Abstract:

This article analyses how moral education is carried out, as well as the frequency of these activities in the Romanian education, in the primary classes. We applied an opinion questionnaire to 160 teachers, and based on the research data we formulated the conclusions.

Regarding the ways of achieving moral education, the results show that 76.4% of the respondents believe that, in addition to compulsory subjects, which are in the core curriculum, the most effective ones are to organize extracurricular activities with such a theme, as well as watching films or shows with subjects from the sphere of moral education (59.6%) and inviting people to talk to students about moral values (55.3%), while the organization of competitions with a moral theme is seen as less effective (34.2%). According to the age of the respondents, the data of our research show that 80% of young teachers, up to 25 years, prefer interdisciplinary lessons, in partnership with the religion teacher, while for the other age categories, extracurricular activities on moral education topics are more effective (74.5% - 88%). The level of training also generates some differences in the respondents’ preferences. While graduates of pedagogical high school as well as those with bachelor's or Master's degrees consider extracurricular activities on moral topics to be more appropriate, those who have graduated from post-secondary school prefer the interdisciplinary lesson with the religion teacher, and those with doctoral studies believe that it is better to invite some people to talk to students about moral values.

On the other hand, we wanted to find out how frequent extracurricular moral activities are. Most teachers organize them once a month (37.9%), 25.5% once a semester, 16.8% - weekly, 14.9% - usually do them every two weeks, and the rest only once a year or not at all. It can be seen that the most primary school teachers who do not carry out extracurricular activities with a moral theme are those with less than 5 years of work experience (8.3%), while at the opposite pole there are those having between 5 and 15 years of work experience, with weekly activities (30.8% of them). Another factor that influences the frequency of these activities is the level of training of teachers: most who have graduated from pedagogical high school (66.7%) carry out activities in the sphere of moral education once a week, while the same percentage of post-secondary school graduates are limited to one activity per semester. Half of the respondents with doctoral studies, 38.5% of those with bachelor's studies and 36.6% of those with master's studies do these activities approximately once a month. From the perspective of the environment in which the respondents work (rural or urban), the data of our research show that there are no major differences in the frequency of moral education activities.

Keywords:

Education, moral, extracurricular, frequency, primary education.