Kultura i Edukacja 2009, No. 5 (74) ISSN 1230-266X
INTRODUCE
We are pleased to provide you with an another English language issue of the Cul-ture and Education (Kultura i Edukacja) quarterly that comprises texts we pub-lished in 2008. While making their choices, editors were guided by a number of principles. Special emphasis was placed on refl ecting the range of key themes of the journal. Th e Culture and Education series covers a potentially wide scope of problems, although, on the other hand, it is obviously limited in practice. As for the disciplines, major roles are played by sociology and pedagogy, but there is also some room for philosophy, culture studies, philology, political science, and others. Th roughout the past 17 years of the quarterly’s presence in the market, one may observe a shift of stress in terms of the content-related refl ection space of the Au-thors contributing to its columns, yet it has always been the multidisciplinary ap-proach that marked the identity of the periodical. Our concern for high quality of content implies multistage selection and reviewing, thus forcing us to eliminate some texts. Th erefore, it has been even a greater dilemma to make a choice of works for this issue, already published in Polish.
Th is issue has preserved a periodical’s formal structure of regular sections, namely the STUDIES–ARTICLES, followed by the RESEARCH RELATIONS RE-PORTS. Some time ago, the SPECIAL NEWS section was added, devoted to rele-vant events in the fi eld of social science and humanities.
Th is issue includes texts that bring up questions of fundamental importance for the methodology of social sciences. Discussed are the problems concerning the diff erences between social and natural sciences with the central question of search-ing the prospect of employsearch-ing social sciences in practice that would go beyond the framework of social engineering (the article by Krzysztof Pietrowicz and Łukasz Afeltowicz). What is more, we recommend the refl ection on truth and logic as the basis for upbringing next generations (the text by Urszula Wybraniec-Skardowska). As usual, we present extensive material on the issues concerning education in the broad sense, this time focusing on the problems related to causes and eff ects of the contemporary mobility of students, both individual (students as gamer) and mass
6 Introduce (dominant outlooks on studies) results of growing popularity and increasingly market-based attitude of higher education, reproduction of elitism in Bulgarian educational system, and virtual education (the articles by Andrzej Lis, Marta Opiłowska, Valentina Milenkowa, Maria Nawojczyk, and Agnieszka Chrząszcz respectively). Please note also the topic of cultural transformations, including the study of the everyday life of the contemporary girls encompassing its hidden ag-gression and rivalry (the text by Katarzyna Stadnik), or the phenomenon of park-our, a leisure time activity simultaneously bearing the features of sport and the characteristics of subculture (the article by Alicja Chyła). In the section containing reports and reviews, we would like to direct your attention to the exchange of polemics between the reviewers and the authors of the books reviewed. We believe that our practice of instigating discussions over the published monographs with the active participation of the authors of the publications proves to be inspiring and contributes to the development of scientifi c discourse. We wish you a fruitful reading.
