“Going out onto the streets and protesting in a traditional manner is associated with risk, so for the moment we are focused on organising our actions online, in a safe manner,” said Kozak. “For now, this is a warning strike, but we might escalate it if our request to dismiss the education minister is not heard.”

During the week, students have been encouraged to show their disapproval of Czarnek online by displaying protest messages and badges on social media profiles, while also in parallel donating blood, collecting garbage during forest walks or supporting local restaurants. “Via these actions, we want to show that we care about the country, about what is happening here,” Kozak explained.

On Wednesday, the peak of the action week, many students across the country (it’s impossible to estimate numbers, say the organisers) simply abandoned their online classes and, in some cases, joined protest actions organised in their towns. In Warsaw, it was a climate strike march to the prime minister’s office organised by Fridays for Future and supported by the Polish Women’s Strike. Climate and other youth activists are worried about the consequences of a Polish veto of the next EU budget on the planet’s future as well as on their own lives.

Minister of homophobia

Czarnek has been met with strong opposition from students and teachers since he was appointed to the post in October.

The PiS politician was known for his infamous remarks on “LGBT ideology”, which he claimed “comes from the same roots as Nazism”, while its “supporters are not equal to normal people”.

He has also made remarks about the danger of women being told they can have a career first, children later. “Saying to a woman that she does not have to do what she was called on by God to do [has] dire consequences,” he said.

The minister has in the past endorsed the use of corporal punishment by parents and spoken at far-right events.

Upon becoming a minister, Czarnek declared that, “there is no doubt of the domination or even dictatorship of the left-liberal views, especially those radical in content, even totalitarian, which have taken over particularly higher education, but also penetrated secondary and primary schools.”

Czarnek promised his ministry would offer to support the “freeing” of humanities studies from “political correctness” and “left-liberal ideology”. He has also said he would prioritise a review of textbooks, especially in history, social sciences and the Polish language, as they were “too broad”.

On his first day in office, the new minister was greeted by a banner hanging from the ministry building saying: “Boycott Czarnek. Homophobe. Xenophobe. Fundamentalist.” In response to Czarnek’s appointment, academics and people active in education and culture have made several public appeals for his dismissal. Before schools went into remote learning, kids across the country dressed in black in October to show their opposition to the new minister.

A petition demanding the minister’s dismissal collected over 90,000 signatures and, in late November, it was submitted to Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki (Kozak says the prime minister has not so far replied). Last week, Kozak and his colleagues also filed a petition with the Marshall of the (opposition-controlled) Senate, which could call on the prime minister to explain the education minister’s public positions.

Politicising education

While the current week of protest is focused on getting Czarnek dismissed for his controversial views and derogatory remarks, opposition to the minister is also centred on PiS’s attempt to transform the education system into a propaganda machine for the nationalist-Catholic vision of society that it has been promoting since it came to office in 2015.

“Ours is a protest against Czarnek, but the truth is that no matter which minister from PiS is there, they would implement the same government agenda in education,” Kozak said. “Our protest is also about what PiS has done to the education system. We fear there will be even more politicisation of Polish education, and we want to prevent this before it goes too far.”

Since it came to power, PiS has been implementing education reforms – including dismantling the successful gymnasia system and adopting changes to the curricula – which have been dubbed “the deformation of the education system” and led to significant protests by teachers, parents and students alike.

“This government destroys various institutions with quite a lot of persistence,” Dorota Obidniak from Zwiazek Nauczycielstwa Polskiego (ZNP), the main teachers’ union in Poland, told BIRN earlier this year. “We see the same philosophy at play in education. The government imagines that schools should be obedient and subservient to PiS ideology.”

While dissatisfaction over PiS’s reforms has been around for years, two developments led to the current wave of mobilisation: one was the appointment of Czarnek, a conservative hardliner; another was the ongoing women’s protests, which attracted a large number of young people whose revolutionary mood has emboldened students to become more active on education issues too. (Czarnek has also threatened universities that allowed their students to take part in the women’s protests with unspecified negative consequences).

On the back of the protests against limiting abortion, the Polish Women’s Strike has also been organising working groups tasked with identifying the major concerns of the massive anti-government protest movement beyond women’s reproductive rights. Education turned out to be top of the agenda, so representatives of the student protest movement, like Kozak, have been speaking out from platforms offered by the more prominent Polish Women’s Strike (for example, by announcing their demands at the weekly press conference of the women’s movement leaders).

“The Women’s Strike is the largest opposition organisation, and it supports many other movements. While I and many others in the student movement personally support the Women’s Strike, we are focusing our actions on education alone – we want to underline that our movements are separate,” said Kozak.

What happens after the actions this week is unclear. Kozak said he doesn’t expect the PiS government to listen to the protestors, but he is happy to see more attention being paid to the student movement, which brings about more awareness among the general public about the growing problems in education.

This week’s protests, he stresses, are a “warning” and more determined action is possible if the government pays no attention to the student demands. And the Women’s Strike movement has already proven this can happen even in the midst of a pandemic.