School and Shaping Students’ Identities: A Report on the Studies into Youth in the Silesian Voivodeship

The identity of young people, and the state of a school’s fulfilment of its tasks, as presented in the article, are based on the results of the author’s own field explorations carried out in the school year 2003/2004 and repeated in the same territory of the Silesian Voivodeship in the zone of intensive social and economic development in 2016/2017. The results of the research conducted have shown that schools brought young people with different personal and social resources, and living in different historical and socio-cultural contexts, to a similar value of identity capital. The study, conducted in two stages with an interval of 13 years, has revealed the greatest shifts in the following areas: extension of the range of interactions (change 13.2%); ambivalence (change 8.1%); revitalization (change 7.7%); and ethos (change 6.8%). The least change occurred in the provision of offers of identification (1.7% change). A slight decline was noted in the extension of the developmental moratorium (1.5% change). The identified, described and empirically verified tasks of a school form a specific map of educational activities, which can be successfully used as a matrix to describe and interpret a school’s participation in the shaping of young people’s identities.