Systemic transformation in Polish surface transport: An evaluation. The purpose of this paper is to provide some insight into the processes of restructuring and privatisation among rail, road, urban-transport, and inland shipping companies after 1989. Where freight is concerned, carriage on standard- and broad-gauge railways can be evaluated as partly deregulated, while where the carriage of passengers is concerned – all carriers up to mid-2005 had originated within the PKP Group. The most common form of transformation of passenger carriers is communalisation of existing companies. The first private operator (the present-day Arriva) appeared as late as 2007. The disintegration of national road carrier (PKS) resulted in the founding of c. 40 new freight firms, the majority of which were closed-down soon. The most common form of privatisation of the PKS passenger enterprises has involved leasing by workers. The privatisation has involved not only Polish investors but also foreign ones (Veolia, later on taken over by Arriva, and Israeli Egged Holding via its affiliate Mobilis). However, the share of public-capital ownership remains substantial, resulting often in final bankrupcy of road transport companies. Among the operators in urban transport public owership remains dominant in various forms (local authorities, municipal, budgetary companies). On the opposite, in inland shipping small private firms are dominant. Moreover, systemic transformation plus Poland’s EU accession have given rise to the conditions underpinning the emergence of Europe’s largest shipowners (OT Logistics).

The main aim of the article is an analysis of the privatization of pedagogical knowledge using an example of one of the alternative pedagogies (Montessori Method). We claim that nowadays, pedagogical knowledge is treated as economic capital, and therefore subject to modifications characteristic for neoliberal culture. In our analysis we implement qualitative focus interviews conducted with various members of the Montessori community (teachers, owners and administrators of schools) who have gained access to a rare commodity – that is, knowledge regarding the teaching methodology of this particular pedagogical approach.

The results of this empirical research point to mechanisms characteristic for making pedagogical knowledge classiffied and „gilded”, mechanisms that limit it to the closed space of a particular discourse society. We conclude that this ‘inbred’ form of knowledge transfer can lead to an inability to renew meanings and, as a consequence, to the replacement of critical and in depth pedagogical considerations with a form of dogma that may be culturally inadequate and reproduced as a technical procedure, which is far from what Montessori herself wrote about the method.