Moral Education

Children must be taught morality. They must be taught to recognise the authority of moral standards and to understand what makes them authoritative. But there’s a problem: the content and justification of morality are matters of reasonable disagreement among reasonable people. This makes it hard to see how educators can secure children’s commitment to moral standards without indoctrinating them. In A Theory of Moral Education, Michael Hand tackles this problem head on. He sets out to show that moral education can and should be fully rational. It is true that many moral standards and justificatory theories are controversial, and educators have an obligation to teach these nondirectively, with the aim of enabling children to form their own considered views. But reasonable moral disagreement does not go all the way down: some basic moral standards are robustly justified, and these should be taught directively, with the aim of bringing children to recognise and understand their authority. This is an original and important contribution to the philosophy of moral education, which lays a new theoretical foundation for the urgent practical task of teaching right from wrong.

The authors draw from their work with teachers and students to address issues of social justice through the regular curriculum and everyday school life. This book illustrates an approach that integrates social justice education with contemporary research on students’ development of moral understandings and concerns for human welfare in order to critically address societal conventions, norms, and institutions. The authors provide a clear roadmap for differentiating moral education from religious beliefs and offer age-appropriate guidance for creating healthy school and classroom environments. Demonstrating how to engage students in critical thinking and community activism, the book includes proven-effective lessons that promote academic learning and moral growth for the early grades through adolescence. The text also incorporates recent work with social-emotional learning and restorative justice to nurture students’ ethical awareness and disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline. Book Features: Guidance to help teachers move from classroom moral discourse to engage students in community action. Age-specific lesson plans developed with classroom teachers for integration with regular academic curricula.Detailed overview of moral growth with examples of student reasoning.Connections between moral development and critical pedagogy.Connections between moral development and digital literacy.Connections among classroom management, school rules, restorative justice, and students’ social development.Insights drawn from research conducted within the Oakland Public School system.

Moral and citizenship education are again at the forefront of educational attention with the recent governmental announcements about revisions to the National Curriculum frameworks to 2000 and beyond. This book addresses some of the central issues in moral and citizenship education facing teachers today, embedding practical considerations in a theoretical context and reviewing teaching, learning and assessment strategies. It draws extensively on research but is written in a clear, accessible style. Citizenship and Moral Education examines the key concepts and provides an up-to-date overview of policy, particularly addressing: theoretical issues, aims and approaches in relation to moral and citizenship education in a pluralist society the contributions of the curriculum, extra-curricular activities and the school ethos to citizenship and moral education in school teaching strategies, materials, pupil assessment and school evaluation. The book also focuses on key professional and personal issues for teachers in undertaking moral citizenship education.

There is widespread agreement that schools should contribute to the moral development and character formation of their students. In fact, 80% of US states currently have mandates regarding character education. However, the pervasiveness of the support for moral and character education masks a high degree of controversy surrounding its meaning and methods. The purpose of this handbook is to supplant the prevalent ideological rhetoric of the field with a comprehensive, research-oriented volume that both describes the extensive changes that have occurred over the last fifteen years and points forward to the future. Now in its second edition, this book includes the latest applications of developmental and cognitive psychology to moral and character education from preschool to college settings, and much more.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Media and Moral Education demonstrates that the study of philosophy can be used to enhance critical thinking skills, which are sorely needed in today’s technological age. It addresses the current oversight of the educational environment not keeping pace with rapid advances in technology, despite the fact that educating students to engage critically and compassionately with others via online media is of the utmost importance. D’Olimpio claims that philosophical thinking skills support the adoption of an attitude she calls critical perspectivism, which she applies in the book to international multimedia examples. The author also suggests that the Community of Inquiry – a pedagogy practised by advocates of Philosophy for Children – creates a space in which participants can practise being critically perspectival, and can be conducted with all age levels in a classroom or public setting, making it beneficial in shaping democratic and discerning citizens. This book will be of interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the areas of philosophy of education, philosophy, education, critical theory and communication, film and media studies.