Tackling discrimination and exclusion in public school: between rights and recognition
Dr. Mojca Kovač Šebart

Summary:  The starting point of this article is an event that took place in Kranj last year when some parents, supported by 24 educators of Gimnazija Franceta Prešerna Kranj, opposed offering accommodations for unaccompanied refugee minors in their residence hall for secondary-school students. We understand the event as a telling symptom that testifies to how the content and values of the formal framework that both the authorities and citizens should be committed to are clearly not established as a moral barrier against hatred and exclusion. It is a symptom that, among others, clearly demonstrates how educational institutions reflect society’s increasing intolerance and hatred of the Other as ‘different’ and how institutional education can generate and reproduce such exclusion. In the first part of the article, we contextualise the issue in the broader framework of the so-called refugee crisis, then we show how intolerance, exclusion, and stigmatisation may be (are) present in school. This makes it necessary to consider the respect for formal social norms and the shared values inscribed in them as they pertain to human rights, especially regarding the question of how to ‘attach’ the individual to them during the process of education. We also reflect on the effects of the ideology that relates to the reproduction of social relations, and we draw attention to the conditions that form, including through school education, inactive individuals who are not interested in social inequities or who are interested only as far as it targets their own particular identities.

* Full text article is only available in Slovenian language.
Journal of Contemporary Educational Studies is
published with support of Slovenian Research Agency.