Shaping Civic Attitudes in Civic Education Textbooks in Poland: Globalization Processes and Fragmentation of Reality

Abstract

The main objective of civic education nowadays-in most Western countries-is to overcome social apathy among young people, and to educate engaged and responsible citizens who will be ready to take up activities for the local, national, and global community. From this perspective, citizenship ceases to be considered not only as a relation of an individual with the state (individual rights and duties), but it becomes a more spacious conceptual category, also taking into account the issues of identity. The concept of citizenship is a transformable social construct, and therefore, civic education is also fluent and contextual. From this perspective, the school becomes an important place in the process of shaping responsible citizens. In this article, an attempt is made to analyze civic activity, as well as to understand the category of citizenship presented in selected school textbooks on the subject of civic education (pol. Wiedza o społeczeństwie) at lower secondary education in Poland. The analysis allows to conclude that the strong discourse of civic education in the school system has not yet developed in Poland. In addition, the subject “Knowledge about society,” as the name suggests, is oriented mainly on the transfer of knowledge, not on shaping civic competences and attitudes.