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Today’s State Authoritarianism in the Field of Education – The Case of So-Called Health Education
Artur Dąbrowski
Abstract
The article examines the introduction of the subject “health education” into Polish schools, with particular emphasis on the changes implemented between 2024 and 2026. It advances the thesis that constitutionally permissible state concern for pupils’ knowledge and health security may acquire features of sectoral authoritarianism when the administration transforms compulsory schooling from a place of transmitting verifiable knowledge into an instrument for shaping attitudes, values, and habits in areas belonging to the core of personal and family autonomy. The analysis covers the curriculum foundations, statutory authorisations, parental rights, and the Strasbourg standard. It then compares the contemporary model with the Marxist‑Leninist and Polish People’s Republic concepts of upbringing. The demonstrated similarities are functional rather than genealogical: they concern the primacy of an administratively defined social goal, the legitimisation of the programme through a monopoly on “scientificity”, the shaping of desired dispositions, and the shift of assessment from knowledge to the pupil’s life. The 2026 separation of compulsory health education from the non‑compulsory “sexual health” component reduces the conflict but does not eliminate it, because the compulsory core remains broadly formative, and the boundary between the two subjects is not watertight.
Keywords:
health education, parental rights, sectoral authoritarianism, pluralism, Marxism, socialist upbringing, principle of proportionalityDetails
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