Tautinis tapatumas ir jo kaita vyresniame mokykliniame amžiuje

Abstract

The present article discusses the issue of national identity under the circumstances of globalisation. We view globalisation as a double-sided phenomenon: as a positive phenomenon that opens wide perspectives for political, economic and cultural communication co-operation, and - as a negative phenomenon — that may cause threat to the identity of separate persons, commu-nities and cultures by weakening or even destroying that identity. The article also considers the possibility of viewing national identity from different perspectives. In terms of personal self-identification, national identity is most commonly treated as person’s existence and survival within the context of the same ethnical group , this existence being accompanied by the feeling of belonging to the nation and Motherland. In this case, it is necessary to establish the measure of value for one’s own nation against the background of other surrounding nations, as well as to clearly visualize the specific expectations for the future of the nation and one’s own further existence within the national context. In our study of senior school learners’ national identity, the starting point was the respondents’ attitudes towards one’s own national state and national security that underlies the freedom and independence of the nation as well as the recognition of the nation by others. The obtained results manifest a tendency in senior school learners’ attitudes towards lower evaluations of one’s own nation (in comparison with the data of attitudes obtained in 1998 and 2005), whereas the attitudes towards one’s own state show a tendency for a rise; the attitudes towards national security, in turn, remain on the same level and could be specified as not sufficiently favorable. The above data may signal the beginning of processes in the learners’ consciousness that might lead to separating the understanding of state from that of the nation and could hinder the future processes of preserving one’s national identity. For reasons of that kind, we consider the national values-based education in the present-day school of u tmost significance - as the kind of education that provides basis for inter-cultural education