A comparison of democratic attitudes of primary school students and in public anc private schools

The relationship between education and democracy is a long-standing debate. Considering that education should feed democracy and democracy should be nurtured by education, the inputs and outputs always need to be re-examined with changing orders. Accordingly, it is aimed to achieve a "Democratic Unity" in teaching programs both in state and private schools of our country. In this study, it was aimed to investigate whether there is a difference between these achievements in private and public schools. The "Scale of Democratic Attitude" and "Parents Information Form" were used as tools for collecting data. In the academic year 2017-2018 preliminary practice 537 was applied to grade 2, 3, and 4 students. Out of 28 preliminary practices analyzed, 21 were finalized. At the end of the development process, the scale consists of co-existence, justice-equality, rules and rights sub-factors. The Cronbach Alpha value is calculated as 0.77. SPSS 22.0 program was used to implement the analysis. The Democratic Attitude Scale developed by the researcher was applied to 848 private (406) and state (442) primary school students. At the end of the application, the average of the democratic attitudes of the private school students was found to be significantly different from the average of the democratic attitudes of the state primary school students. Examining the results of EBF (Parental Information Form), the democratic attitude level scores of the students were evaluated according to their genders, their families' socioeconomic status, mother's education level, father's education level, the number of children in the family and the marital status of the parents, thorugh which no significant difference was found. In the analysis made, taking into account the class levels of the schools, the 3rd grade showed a significant difference compared to the 2nd and 4th grades and the second grade compared to the 4th grade. As a result of the research, it was found out that teachers working together with PDR services (school councilor) plays an important role in promoting a democratic class culture; In conclusion, in order to contribute to the studies on the construction of private and state schools, researches need to select a large sample. Additionally it is important to investigate the reasons influencing the democratic attitude levels of 4th grade students.