L’educazione morale. Dal disciplinamento alla competenza.

Moral education is a pedagogical phenomenon that is born from the social engage in educating children about morality. This interest has spread to all society and even today most of the educational agencies care about developing programs to form the morality of its youngest members. Our research starts from the pedagogical question that arise when we observe this phenomenon, and tries to investigate the response to them by the great authors of the educational literature. The first stage of the research was just an analysis of the definition of morality to set the problem in its historical field, codified by philosophy, and soon after we passed to define the moral education in the classical authors of the pedagogical and philosophical tradition (as Plato, Aristotle, Montessori, Don Milani, Freire, Dewey and Bruner). During the analysis of these authors we have discovered the presence of two patterns of interpretation of the positions taken about the problem of how we should educate the moral abilities of children. These two patterns correspond to one that we defined implicit and one explicit. By focusing on constructs, ideas and recurring concepts in moral education studies, we have also highlighted that discipline is one of the most important concepts in education, and it can be understood differently, depending on whether you want to consider it in its role of domain device (Foucault and La Salle), in its structuring aspect of cognitive nature (Bruner and Gramsci) or in its active and socialized nature (Dewey and Montessori). Reflection about discipline has been followed in recent years by a reflection about the moral competence and the developing of moral abilities and skills in the social context we live in. These two ideas in the history of moral education had constituted one of the most important attentional focus of the pedagogical discourse, implying the assumption of educational, sociological, political, epistemological problems who helped define and expand the structure itself of the pedagogical codes.