Casual, customized and contemptuous relationships with education: Social solvation and young people's strategies during multi-crisis

Abstract

This paper focuses on individual responses to education in crisis, with the strategies of students contextualised and examined within a wider multi-crisis reality. Offering a conceptual framework of social solvation, the proposed model explains how failures in the education system at the macro (state) and meso (institutional) levels translate into young people's behaviours at the individual (micro) level. Based on the analysis of 26 in-depth interviews with young students, we identify and discuss three main micro-rational strategies that the interviewees relied upon to navigate their learning during the pandemic: (1) casualisation (2) customisation and (3) contempt towards the broader system. We argue that the already weak Polish education system was further impaired by the COVID-19 crisis. In response to growing social and educational risks, young people forge and employ highly individualised strategies. As micro-rational social actions essentially bypass the unwieldy education system in a variety of ways, they have vital implications for educational futures.