Description: Students' school experiences and approaches related to it. Research question: What approach to education student' have in respect to what they think to receive from school as a preparation for life. Objective: To explain the relations between experiences, opinions and beliefs. Purpose: to indicate to possible relations between school's commonly known dilemmas and development of beliefs. The tension between the wished and the real has through times been characteristic of the educational reality. It has somewhat belonged among the hushed-up themes, on the other hand, however, has inspired school innovation movements. One of the bases of the modernist progress idea - the Occidental educational ideology - includes both the humanist approach to human being as a view of holistic education and of processes that presume it (Uhle 1993, Siljander 2002, Lenzen 1997). But studies of school reality and the numerous analyses (e.g. shadow education, invisible pedagogics) have revealed the somewhat unrealistic realisation of these ideas in everyday practice (Giesecke 1999, Tenorth 2001, Bardy 1996). In the present day the contradictions between different societal and cultural expectations directed towards school become even more magnified and find expression as school dilemmas: children's developmental needs versus the model of giving out mechanical production, the need to bring up citizens able for democracy versus the passive status of student, different ways of learning that inspire to be active versus the ascetic reproductive learning culture of school etc. (Paschen 2001). The main tension that these dilemmas provoke - there is no intention to fulfil the promised - has been left the internal problem of young people themselves. How and to what extent the ambivalent nature of the experienced school reality influences the views of young Estonians about education and what is their interpretation of education given at school? Methodology: Current analyses is based on the qualitative study of school experiences of 11th grade students from 8 Estonian high schools (144 students), where the collected half-structurated interviews were interpreted using the phenomenological and text-hermeneutic method. The basis for interpreting the texts was a question inspired by Heidegger's existential philosophy (Heidegger 2000): in what way present day student's care about one's Being (Sorge) manifests within school's frame conditions (Kuurme, 2004). This proposal is part of the doctoral thesis of Tiiu Kuurme (Kuurme, 2004). Conclusions: According to the study Estonian student's main care focuses not so much on self-development but on coping with school's frame conditions, which is accompanied by the worry about future. The spectrum of meanings that characterises the concept of education for young Estonians is wide and overlaps in many ways with findings from the Occidental educational ideology. However, what do young people believe to receive from school; the spectrum of meanings of this question is narrow, colourless and mercantile and was related to erudition, skills, and the ability to endure bad experiences. One can conclude that although students believe school to be a place for education, nevertheless they do not experience it as a place for education in respect to their approach to education. This in turn leads to the presumption that in the dilemma of everyday school experiences and beliefs diminishes trust towards one's own experiences and increases individual receptiveness to ideologies.