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Moral Development Reflect

Moral education is becoming a major topic in all communities. People are educated on social problems affecting the society and the way they can be prevented or avoided. The major issue in this case is who has the biggest role in issuing moral education to the community. While who is obligated to deliver moral education to the community is a concern, people and various sectors or institutions have various roles to play in moral education. The responsibility of schoolteachers is to teach children and teenagers on morality and educate them on the moral issues that can benefit them and the society. The role of the school is to create a perfect environment in ensuring that the subject and knowledge gets to the targeted audience. The school offers the services and good environment for offering education on moral education through practicing the set rules in a fair decision-making process.

Moral education is increasingly being offered due to the many cases of moral crisis in the community and the nation as a whole. The education is being raised to tackle social problems such as juvenile violence and crime, suicide, as well as teen pregnancy. Not all of these social problems are associated with morality but some are complex in origin. Moral education seeks to address mainly moral problems facing the society. In identifying the moral problems, taking note of how each affects the society need to be based on individual opinion but hardly on informed opinions. The Piaget’s theory focuses on children’s moral lives and states that development starts from action in that people have to interact with environment to gain knowledge. Children have rules when playing, which is part of morality. Fair rules are considered to be within a system but not rules originating from outside the system like the case of marble games according to Piaget. However, some external rule creates fairness within a system since those created within the system could favor some individuals creating unfairness and immorality. The theory also argues on children understanding on rules. Young children understand little about rules but older people know almost everything about rules and that children start from heteronomous moral reasoning stage. In this stage, children are obedient to authority and rules caused by children nature of being cognitive and egocentrism whereby they can project their thoughts as well as wishes on others. Again, children have social relationships to adult in relative ways and most of them consider power be initiated from above. Schools need to emphasis on cooperative decision-making, nurturing moral, and problems solving under the governance of common rules and fairness. The theory hardly advocates for proper moral education but asserts that morality is learned through interaction.

Kohlberg’s theory talks of moral development through education and that moral development happens in levels broken into stages. In the first level, one avoids to break rules in fear of being punished with no consideration of others. This grows to create value in actions with consideration of the society in taking any action in the second level. In the final level, people reason based on principles but hardly on the rules or norms of the society.

Moral education is against these theories asserting that morality is learned and practiced. Individual improve on morality based on the moral education they have learned in school. However, the truth is that morality can best be acquired through practical interaction with others and environment. At the same time, morality grows in individuals as they advance on their capacity to reason. It therefore follows that moral education plays little or insignificant role in shaping people’s moral values in the society but only helps people understand the society in which they can practice morality based on what they have learned through interaction and their reasoning maturity.