The influence of school as a planned agent of socialisation on the development of secondary school students' interest in theatre

This paper deals with determining whether school as a planned agent of socialisation influences the development of secondary school students' interest in theatre. We observed school through the prism of the theory of socialisation, because the socialisation function of education is one of the most important for society and that is why the school is considered one of the most important agents, i.e. the transmitter of what socialization actually is. The conducted multidisciplinary research first included an analysis of the content of strategic and legal acts, as well as bylaws in the field of education, which aimed to determine whether and to what extent the state prescribes theatre as an acceptable way of socialisation. Considering that the research was conducted during 2015, the mentioned documents have been changed to a greater or lesser extent. For these reasons, and for the purposes of this paper, a comparative analysis was performed. In order to get an insight into whether and in what way the school carries out the prescribed content related to the theatre, a survey was realised with a formalised (standardised) written questionnaire and individual structured interviews were conducted with employees in schools where the survey was organised. A total of 648 secondary school students from Novi Sad were examined. We start from the assumption that theatre will be defined as acceptable in the overall educational content of socialisation within the framework of public practical policy in education depending on how important it is to the state, more precisely to the 'ruling forces'. In accordance with the educational policy, school will transfer the prescribed amount of content related to the theatre to the given extent. The results of this research prove that the level of representation of theatre in the educational content of socialisation is extremely low, which leads to the fact that school as a planned agent of socialisation has a minor impact on the formation and development of secondary school students' interest in theatre.