Moral Foundations of the Social Policy in Pedagogical Discourse
This article presents results of analysis of moral aspects of the representation of socially vulnerable groups in school textbooks. We discuss the social classiﬁcation as a factor that forms the social structure. The classiﬁcation system is reﬂected in public discourse around issues of social policy, as having a moral dimension. It ﬁxes codes of desirable and undesirable behaviour, institutionalises behavioural practices and patterns of perception. The textbook becomes an instrument for transmitting existing practices to new generations. The empirical base of the study is made up by textbooks on the subjects “World Around” and “Social Science”. The set of textbooks for elementary schools includes four fragments for analysis, for grades 5-11 it includes 72 fragments. The study of examples of vulnerable groups in school textbooks has allowed us (a) to trace changes in the representation of this theme in textbooks aimed at diﬀ erent age groups and (b) to trace the degree of similarity in the representation of diﬀ erent groups included in the category “social insecurity”. A normalising discourse is prevalent towards the poor/unemployed. People with disabilities, the elderly and single-parent families are represented either in the discriminatory discourse, in which the individual is shown as an object of care, or in the discourse of avoidance, aimed at the symbolic removal of the problem from real life.