The text presents a weighty problem of the authority in pre-school education, which as an element of educational practice plays a decisive role in the process of generating cultural awareness of the child. The direct subject of the analysis are fragments of teacher-student dialogues that focus on the problem of authority; its practical exemplification is St. Francis (also the patron of the kindergarten in which the research was carried out). The teacher is participation in the process of transmitting knowledge about authority and in creating an emotional relationship between authority and student is particularly interesting. The problem of authority, which was essential for the article, turned out to be important for recognizing the importance of the so-called pedagogy of authority within which the child’s identity is at stake. In this sense, the article is a contribution to the discussion on the construction of the child’s subjectivity in the institutional context.

Megalothymic subjectivity as a result of populist narrative strategies

The article addresses the phenomenon of megalothymic subjectivity as an indirect effect of the systemic weakness of modern liberal democracy. By using Donald Trump’s narrative strategies as an example, the author shows how populism creates in voters’ minds an imagined reality of conspiracy, danger, and loss of human decency. The process of populist communication takes the form of a story with an upcoming decisive moment, the victory of good or evil. A voter being shaped in such manner sees himself both as a part of a significant and strong community and as a victim of hostile actions of politicians on the national and international scene. The voter in such a position begins to manifest attitudes indicating a desire to regain his supposedly lost subjectivity, the extreme manifestation of which was the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

According to the assumptions of the pedagogy of the heart, the child must always feel secure and needs to have at least one close person beside him or her at all times. If this condition is not possible to be fulfilled, one should answer the following question: is the pedagogy of the heart still needed in child upbringing in the times which are not only difficult, but sometimes even hostile to contemporary man? Or perhaps the pedagogy of the heart becomes unnecessary, since it is inconvenient and unwanted by parents struggling with the everyday challenges of ever-changing, more and more demanding and unpredictable reality?