Abstract:

The study on child’s moral life is a complementary component of a wider research project on current children and their world, carried out by a team of university researchers in Banská Bystrica, Slovakia. This overall project called ‘Children At The Threshold Of Education And Their World‘ (VEGA 1/0598/15) is supported by the Scientific Grant Agency of the Ministry of Education, science, research and sport of the Slovak Republic. Its overall aim is to update and innovate the knowledge about current children and their world via monitoring the state of several specific areas, such as cognitive, psychomotor, socio-emotional and moral features of child’s development.

This study shares with an outcome of the first stage of this project – an overview of research studies that have been accomplished in the area of moral life of children so far. It will focus on the youngest generation of children – at the age of starting their compulsory education. Ontological psychologists state that the current children are different to the previous generations, especially due to the technological environment, abilities to live in virtual reality. When describing the features of the currently youngest generation, several sociologists characterize them as The Internet Generation, iGen, The Content Gen, The Digital Native, The Multi-task Generation, The Kaleidoscopers, etc generation. All of these characteristics have a very strong value element incorporated. Thus they have a direct influence upon the morality of the current children. The current moral educators seem to be eager to describe the ‘emerging‘ morality of the youngest children, expressed in new ways of children’s thinking, feeling and acting. As, logically, the current generation of children is researched by people belonging to an older generation, there is a need to find a really valid tool to research the youngest generation without resulting in misconception and non-effective moral education. Inner life of children, their moral awareness and moral reasoning has been a topic of research by several world’s most distinguished psychologists, culturologists, anthropologists or theologians. We can mention research done e.g. Piaget, Kohlberg, but also Erikson, Coles, Montessori, Fowler, DeVries, Zan. This study will present a selective theoretical analysis and comparison of the accomplished research studies that have been focusing on searching inner world and moral life of children, with a special focus on the current generation of children. The study will present a final comparison of the main features of the researched studies, their outcomes (e.g. how children think about right and wrong and why), methodological tools and basic outcomes. The aim of this analysis is to prepare the theoretical grounds for producing a valid research tool, adequate to the current stage of development in this research area. From pedagogical point of view, it is especially important to investigate the current child’s moral thought typical for their development level in order to better understand how to link emerging morality with the institutional moral education.

Keywords:

Research on children, moral life, moral world, qualitative research, moral develpoment, moral education, tools for searching moral preconcepts.