Show Summary Details

Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 19 April 2021

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter positions moral education as concordant with the moral component of religion, but does not equate moral education with socialization into the particular norms or conventions of any specific faith tradition. Research findings have revealed that deeply religious children and adolescents make a similar set of distinctions between religious conventions and moral prescriptions regarding fairness and the welfare of others. This research forms the basis of a critique of the proposition that religiously devout people maintain a separate “morality of divinity.” The chapter reviews research on moral education designed to stimulate development of these universal moral understandings of fairness and welfare through developmental approaches to classroom rules and discipline together with practices that foster responsive engagement and transactive forms of discourse to stimulate the development of a critical moral perspective. This developmental approach to moral education is compatible with the basic moral core of religious systems but may be viewed as challenging to religious traditions and customs that sustain social inequalities.

Keywords: moral education, social cognitive domain theory, moral development, transactive discourse, social convention

Larry P. Nucci

Larry Nucci is adjunct professor of Human Development and Education at the University of California, Berkeley, and professor emeritus of Educational Psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author/editor of seven books including Education in the Moral Domain (Cambridge, 2001), Nice is Not Enough: Facilitating Moral Development (Pearson, 2009), and the Handbook of Moral and Character Education (with Darcia Narvaez and Tobias Krettenauer; Routledge, 2014). He is the editor in chief of the journal Human Development.

Robyn Ilten-Gee

Robyn Ilten-Gee is a doctoral student in Human Development and Education at the University of California, Berkeley. She has worked as a journalism instructor and reporter with Youth Radio. Her current research is on adolescents’ moral reasoning about adversity and conflict through multimodal storytelling. Her interests include exploring ways to use children’s media and literature to facilitate moral development and critical discourse.

Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.

Please subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.

For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.