Eureka! Institutional Repository

Education consists one of the country’s development pillars, a trait of personality growth and social integration. Secondary education quality is crucial and relates to a large amount of local population, since teachers, pupils themselves, their parents and the political leadership primarily is entangled. Public school nowadays in our country, amidst an intensely competitive social environment which is constantly fluid, while changing faster than any other period of human history, competing with each and every school unit separately but also as a whole, falls increasingly into disfavor with the students’ value system. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the views of secondary education teachers, pupils’ parents, and respectively school directors on the situation of public education in relation to the competitive environment in which it functions, whether it is parallel education structures, either the labor market or a prospect for academic studies. The first, theoretical part introduces basic concepts concerning secondary education, reviews its evolution and approaches its position in the Greek education system. More importantly, the most significant factors affecting secondary education are disclosed through bibliographical references. The second part of the research includes a quantitative survey, joined by secondary school teachers and pupils’ parents respectively. The method used to collect the results contained mainly closed type questionnaires, accompanied by qualitative enquiry of Junior and Senior High schools through interviews where an attempt has been made to display the quality of public education and whether it finalizes its objectives. The findings of each survey are presented separately and in comparison with each other in a multifaceted study of the subject. Any problems are highlighted while solutions are put forward to improve the performance of public education.