Educación moral y literatura infantil : estudio de la formación moral en la infancia a partir de algunas teorías de los sentimientos morales

Abstract

This work, done as a graduation requirement for the degree program of Philosophy of the Universidad Colegio Mayor de Nuestra Señora del Rosario, addresses the topic of moral education in childhood, based on the analysis and discussion of some moral theories. It also makes an approach to children's literature regarding the role that can be attributed to it as a resource or tool for the moral training. In this way the paper is structured following an argumentative line that first attempt to clarify the concepts that are linked with the topic of moral education such as socialization, childhood, development, the concept of moral education as well, and others that allow to identify and problematize the issue in relation to the children and the special characteristics of their behavior, their cognitive processes and the way in which their social relations are given. Therefore, the work includes contributions from the sociology and psychology that complement the topic that is observed here mainly from moral philosophy. These concepts help to structure the problem about the way in which moral in childhood is built. Since them, the rest of the paper is developed, first, with the critical analysis to the rationalist theory of the moral that is done in chapter two, which is questioned with the approaches of some theories of moral sentiments and emotional development. Then, chapter three examines the theory of the virtues of Aristotle, highlighting the greater ability to understand non-rational moral behavior such as children’s, associated with what from the sociology is understood as the social environment in which individual morality is developed. Finally, chapter four examines children's literature as a resource that serves for the moral formation in children, due to the cognitive and social processes that this literature favors. In this chapter the issues addressed during the paper about morality and training in childhood are taken up again to put them in relation to some examples of children's literature taken from the Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm allowing us to identify some elements that link the reading of these stories with the processes of moral formation.