Abstract:

The biggest challenges of the 21st century is to guarantee people's rights. Many legal procedures and normative documents have been created to guarantee these rights. Human rights and children's rights must be valued and protected, and this can only happen if we know and understand them. In this sense, we are talking about human rights education - this is the only way to prevent their violation.

The children's rights described in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child are part of the domestic law of Bulgaria and ensure that children are protected by law. Teachers, as well as various institutions make efforts to respect the rights.

The questions addressed in this article are which rights teachers identify as fundamental; their awareness of children's rights as part of the learning process; teachers’ views on textbooks related to the teaching of rights, as well as the involvement in the process of teaching the rights of older students and various state institutions.

Two hypotheses can be made - that teachers have no difficulty in stating the basic rights of the child; that they can point in which specific subject relevant topics are discussed at the initial stage of education. The second hypothesis should claim that teachers find it difficult to name children's rights and are not sufficiently informed about them. For the purpose of this article, a survey was conducted among 62 teachers of children up to 4th grade, the results of which support the second of the two hypotheses and lead to the conclusion that teachers need to raise awareness regarding children's rights.

The article presents the results of the survey among teachers from different schools in Bulgaria about the challenges in teaching rights and integrating them into the learning process. The questions discussed are about the difficulties encountered in understanding the rights, the motivation for learning them and the knowledge of the subject on the part of the parents.

The purpose of the research is to provide an overview of the situation from the teachers' point of view and to make recommendations for improving the quality of child rights education in school education, seeking a balance to ensure a better environment for development. Many of the interviewed teachers share their concern that they do not know enough about the rights of the child, that the children themselves and parents are also not aware of their rights. It is encouraging that educators would voluntarily engage in training to improve their knowledge. If such specialized training is implemented in the Bulgarian education system, the consequences of the change in school education will be found both in the psychological and emotional state of the children, as well as in the quality of the training they will receive, and also in the higher qualification to the teachers.

Keywords:

Rights of the child, civic education, fundamental rights, rights of the child within the educational process.