My aim in this paper is to problematize assumptions that underlie civic education as it is practiced in polish schools. The main object of my criticism is the absence of axiological dimension in the social studies curriculum. This absence is construed in the context of present social and political realities, such as: the growth of right wing populist parties, the popularity of nationalist ideas and practices among the younger generation, the presence of hate speech in the public sphere and the growing wave of chauvinism and xenophobia. In this context, the main thesis of this paper is that pupils and students need to be provided with a symbolic universe founded on radical values such as justice, equality and solidarity. Those values could be a base for political identities alternative to the essentialist, and exclusionary identity offered by the modern right wing populism.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the mechanisms of classification and discursive representation of the poor and their everyday life, that result in dehumanization and orientalization of their image. Research data (press articles) was analyzed in the framework of theories such as the Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic power, post-colonial studies and discourse theory. The representation of everyday life was analyzed using the theory of real and symbolic localization. The use of the abovementioned theories enabled the author to describe the processes in which the poor are discursively reconstructed as Others. The identity of the “Other” is (falsely) attributed to the poor by localizing them, within the constructed representations of the places they inhabit