Moral Education in Early Childhood Schooling

Abstract

This article studies an aspect of the process of acquisition of the first moral behaviours by children between two and three years old in the context of early childhood schooling: moral peers encounters and the regulation that adults sometimes carry out. Throughout a year, an ethnographic investigation was carried out. It provided two hundred and sixteen scenes of relationship episodes between equals. This material allowed us to define what is a moral encounter, which types of challenges and different moral behaviours appear in the encounters and which kind of help the educators carry out during the moral encounters. The results showed that the acquisition of morality is a complex psychopedagogical process that articulates at least three dynamisms: the fine tunning of group intentionality, the development of moral attitudes manifested in the relationship, and the moral learning through the transmission of behaviour guidelines and reference values. Likewise, we could verify that moral behaviours of justice, cooperation and care appear in moral peers encounters. Behaviours that are the basis of the future adult morality, as well as the development of various ethical theories. Finally, the article gives practical indications for implementing a model of moral training for early childhood education, with regard to the peers relationships and adult regulation.