The doctoral dissertation provides theoretical and analytical insights into the development of the Slovenian education system through the prism of children's rights. The theoretical part of the dissertation presents the conceptual and analytical framework of children's rights and the importance of education over time. It reexamines the concepts used to justify the centrality of children's rights in developed societies and the reasons behind the tendency for their implementation in all social structures.
We conducted a theoretical review of educational policies, ideologies, and ideological state apparatuses based on the discovered multi-layered processes and practical starting points. We were mainly interested in the relationship between individual policies, stages of policy formulation, and the functions of ideologies that, through dynamic ideological conflicts, impact the constitution of social systems, including schools, as ideological apparatus of the state. The second part of the dissertation is based on a case study. It examines, from a political science perspective, the agents and educational policies related to the formation of the educational system and the subjects and educational policies within the system itself.
The primary methodological framework used in our study was Margaret Archer's morphogenetic approach, which focuses on the relationship between structure and agency. In the morphogenetic cycle, we mainly used qualitative methods such as description, the idiographic approach, interpretation, and case study.
We found that the cultural conditioning and the structural context in which education in Slovenia was formed were based on opposition to the ideologies of the previous regime. Democratic values, the rule of law, and the realization of human and children's rights became prominent. We found that morphogenetic cycles in the formation of the educational system are always linked to ideological interests or urgent issues stemming from social pressures. Priority is given to the areas and values favoured by the political parties that are part of the coalition. In this context, victory in a cycle depends on the power of the agents involved. Owing to continuous changes of position within the system, however, the powers of agents are in flux and can, at certain times, even be unpredictable.
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