Полемичните основи на гражданското образование
The polemical bases of civic education

Summary/Abstract: Modern school education is often regarded as a mere (ideological) function of the general state strategies aiming at producing and reproducing a certain socio-political order. Civic education is thus analyzed as an almost mechanical translation of state policy towards production of civic consciousness through educational programs. The present article offers a different way of analyzing this process by focusing on education as a tactical interaction in the particular situation of the contemporary Bulgarian school. It stresses the inherent uncertainty of power relations between teacher and students by privileging the teachers’ point of view. The school is therefore described as a fi eld of polemical interactions in which the usual power positions are constantly contested and redistributed by reason of a multiplicity of internal and external factors evoked by the teachers themselves. As a consequence the latter are transforming their ‘pedagogical’ practice in tactics of intellectual bricolage in order to ‘capture’ the students’ ‘interest’ and by this to maintain the ‘discipline’ in the classroom – an indispensable but somehow unachievable basis for the education process. A point is made that it is on these polemical bases that nowadays civic education programs and practices struggle to embed. However they are by necessity traversed by the same tensions that constitute the form of educational interaction.

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