In popular consciousness, the dispute between the communitarians and the liberals focuses on citizens’ individualism and the role and place of the community in contemporary society. However, it is merely a simpli-fied vision of the topic of discussion between supporters of the currents of political thought indicated above. Indeed, a no less essential part of the debate concerns problems associated with the interpretation of the idea and the principles of democracy, their uses and importance in human life. The canon of fundamental values of democratic government includes freedom and equality. These principles are inherently conducive to the emergence of conflicts, as illustrated by the classic dilemma „the more freedom, the less equality, and the more equality, the less freedom.“ This particular problem has determined the emergence of two major theories of democracy: individualistic and collectivist. The main difference between these approaches to democracy concerns the view of the relationship between the state and society, and between the state and it‘s citizens. And thus, the individualistic current (procedural) derived from the traditions of the English Revolution aims to reduce the area of activity and competence of the government to the minimum specified explicitly in the rules of law. Consequently, both Society and citizens are free from the state, the latter becoming only the guardian of the laws.

The Identity of Ukrainian Lviv: how the stronghold of cultural resistance has been created.

The aim of the essay is to present and explain the process of creation of the identity of contemporary Lviv. According to the author, in order to analyze this process, it is necessary to remember about cultural factors which can influence political affairs. The essay includes an examination of the main cultural images composing the identity of the city, especially these believed to be attractive for the presented community, as well and these which are treated as the points of repulsion.

The article presents the concept of community as a sociological category, there are various ways to define it, the importance of sentiment, moral order, identification and contact in its meaning is emphasized. A learning community is identified as a group of people in contact with each other, having a sense of bond, awareness of their own identity and individuality, as well as experiencing mutual support, recognition and belonging. The determinants of the process of shaping such a community in the school are indicated and the focus is on school-related factors. The teacher’s role in creating a school culture conducive to creating a learning community is emphasized. The teacher’s knowledge and skills, his personal characteristics and attitude to life are emphasized, as well as the teacher’s motivation for continuous learning, self-reflection and self-evaluation of everyday practice. As a result of the analysis, it is found that the creation of a learning community at school is fostered by the culture of cooperation, dialogue and creativity, and at the same time this type of organizational culture can be influenced by the learning community.

The main goal of the article is to show the possible ways of thinking about the relation between multiculturalism and liberal democracy. Author of the article tries to present some troubles with reconciliation of such political culture and elements of multicultural ideology which supports rights of member of foreign (nonwestern) communities to manifest their cultural convictions freely. In his opinion that would be a little bit naïve to think that all elements of political culture connected with liberal democracy can be accepted by members of the communities in questions. That is why he articulates the thesis that some conflicts between them and people faithful to the ideas of liberal democracy are inevitable and that it cannot be found possible solution of these conflicts which can be gladly accepted by all sides. Someone will have to give up some parts of cultural heritage of a given community if we are supposed to live in peace together. Although the author of the article believes that this resignation should not be limited to only one side of the potential conflict he argues that a political culture of liberal democracy is so precious that its defenders should not abandon it for the sake of ideas of multicultural society even if this brings about some pain on the side of their interlocutors.

The main research objectives were presenting experiences of virtual classroom learners in the context of being part of a community or being indifferent towards it, as well as getting to know the value of the community in view of respondents, and the attitudes of respondents to the community. The research operated within the interpretive paradigm. The respondents were twenty six students of different majors at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. All the respondents emphasized the value of being part of a community; still, the opinions were diverse with regard to individual predispositions, skills and aptitudes of the learners. The obtained results are of great significance to the educational thought and practice and in relation to the growing importance of e-learning and its popularisation.

Identity dramas written into the cultural borderland. Educational implications

In addition to the positive borderline effect, which is often presented in the literature, this text presents the dilemmas and tragedies of the individual, family and community, taking place on the border of cultures, religions and ethnicities. The methodological basis is the concept of the interpretation of the borderland and multi-range identity, through which I read and describe the fate of Emilia Moszczańska Kosiur Niewęgłowska presented by Grzegorz Dżus in the book “Banderowka”, published in 2020. The narration of the book’s main character allowed for presenting the process of shaping the family, individual and social identity. In this process, in the face of experiencing suspicion, helplessness, fear and humiliation, such questions dominate as: Who am I? Who am I to be? How am I to be? The author draws attention to the problem of the narrator’s internal dialogue, points to its value in the educational and humanistic context. He emphasizes how difficult but important, in the process of shaping identity, is the mediation of three areas of identity and the liberating oneself from the stigma of alienation experienced from all sides.

The idea of restorative justice cities on the example of Wrocław

The article aims to present the idea of restorative justice cities and attempts to apply restorative practices by local government institutions and nongovernmental organizations in Wrocław, as well as ways of involving local communities in solving social problems and conflicts affecting city residents. It refers to the concept of restorative justice, which becomes an effective tool for repairing social relations by rebuilding interpersonal bonds, it also plays an educational role, contributing to the revitalization of communities and building a civil society. The article points to the importance of local and environmental communities which, as victims of crimes or conflicts, but also as entities co-responsible for their causes and effects, may be involved in the remedial process in various ways.

