ETHICS IN THE ALBANIAN EDUCATION SYSTEM (original) (raw)

Ethics in education involves principles and standards of praxis aiming at students’ character education through deliberate efforts to instil core virtues that are good for the individual and good for the society. It aims at educating concepts of right and wrong conduct, social morality, and values of integrity, discipline, honesty, and the application of these in daily life. Integrating ethics in education, both by teaching it and providing standards for an ethical education process, adds to education the social perspective and makes it adapt to the need of evolving societies. It implies understanding that ethical principles are not to be used as theoretical rules or social heritage, but as instruments which evolve out of the need to solve problems and provide benefits for the individual, institutions, and society as a whole. At a time when Albania is working towards its full membership in the EU, the Albanian Government has committed to revisiting its conceptual framework for quality education, following the recommendations of the Council of Europe’s education programmes which point to democratic education, life skills learning, and character formation. These recommendations are sustained by principles and standards which conceive teaching as a moral activity with teachers being the moral agents. They encourage an understanding of inequality and social exclusion in education as direct factors that jeopardize the core principles of socially-sustainable societies, democracy and social justice and developing strategies to address them. They promote a pedagogy approach which focuses on shared responsibility, uses active learning methods and opens the boundaries of the school to the community with all actors being equally responsible for the healthy and ethical climate of education. Ethical problems in the Albanian education system have not been studied before, however there is public awareness of various ethics violations exposed in the media that often border on the illegal. Besides the most extreme cases, ethics covers a wide range of behavior and relationships. This report presents a comprehensive picture of ethical issues and integration of ethics in the Albanian education institutions across all study levels, from pre-school to higher education, as a core requisite of democratic education and life skills learning. It explores the perceptions of teachers, parents and students on unethical behaviors in terms of severity and occurrence and contrasts their reports, providing ground for understanding how the main actors in education perceive the ethical constructs of each of the groups regarding shared responsibility. The study also explores institutional bias and oversight that can lead to unethical behavior and brings recommendations for strengthening structures that will cultivate an ethical ground for education institutions that will shape future generations. To achieve the objectives of this study, a mixed-methods sequential explanatory design was conducted initially through collecting quantitative data followed by qualitative. The data for the quantitative study was collected from September to December 2016. It includes a large-scale survey using a stratified sampling method on national level, including pupils, students, teachers, lecturers, and parents across all levels of public education (N =3771). For collecting quantitative data, 12 different questionnaires were prepared to measure ethical and unethical behaviors in all levels of the Albanian public education system. In addition, in the qualitative study, teachers, lecturers, parents, pupils, and students were interviewed face to face, by a skilled interviewer. This method was chosen to further explore factors that influence unethical behaviors, as perceived by various actors in education.