Online tolerance among primary school children

The problem of online tolerance is especially relevant today, when a modern child spends a lot of time in Internet and communicates with children and persons over the age of 18 from all over the world. Unfortunately, online communication carries risks, and children are most vulnerable because they are naive and uninformed enough about it. Anonymity may be maintained in Internet, leading to impunity for acts that should be punished, which makes behaviour in the virtual space freer than it actually is in reality.The idea of tolerance education should cover children from the earliest possible age when their views, attitudes, expectations, and rules for communicating with peers and other people are formed. It follows that online tolerance definitely must be nurtured, which is not supposed to be a form of behaviour, precisely because the Internet gives more opportunities than just limits. The study, some of the results of which will be analysed in this article, was conducted among 234 primary school students. The aim is to examine their attitude towards the lack of tolerance in Internet, the use of insults and threats on social networks, rejection of others' point of view.

Online tolerance is not a concept that is often discussed at home or at school. Most of the children are familiar with the content of the concept of tolerance, associating it mostly with a display of kindness, patience and respect for others, regardless of their differences, peculiarities, characteristics. However, if a comparison is made between the definitions of tolerance considered and the responses received from the students studied, it becomes clear that most of them associate tolerance with being good, which is not the basis of the definition. There are very few students who think they may offend someone by telling they don't like him and when children do not like someone, they immediately show it to him. "The students surveyed know well what signs to use when they want to show their disapproval of someone on the web, when they want to show dislike or respond to a provocation. It turns out that students who recognize tolerant behavior as accepting others when they are online it is very easy to show their disapproval of others (with capital letters, angry emoticons, rude language, blocking, exclusion) and they respond quite sharply when have been provoked (even with threats). So, the following aspects of tolerance definition: accepting an opinion, behavior or a person that is different from us; ability to deal with something unpleasant or annoying; being altruistic and humane, are known by heart but are not always realized in interpersonal relationships between children in primary school." (extracted from part 4 of the publication - conclusions)