The teachers’ perceptions of the curriculum or their beliefs about how children learn can influence the quality of the teaching activity and its final outcome. Furthermore, the importance of an extended cooperation and mutual understanding between the actors involved (kindergarten teachers – parents) seems to be a crucial issue in order to establish a supportive framework. The research is structured in two dimensions. We seek the beliefs of kindergarten teachers (K-teachers) and parents, as well as their mutual perceptions of each other’s beliefs, i.e., K-teachers for parents and parents for K-teachers, about the importance of kindergarten goals. The study was conducted in Greece, specifically in the region of Central Macedonia, in June 2021, after the re-opening of schools due to the Covid-19 pandemic. A sample of 330 K-teachers and 419 parents from public and private schools responded to closed-ended questionnaires, rating –on a 5-point Likert scale- the importance of 14 Kindergarten goals. We found that K-teachers generally underestimated parents’ beliefs about kindergarten goals relative to their own beliefs and overestimated parents’ beliefs about the ‘academic’ curriculum goals; a trend that was not confirmed by the parallel survey of parents’ beliefs. In contrast, parents appeared to express a more balanced perception between their own beliefs and those they perceived K-teachers to hold. We also found evidence of differentiation between private and public schools. According to the findings, a harmonized perception of kindergarten goals by K-teachers and parents in private versus public schools is apparent.

The 2014 refugee crisis has led to a crisis of trust among the institutions and the leaders of the European Union (E.U) as a supra-national political instrument. Furthermore, it highlighted the disadvantageous condition of the E.U is, such as deficits in humanitarian and democratic ideals, in solidarity among member states, and the consequences of strengthened nationalistic and xenophobic stereotypes. It is claimed that an initially apparent institutional failure was just a transitional stage of an ongoing strategic game oriented by choices and preferences of the dominant players. Thus, the refugee crisis management was guided by multiple nested games, national priorities and political competition themes under the goal of achieving the premium objectives of each player. Hence, the management of the crisis formed a field against collective expression of common European political objectives, confirming the rationality of the individual (national) motivation based on a hierarchy of preferences. The aim of the present article is to analyse, within the scope of the rational choice theory, the strategic choices and the decisions of the member states, as well as to highlight the complexity of the refugee crisis, which in parallel with the economic crisis, contributed to the questioning of the E.U’s power in its core formation.