Abstract

As I stressed in Chapter 13, I have by no means addressed all aspects of moral education in this book, let alone all aspects of personal and social education or of a school's concern for spiritual, moral, social and cultural development. Even within the notion of `moral development' there is much about which I have said little. In Chapter 3 I sketched a rather crude notion of moral development by which it could be said that someone has developed morally to the extent that he or she has come to share the values which are central to a given society. That way of conceiving of moral development leaves out a great deal: it says nothing about individual attitudes and feelings towards others or about the degree of responsibility the individual takes for his or her own behaviour. Nor does it tell us what balance is to be struck in the overall educational task between putting across received norms, trying to develop virtues, and encouraging the capacity for and disposition towards autonomous thought. I do not, therefore, put it forward as a conception of moral development tout court. Nevertheless, it does point to an aspect of moral development in which society has a legitimate interest, but which education has not in recent years done much systematically to address. It is my contention that this is an important aspect of moral development for education to take into account, not least because it can at the same time be seen as an aspect of education for citizenship.