Perspectives of Secondary School Teachers and Students on Inculcation of Democratic Values in Public Schools: A Qualitative Analysis

Abstract

The study aims to understand participants’ perspectives on the prevailing conditions and practices of inculcating democratic values and how these values can be instilled among secondary school students. A qualitative research design was employed to execute this study and a purposive sampling technique was used to select twelve study participants including seven secondary school teachers and five students from the Sahiwal division of the Province of Punjab, Pakistan. An interview guide was constructed to conduct in-depth interviews with these participants which lasted for 53 minutes on average. After data gathering, thematic analysis was performed on the interview transcripts following six steps of the analysis i.e., familiarization, coding, categorizing, generating themes, reviewing themes, and writing up for the analysis. The emerging themes include perceptions of democratic values, inculcation of democratic values, democratic principles of schools, and challenges and issues of inculcation. The themes revealed that the situation regarding inculcation of democratic values among school students was not encouraging although teachers were struggling with many limitations. It is recommended to address the challenges and issues related to curriculum, school environment, school administration, class size, teachers’ and parents’ training, and promoting democratic literacy among the parents. The study has implications for promoting democracy in the school and society for the larger interest of the county.