Introduction

Exclusion and inclusion in the culturally, economically, and politically deter- mined educational space are one aspect of social life and its many micro-, meso-, eco-, macro-, and chronosystems. This issue is often addressed from theoretical, cognitive, practical, and research angles, which is reflected in scholarly and popular-science pub- lications as well as literary fiction. It is not bound to any particular time or place and it is relevant at all stages of a person’s life, from conception to death. It can therefore be assumed that, to a greater or lesser extent, it governs the integral, holistic develop- ment of a human being, and, by the same token, the development of civilization. Moreover, one could argue that as the biological, psychological, social, cultural, and spiritual (religious) exclusion of the human being is more and more mitigated by his/ her participation in creating a living environment in the local, regional, national, and international spaces, we can observe an increasingly higher quality of the functioning of education systems. This is particularly a challenge for schools, which perform the basic functions-educational and preventative, didactic and protective-as defined by the educational law in Poland.