Rozwój i wychowanie moralne dzieci i młodzieży

Abstract

The point of departure for the author’s consideration is the statement that one of the essential elements of catechesis is moral education. Today it faces certain difficulties resulting from lack of synthesis and unity. Besides, moral education is not satisfactorialy matched with the natural development of a child. The problem of moral education has been and still is usually solved with reference to two different education systems: one of them dis based on moral relativism; the other, opposite to the former, consists in indoctrination, i.e. in forcing upon pupils a definite moral code. The author criticises both systems and presents a theory of development and moral education worked out by an American psychologist L. Kohlberg. He distinguishes 6 different successive stages in the moral development of children and then young people. According to this theory, based on numerous experiments, the aim of moral education is to stimulate the natural moral development of a child so as to be able to lead the child to the highest stages of that development. This requires the following actions on the part of the teacher: 1) to get to know the exact stage in the development of the pupils, 2) to demonstrate them the inadequacy of their present moral evaluation, 3) to offer them the moral evuluation which would be higher by only one stage from their own level of moral growth, 4) to enable the pupils to go through genuine moral conflicts, where they would be able to see and personally experience the superiority of the new way of moral thinking, 5) to try and make the moral problems interesting for the pupils. In the conclusion of the article the author shows the usefulness of Kohlberg’s theory for catechesis, providing it is completed and enriched by the ideas from the Divine Revelation and by the motivation that comes from faith.