Abstract
The constitutive anthropological impact of the school institution has been eroded by enthusiastic acceptance of "alternatives" resulting in diversity of the structure, forms, methods and curricula of the system of education. The paper supports the idea that the issue of diversity as the main value of educational change after 1989 prepared the ground for the neoliberal ideology of efficiency and accountability.
It puts forward the hypothesis that actually the crisis of school as an institution consists of the crisis of legitimacy of the culture based on the logic of gift exchange, as described by Marcel Mauss (1923/1968).