The principles of child rearing and education in Slovenian public school arise under the concept of human rights and the perception of rule of law. The concept of human rights is the main foundation of common values to modern society which must be followed, respected and developed by public schools and therefore it is aimed to pupils to adopt those values arising from human rights. For this to be achieved a public school must as well impart awareness of duties to one another, for the rights are never acted without the duties to one another and a public school must respect that. Due to the latter, public education must be secular and must not be under the monopolistic influence of church, political parties, etc.
A public school is a place where all pupils must be treated equally regardless of their sex, race, ethnicity, religion, belief, language, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, health or other status. Pupils come from different environments and have different values and beliefs that is why there is no place for discrimination, meaning that all pupils are protected from being treated unequally for their sex, race, ethnicity, religion, belief, language, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, health or other status. However, the amount of work that teachers do is due to this growing pluralism huge. Furthermore, there is another principle that public schools must follow: a principle of objectivity. With that principle teachers ensure that the knowledge they pass on to their pupils is based on science and scientific facts so they can develop critical thinking. Developing an autonomous, a critical individual is one of the main objectives of public schools for only such an individual can become a successful grown-up in today's pluralistic society.
It is the teachers' task to develop respect, tolerance and empathy in pupils and to develop the ability of mutual collaboration and acceptance. Teachers have to implement all the differences – cultural, racial, and religious - into their lessons in such a way that no pupil feels discriminated or being considered badly. In my thesis, I tried to find out how teachers should carry out their lessons and what to do in the situations where there are differences among pupils based on different values without disrespect. I made realistic examples of such cases and used a theoretical research to describe corresponding teachers' and other educational stuff's behaviour in those cases.
With the research I got the insight into activities of teachers and other educational stuff on pluralism of values and beliefs. I found out that it is important for teachers to be aware of their role, to work non-discriminative and equally integrate all the pupils regardless of their values, beliefs and family characteristics.
|