Values are influenced by various factors, one of which is school. It shows and can shape changes in the hierarchy of values of society. Although value formation is a lengthy and complex process, the beginnings of value scales already begin to develop in children. Teachers, therefore, have the opportunity to influence children in this area as well. They can promote the values that they would like in a society of the future. One way to do this is through literature. Fairy tales have an extremely communicative and educational power. We can empathize with the characters from stories and through their experiences symbolically rework certain things and internalize values.
In the theoretical part of the master's thesis, I presented values, their development, divisions, and design. I wrote about the educational function of the school, the impact of globalization, the problem of indoctrination and the general crisis of values. I also presented the influence of literature and the power of fairy tales and works and their authors that I chose to address in empirical work.
The purpose of the research in the empirical part was: to determine the state of students' value judgments before and after reading literary works; search for possible differences between the experimental and control groups and between the sexes; examining the impact of teachers' value systems on the value judgments of students in their classes. 38 students and 2 3rd grade elementary school teachers participated in the survey in the 2017/18 school year. I did three double period literature lessons in the experimental class during a three week time period. We didactically discussed the following works: The Little Match Girl (Hans C. Andersen), The Happy Prince (Oscar Wilde) and Bobby and the Boat (Anja Štefan). With these, I wanted to encourage students to step in the shoes of the characters and encourage the development of values that seem to have been disappearing from the top of society's values (e.g. empathy, solidarity, tolerance). Before and after reading and discussing the works, everyone involved filled out my authorial survey questionnaire. I analyzed the answers using SPSS. The results showed that there were no statistically significant differences between the things I compared. Although I cannot generalize to the general public, I can say that there has been little progress in the sample after reading the works, which gives hope that within a longer period of influencing the children, a shift in the values may occur. Girls are more sensitive to the values chosen than boys, and the values of the teachers do not have a significant impact on their students' rankings. On average, friendship and cooperation are the most important things for children, and wealth is the least.
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