EXPERIENCING THE MEANING IN LIFE BY TEACHERS AND STUDENTS IN THE FIELD OF EDUCATION

The aim of the paper is to point out to the facts that accompany all of us throughout our lives which can significantly influence the quality of our lives. We focus on the basic human motive "to experience a meaningful life". The extent to which one is successful when looking for a sense of his/her own existence is reflected on his/her overall health, his/her effort to achieve a certain goal and his/her action. We present some findings from our recent research study which attempts to reveal the level of (subjectively) experienced meaningfulness in one's life. Results were obtained from a sample of Czech elementary school teachers and students of pedagogical studies. One aim of the study was to discover any connections (relationship) between experiencing meaningfulness, the age and sex of the participants. The set included 120 people in total (60 men and 60 women, out of which half were teachers and the other half were students). Our focus on the job of a teacher was motivated by the fact that a teacher's character, psyche functioning and integrity of a teacher's personality are extremely important in their influence on the young generation. The level of experiencing meaningfulness in one's personal life was quantified (assessed) by means of two psychological methods - the Logo Test by E. Lukas and the Existence Scale designed by the authors A. Langle, Ch. Orgler and M. Kundi. We assumed that the variables of our interest in this paper, i.e. "age" and "sex/gender" play a significant role in the quality of experiencing an authentic existence. The data obtained and their statistical analysis have shown this assumption to be true for the "age" variable. More specifically, the higher the age of the respondents, the higher (stronger) the quality of meaningfulness experienced. In other words, the teachers from practice showed a significantly stronger meaningfulness of their lives (in its experiencing) when compared to students. This was tested on the 1% level of significance. Hence, it can be concluded that younger people are more likely to be threatened by noogenic neurosis. The significance of the differences between men and women was only "outlined" in the data analysis (suggested as a trend), being significant only with a 10-% level of significance. Hence, this factor can be regarded as insignificant. Experiencing one's personal life as completely filled with its meaning can be regarded as the core of every human action. It is a fundamental condition for the resilience of a personality and for his/her mental health. Every-day reflection on the reality of life and self-reflection enable the unique experience of active participation in one's own life, perception of life's values, possibilities, challenges and experiencing the responsibility for solving every-day situations. The absence of such meaningful experiencing, on the contrary, leads to a feeling of internal emptiness, anxiety, discontentment, spleen or boredom, which leads to resignation and to the passive withdrawal from the circumstances. Alternatively, it can also lead to the development of pragmatism and the de-humanization of life values.