From the perspective of critical pedagogy, school appears to be a dynamic institution, a battlefield where meanings are defined and knowledge is legitimated. It is a place of an ideological and cultural war which primarily benefits the well-off, males, and white people, which are the privileged classes (S. Aronowitz, H. A. Giroux, 1985). It is an arena for designing a project of possibility where the voices of non-privileged groups may also be heard (H. A. Giroux, L. Witkowski, 2010). Confrontation of violence and resistance takes place within its boundaries. School upbringing forms in children a certain image of society, the world and themselves. Education and upbringing processes allow us to get familiar with the possibilities as well as ways of behaving in situations of conflict and oppression. They also allow to acquire the skills of liberating oneself and foreseeing the consequences of achieved states. Apart from teaching how to be free, school also teaches recognising the opportunities to free oneself and to be aware of the scope of risk connected with enjoying the obtained rights. It also develops the ability to be a subject in a democratic society.

Through a number of colonizing and subjugating practices, school may contribute to the becoming of a student as a critically thinking subject who, through experiencing the enslavement, will be able to resist it actively. Resistance appears in a situation of compulsion, enslavement and non-acceptance of a certain state of affairs. We are often involved in these situations at school where the representatives of the dominant culture (teachers) and the representatives of the subordinate culture (students) face each other. Colonizing practices are essential for an individual to experience their nuisance and discover one’s potential for liberation. However, does Polish school allow students to display their development potential through rituals of resistance or does it only create an illusion of this state? I will try to answer this question with the help of the results of the studies conducted in Polish lower secondary schools. The subject of the research was diagnosing the scale and types of rituals of resistance manifested by students. The main issue of the research is the question: what types of rituals of resistance do lower secondary school students display? This question was put in the context of school situations which may favour or block manifesting rituals of resistance. These are situations in which teachers respect or do not respect students’ right to self-expression. 

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