The pandemic that broke out in 2019 had a significant impact on the lives of all social groups around the world. The imposed restrictions and mandatory quarantine were crucial to limit the virus’s spread. The research comprises an analysis of the psychosocial impact exerted by the pandemic that attempted to determine the response to the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath. For this purpose, a study on social resilience in the pandemic era was worked out. The study consisted of several parts: stress and the sense of safety, education, trust and defined needs and the mass media in COVID-19. The research team decided to present the study’s results in a series of articles that will contribute to forming a complete picture of the community in the context of the analysed variables. The paper is the first in this series. It contains an analysis of variables intended to determine the level of the experienced sense of safety and its constituent, i.e., stress, and the identification of socio-demographic data strongly influencing the studied variables. The study comprised 559 individuals who were surveyed between May 2020 and November 2020 with the use of an online survey questionnaire. SPSS Statistics version 21.0 and PQStat were used to conduct statistical analyses and correlate and assess the correlation of responses. Also used were Chisquare, Fisher’s test and Pearson’s linear correlation coefficient. A logistic regression analysis was carried out for dichotomous variables. The results of the study indicate that the level of experienced stress is influenced by age, place of residence, gender and job security. The sense of safety is inversely correlated with stress, i.e., as stress increases, the sense of safety decreases, indicating a need to undertake appropriate measures to reduce stress. It may be interesting to compare the level of stress with, among other things, information retrieval from different sources. These results will be presented in the subsequent studies.

Belgium as a Laboratory of Bipolar Federalism

Having moved away from unitarism, Belgium is described as a federal state of communities and regions. A large number of interpreters of the Belgian Constitution believe that federalism is an essential element of its constitutional identity. However, a more detailed analysis is needed to interpret the political system of this state. The breakdown of the unity of the political community at the national level as well as the doubt about the existence of a political nation are of crucial importance. A striking identity and growing separateness of the two linguistic groups, Flemish and Walloon, are decisive factors behind the originality of the political system of modern Belgium. In the article, I point out that the distinctive feature of the Belgian federalism involves the bipolarity and domination of the constitutional mechanism based on co-determination and co-operation of the two linguistic groups as the actual subjects of the power in the state. The predominance of this mechanism has significant systemic effects, including the renunciation of reforms to rationalize parliamentarism. The article also shows the importance of the Constitutional Court, hitherto underestimated, in maintaining the Belgian unity.

Community in the discourse of pedagogy and intercultural education

The article presents the community as a category inscribed in the narrative of intercultural pedagogy, as an interdisciplinary pedagogical subdiscipline and educational practice. The concept of community and sociological approaches to this category were described, highlighting the variety of approaches and possible epistemological interpretations. Common features of various definitions of a community were indicated: goals and norms shared by members of the community, recognized values and accepted means of achieving them. Particular attention was paid to the concept of community in communitarianism, which treats the identity of an individual as a derivative of tradition assimilated by him in the course of socialization and the social functions he performs. The community was shown as a space of interpersonal relations in which the category of the Other was immanently inscribed. The relationship of the Self with the Other was referred to the source responsibility that the Self discovers as the sphere of freedom. The importance of hospitality, justice and creative understanding in the dialogical relationship with the Other was described. Openness to dissimilarity, readiness to recognize it and respect for the Other, as an inalienable element constituting a community and enabling the achievement of non-selfish Good, were also exposed.

Otfried Hoeffe’s philosophy of political justice

The paper covers an issue of justice in the light of a new paradigm in political philosophy proposed by Otfried Hoeffe’s theory of the exchange of justice. The author analyses the impact of this approach to justice upon understanding of how could contemporary society develop its fair moral and legal grounds. It is proved that for an adequate understanding of justice is its understanding as a personal responsibility, organically related to guidance on solidarity and recognition. Their interpretations of as well attempts to join moral and material grounds of social life to overcome of injustice are in the author’s focus. It is showed that freedom and justice are enrooted in a lifeword, as well relay upon formal norms and procedures of moral and justice. It gives a methodology for understanding of O. Hoeffe’s philosophy of political justice that states freedom and justice as basic conditions of human being.

The purpose of this article is to present Hugo Grotius’s views concerning the idea of freedom. It must be pointed out that the idea of freedom was not the subject of a separate thought, except for the freedom of the seas, which Grotius dedicated a separate work. Theses on freedom were formulated in the light of other issues such as natural law or the essence and scope of state power. For this purpose, the first part of the article presents a historical background. In the second part, Grotius’s views will be presented in three contexts. First, freedom of the individual as power over oneself. Second, freedom in political terms, as a relationship of community. Finally freedom in the global aspect, as freedom of navigation, trade and migration.

