This master's thesis discusses the influence of societal changes on the teacher's authority, focusing on defining the authority and examining societal changes in Slovenia through the last century. We begin with interpreting the teacher's authority and concentrating on authority establishment, the transference relationship between the student and the teacher, and the concept of the 'subject supposed to know'. Next, we continue by describing the authority's societal functions. We first address the ideology, examine the relationship between ideology and the subject, and then connect those with social aspects of education, school, and the teacher. In the second section, we review Slovenia's societal changes, focusing on the last century's cultural, economic, and political changes. Combining this with the existing research and the analysis of current statistical data, we also designed a model where Slovenia was divided into more and less developed areas. Based on this division, we did smaller research with secondary school teachers. We looked for the differences between teachers that work in less developed areas and teachers that work in better-developed areas. Even though we did not find significant differences between the groups of teachers, we conclude this thesis with suggestions for further empirical work and a short discussion about the importance of acknowledging the societal changes in education.
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