Abstract:

In everyday life, value orientation of young people is reflected in their opinions and attitudes towards themselves and towards their surroundings, and it also influences overall behaviour and actions of the child or young person. The area of values and value orientation becomes an urgent issue - especially in the context of increasing percentage of child and young people criminality: its share in the total crime grows, the age limit in the incidence of socio-pathological behaviour of children in the school educational environment decreases, people prefer materialistic and consumer way of life – these factors inevitably lead to family crisis in Slovakia and across Europe. It should be emphasized that prevention of undesired socio-pathological behaviour is more effective and economical than fighting it. Therefore, each school and its educational impact play an important role in the area of crime prevention. The teacher´s behaviour acts as preventive measures that are supposed to help restrain the undesired development of our children and young people. To a great extend it may also affect their value preferences and value orientation.

Value orientation cannot be changed in a prescriptive way. Teachers must be identified with positive values, they must trust in them and act in accordance with them. Such a situation requires the teacher who is able to encourage and motivate his/her learners to recognise and promote universal human moral values. Man is constantly developing and passing various stages in his life and those changes lead to creation of man´s personality. A young man who enters university is usually at the stage of searching for his own identity, separated from family care, expecting quality professional training and building new social relationships. University educational environment is thus offered a space for shaping university student´s personality – the one that will help grow the society in the future. Therefore it is essential to address the issue of forming and shaping the student´s personality. Unfortunately, the theory of pedagogy as well as research rarely pays attention to the issue. In literature, we find studies aimed at shaping the student´s personality associated to his/her study and career profile, however, his/her moral profile is not included. We may, nevertheless, say that especially ethics, character and preferred values influence university students, their life orientation, family and working life as well as shaping of the society itself. For this reason, the study deals with the issue of value preferences and value orientation of teacher trainees, it seeks answers whether undergraduate education could affect - in a positive way – teacher trainees´ value orientation and which factors mostly influence the value orientation itself.

Keywords:

Student, teacher, undergraduate teacher training, value, value orientation.