Abstract:

Education and scholarship have always had a determining character in the future, as we can see in the rapid technological development and the global changes of civilization in the last decades of the last century until today. Alongside the benefits of change and development, which are already part and parcel of our daily lives, there are also drawbacks or negative impacts that we either do not perceive or think do not directly affect us and do not deal with them- we ignore them, but it can also be the case that we consciously deny their existence. These are very dangerous human attitudes, given that the accumulation of global negative impacts can be very rapid and unstoppable. In our study, although we do not address global issues of this scale, we do present the results of the research that has been carried out as part of the "Teachers and Students about Sustainability - Research Program" project. The research aimed to find out the attitudes of secondary school students towards sustainability. Due to the dimension of the research, in this study, we address the area of Place Attachment and Place Identity. The target group of the research were students of secondary schools in the Slovak Republic. 1425 secondary school students participated in the research. The results of the research give a picture of how secondary school students in Slovakia perceive their relationship to nature, their attitude to place attachment and local identity, to the place of residence and its environment.

Acknowledgements:
We would like to express our thanks to Alapértékek Nonprofit Ltd. for the opportunity to participate in the research programme - Teachers and Students about Sustainability; for the financial support of the Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Sport of the Slovak Republic within the educational grant KEGA no. 001UPJŠ-4/2023 and for the cooperation of the higher territorial units of the Slovak Republic in providing the research sample.

Keywords:

Sustainability, place attachment & place identity, education.