In context of current psychological and pedagogical works, pupils/students are treated as active „players” who are able to deal with unfavorable educational environment effectively. In response to that, they experience in schools or universities every day, they use different strategies of coping with formal and informal requirements. These strategies are one of the dimensions of the so-called hidden curriculum. The purpose of this article is - on the basis of the content’s analysis of the UJ pedagogy student essays - to reconstruct the students strategies of coping in university and its determinants. Studying at the university students gain an informal knowledge that pedagogy is a low social status field of studying, is not particularly forwardlooking, the education they obtain is incomplete. To increase their chances at the labor market, they are taking part in various forms of training, also outside of the university. This spontaneous activity gives them worldly wisdom, sense of agency, personal growth, developing self-confidence and a better future. The attractiveness of the so-called patchwork education weakens their interest in official knowledge and formal education. Students learn many negative coping strategies at the university. Their primary goal is to gain profits - graduation - while minimizing their time and commitment. Strategies used by them survival and „working an angle” are examples of violations of the law, teach instrumental approach to: knowledge, teachers or peers. The results of the research showed that these strategies have demoralizing effect on other students, reducing their motivation and academic ambitions. A number of the strategies referred to in the paper disclose different dimensions of bogus student life and undermine various myths concerning the centuries-old mission of the university.

Beyond Ideological Entanglement. The Hidden Agenda in the Contemporary Educational Debate

The purpose of this article is to reconstruct a state of the debate ongoing for over a half of the century on the so-called the hidden program. The different theoretical positions are compared and presented – from those who take the hidden program as a central concept and category, to those denying its presence in social sciences. Contentious issues have been outlined, above all in the views of the nature, sources and results of this phenomenon. Vigorous discussions ongoing in the English literature, often having the ideological roots, are used by the author to present the own perspective of the hidden program as an important educational category, but ignored in Polish science, that may become an inspiration for theorists and practitioners and also may become a tool for diagnosis and critique.