policy-lending and borrowing mechanisms.

Following the principle of critical case selection, we chose two policy areas to analyse comparatively. On the one hand, we prepared a comparative case study on the policy changes regarding the core curriculum under right-wing populist governments. On the other, we focus on the anti-LGBT+ agenda and discourses and practices related to the concepts of ‘gender ideology” and the traditional family in education. Curricular policies are classical areas of conservative restorationism and provide a case for nationalism and neoconservatism in education. The anti-LGBT+ agenda offers an example of the ways in which new morality politics and transnational policy mobilities shape education in the studied countries. Following the Russian anti-LGBT+ law, the governments in both countries proposed to restrict ‘liberal’ NGOs from providing sexual education programmes in schools which would allegedly “promote homosexuality”. The critical case studies are based on the analysis of the parliamentary debates and key policy documents. Based on the situated and comparative analysis of the critical case studies, we aim to draw conclusions about right-wing populist discursive and governing strategies in education.

Our hypothesis is that there is a strong convergence in the education policy agenda of the two countries especially regarding symbolic issues of morality politics such as the enforcement of ‘traditional’ Catholic values, the pro-life agenda and the LGBT+ agenda. Yet the travelling of ideas is mainly unreferenced due to the discursive constraints of an inwardly referencing nationalist narrative (which emphasise its continuity with and connections to certain periods of the national past) on the one hand and because they are not directly borrowed but trickling down from other policy domains which are more explicitly shaped by travelling ideas and conservative transnational knowledge production (Frank, 2005, 2016; Hesová, 2019). Symbolic issues seem to be cross-cutting policy domains and education policy developments, alongside social and cultural policy, are repercussions of overarching transformative agendas. Our comparative analysis is intended to be a first step towards theorizing policy borrowing in conservative and populist education politics and the ways in which morality politics spread, shape and challenge European education.

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