A influência da experiência escolar no desenvolvimento moral da criança

Abstract

This study sought to gain an understanding of how the School bas been perfonning its role in the fonnation of moral individuaIs. In the belief that the School has an important role to pIay in the fonnation ofthe child's moral reasoning, it being capable of hindering (in the sense of reinforcing dependence on others) or helping (promoting the child's autonomy), an attempt was made to comprehend how this power has been used in the many school situations. Field research investigated the day-to-day life of a school which claims to adopt a constructivist stance, focusing on the classroom. The basic theoretical framework was Jean Piaget's theory of moral development. Observations were made, together with interviews with professionals from the school and the use of the clinical method with a view to ascertaining the leveI of moral reasoning amongst students. The instrument used consisted of an adaptation to the local reality of Ceará of a previous adaptation from the test fonnulated by Jean Piaget. The test situations, which touch upon moral conflicts, originally focused on family scenes, were presented in two versions, based on the transfonnation of a single category of parental authority (father or mother) into two: parental and school (teacher). Observations showed that the apparently constructivist view which penneates the discourse and forms the foundation ofthe selected school's pedagogical proposal, is not effectively put into practice. A more quantitative analysis of the test results revealed that there was no difference between responses in tenns of the categories "parental authority" and "school authority", leading one to consider that there is a generalization of the concept of authority by the children. The qualitative evaluation, however, clarified that children manifest a greater emotional response when they refer to parental authority figures. It was noted that factors such as economic status, religious beliefs and life experience outside the family and school, permeate the construction of moral reasoning in children, which does not diminish the School's responsibility in promoting the development of moral autonomy amongst students. It can be said that the school shows no commitment to the formation of an autonomous, intellectual or moral subject and, based on this lack of commitment, one finds a lack of theoretical knowledge. The research data lead us to reflect that the constructivist approach, although apparently exhaustively studied, does not appear to be well understood by some educators who believe it is their very foundation.