What has been outlined in this study are the achievements, problems and prospects of cultural transmission in family and school environments in the Polish-Czech borderland. Referring to the results of the studies conducted with the use of the panel method made it possible to focus on the issues of family and school in pedagogical intercultural studies, on the transmission of values in the contemporary Cieszyn family, as well as on the transmission of culture and educational knowledge in borderland school.

The suggestion comprised in this study for bringing education closer to natural conditions of cultural transmission may become an interesting pedagogical offer. This proposal also involves abandoning the traditional ideology of cultural transmission, which reflects children’s development on the basis of the correlation of their behaviour with particular cultural standards. The suggested offer assumes that the processes of both culturation and (primary and secondary) socialization enables learners’ rooting into a culture (the assimilation of the existing cultural values), as well as their acquiring a particular place in the community. On the other hand, owing to children’s subject-oriented self-fulfillment abilities, these processes allow children to “create” new, socially accepted values in the form of cultural products, which entails the creation of a “new” quality of a particular group or a new culture of society.

The article explores the issues of the acculturation stress experienced by the children living in Gubin (in the Polish-German borderland), whose parents decided to educate and fulfill their children’s obligatory school duty in the German cultural environment in the neighbouring Guben. It has been assumed that Polish children’s systematic education (regularly living with their parents in their homeland) in German school: (a) contributes to their applying different acculturation strategies in various areas of life, (b) becomes the source of a constant and/or recurrent acculturation stress, which the child at early school age (with no support from the family and the environment of the admitting culture) is not prepared to manage both in the psycho-physical (individual) and social aspects.