The paper focuses on the quite original and not much discussed subject of the relationship between volunteerism and community sense, whose support in Czech society has great potential for the development and functioning of a humane-oriented civil society. First, the paper depicts both concepts and capacity of volunteering utilization in the development of the community sense. Then it emphasizes two promising ways of volunteering support that take into account the educational and developmental context. These are the development of prosocial values and positive shaping of youth happiness. As the presented findings indicate, the individual happiness impacts on both the individual’s prosocial orientation and willingness to volunteer that is enhanced also by prosocial values.

Early environmental education in the human epoch – from learning about the world to learning and becoming with the world

Implications of human-induced phenomena that include global warming and the drastic reduction of biodiversity adversely affect the entire biosphere, putting the existence of humans and non-human beings at risk. Shifting away from considering humans to be the centre of the world and viewing them as one of many equal elements that comprise that world is seen as the remedy for the resulting state of affairs. Education is believed to play a significant role in transforming the way people think about themselves and their position in the world. In view of the thesis presented above, the aim of this article is to demonstrate the changes occurring in the theory and practice of early environmental education, representing a specific response of its creators to the challenges of the human age. From a theoretical viewpoint, these changes involve a shift beyond ideas of anthropocentrism and turn to theories that show the world as a complex human-post-human community. At a practical level, this takes the form of what is referred to as a common worlds pedagogy. The author’s thesis is that practising a common worlds pedagogy enables children not only to learn about the world but also to learn and become with the world.

The article, referring to the tradition of social pedagogy, discusses the issue of health from the perspective of its relations to the community. Health can be regarded as a value, which has an individual, group or social dimension, and it is related to the process of socializing which is marked by communal diversity.

More and more books, studies and articles have been warning us recently that we are experiencing a period of history in which conformism is increasing in prevalence; as if conformism was becoming the underlying principle of social and institutional existence and adaptation. Similarly, this phenomenon is present in the field of education, what is more, the easily conformable student has become a general ideal. Education seems to prefer mass production of students who are compliant and obedient. We are no longer surprised when we encounter phrases such as the NAT (NAT: Nemzeti Alaptanterv: National Curriculum) -compatible curriculum, EU-compatible education and management, or a Euro-compatible value system. It is clear that teaching and education are constantly facing the problem of conformism. Considering this, it is sad and incomprehensible that educational psychology is so insensitive to this topic and that different educational superstitions have such a strong hold in the fields of educational politics, research and pedagogical practice. For the sake of differentiated education it is time we considered the original meaning of conformism and the dilemma of conformism/non-conformism. The American liberal thinker, William Penn, pointed out three hundred years ago that citizens give up their freedom and culture. Ernst Fischer summarised that in the statement: conformism is the submersion of Self in Everyman. From this original and classical definition we can conclude that conformism, no matter how fashionable and powerful it may be, is a pejorative and extreme phenomenon. In and through conformism an individual gives up his/her autonomy and always adjusts his/her opinion and behaviour to something else. We also have to understand that non-conformism is not a positive alternative to conformism. Conformism means adapting without conviction, and likewise, non-conformism is not-adapting without conviction. Both are harmful and extreme forms of behaviour, neither can exceed the other. So education has to fight against both the compliant, obedient, i.e. conforming student and the rebellious youth, who always says no for the sake of saying no. Our goal is to help, with much more efficiency than before, the development of the process whereby the youth will acceptingly reject and at the same time rejectingly accept the influences of the world.

The terms political correctness or PC were not used until the late 1970s. According to James Wilson (1995), a judge in Georgia, in 1973 the US Supreme Court first mentioned the term “politically correct”. Thus, the doctrine of political correctness was based on the concept of “neutral language”. It is this language, free from expressions that offend the feelings and dignity of the person, violate his human rights, must oppose hate speech (Phumsiri N., 2018). The relevance of the work is due to the interest of studying the political correctness in the modern dimension, which is explained by the growing interest in society and spread in the media. Political correctness (PC) – a term that describes the style of behavior, speech, lifestyle, preferences, but at the same time does not violate the personal boundaries of people in religious, racial, political, cultural fields (Stephen Richer, Lorna Weir, 1995). Political correctness is a kind of voluntary social code of conduct, which provides for the inadmissibility of humiliating mentions of physical or mental disabilities of third parties, about their racial, religious or national affiliation, observance of gender equality in public and private life. The term “political correctness” began to be widely used only in the 80s of the 20th centuries. It was then that conservatives from American universities began to use it to denote social movements that advocated the establishment of codes of conduct that would exclude manifestations of racism, sexism, homophobia or other unacceptable forms of behavior. Politically correct terms are a special group of neologisms that are deliberately created by native speakers to replace lexical units that, for one or another political or social reason, begin to be perceived as derogatory. A number of researchers consider political correctness as one of the manifestations of euphemism, as an integral component of its linguistic aspect (Anna Monashnenko, Svitlana Amelina, Vasyl Shynkaruk, 2021). They consider euphemisms and politically correct units as identical concepts: euphemism is one of the most effective means of expressing politically correct vocabulary.