Science capital as a resource of modernisation: the potential of small-town students

Abstract

This text aims to present the issue of social modernization through the prism of scientific aspirations and attitudes and beliefs related to it. It is accompanied by the assumption that the attitude towards science is not closed in relation to the knowledge system but is a condition for the success of modernization aspirations. The students’ science capital, the quality and structure of which is the main subject of the authors’ research, is in the proposed approach one of the key development resources. The development of capital, and more specifically – aspirations, which are derived from its operationalization, supports the process of the formation of modernization elites. In the presented results of empirical research, the category of science capital is used in two ways. First, as a theory explaining attitudes towards science and the scientific aspirations of young people. Second, as a theory explaining the social role of educational institutions in the broader socialization process. The empirical part of this article uses the results of research conducted in 2016–2019 on the formation and level of science capital of young people living in smaller towns (fewer than 120,000 thousand inhabitants) in Poland. As will be shown, the key deficits in the formation of capital are people and institutions outside the immediate circle of students, which would allow these students to extend the socialization process with new actors: significant “others”.