Moral education as a constant of the educational process: characteristics of the issue in time

Abstract

The article is devoted to the processes of formation and development of ideas about the moral upbringing of children and youth in the domestic scientific and educational space. Based on the analysis of source studies and historiographical works, three stages of development of national ethics in the twentieth century are characterized. With the beginning of the twentieth century in the domestic humanitarian space the most expressive, and in education and generally accepted, was the religious-theological concept. It is claimed that at this time invariants, constants of moral upbringing are developed: categories - good and evil, concepts - faith, hope, love, diligence, truthfulness, love for one’s family (patriotism). It was found that the Soviet discourse opened a new stage in the domestic humanities, a demonstrative rejection of morality as a spiritual phenomenon in the early 1920s. At the same time, the new moral ideology was a symbiosis of Bolshevik party ethics with moralizing. And fidelity to communist ideas became moral guidelines. Thus, the theory and practice of moral upbringing went from moral ideology (30’s of the twentieth century) to “upbringing of communist morality”, which became an important component of the educational process in the 50’s of the twentieth century. The very formation of Soviet morality in the 1960s and 1990s as a process of establishing Soviet ethics initiated an alternative form of moral upbringing, within which ideological and class attitudes gave way to a spiritualized version of moral upbringing. Only two Ukrainian teachers – A. Makarenko and V. Sukhomlynskyi, each of their positions, have made a significant contribution to the development of problems of moral upbringing. The years of Ukraine’s independence presented a whole palette of conceptual approaches and various practices of moral upbringing - from theological, religious understanding of morality, traditional-conservative (folk values).