Developing prosociality in teachings of religious education and civic education

Abstract

Understanding other people’s needs, accepting those different from ourselves, helping others in need, are some of forms of prosociality. Religious education and civic education contribute to encouragement of prosociality. With preaching about benevolence and through practical prosocial activity in civic education, students acquire prosocial patterns of behaviour. In our research, prosociality was observed through emotional empathy and altruism. The objective of the research is to determine the extent of students’ prosociality as well as the existence of differences. The sample of the research comprises 290 adolescents, classified into three categories: opting for religious education, opting for civic education and opting for both elective subjects. We examined whether religious education and civic education contribute to development of prosociality. Data were collected with E questionnaire-scale of emotional empathy and A questionnaire-scale of altruism. The results indicated satisfactory prosociality in all subsamples. Differences refer to the extent of altruism. Students who elect religious education are at a higher level of altruistic behaviour. A statistically significant difference was not established in expressing empathy. The signficance of the research is reflected in teachers’ obligation  to develop and nurture prosocial forms of behaviour in students.