Moral education as contextual: A qualitative study in an early childhood classroom

This is a qualitative study on early childhood moral education. The theoretical framework is that moral education can be contextual and implicit, as well as direct or explicit. Moral virtues may be implicitly and functionally acquired, in the context of meaningful cooperative learning as living, such as Project Approach.;Twenty-five children of 4 to 6 years old were observed twice a week for one semester, especially when they were engaged in group project work. The teacher and children were also interviewed, formally and informally.;Three contexts of children's interactions were discernible in this study: whole class meeting, individual group work, and cooperative group work. Each context was observed to require distinct morality of tangentiality, reciprocity, and coordinateness. But cooperative group work was the most favorable for implicit moral education. On the one hand, the coordinate morality of cooperative group work was inclusive of the reciprocal morality of individual group work and the tangential morality of whole class meeting. On the other, cooperative group work was more inclusive of elements of a moral context---personal interest, active work, and common task achievement---than either individual group work or whole class meeting.;Contextual moral education may be foundational, or at least complementary, to currently dominant direct moral education. It will be particularly appropriate to early childhood, being implicit but active. One implication is that meaningful cooperative learning may have to be universalized all over the school life; it may be an ultimate aim of moral education, as well as its means.