Comparative Discourse Analysis of Moral Dilemmas of Students Attending Hungarian Schools of Three Models

Abstract

The culture of inquiry in moral thought had already introduced the method of eliciting judgement about images and stories through open-ended questions in the first third of the 20th century. In our research, we investigated the moral reasoning of students. We sought to answer how pupils in public, Catholic, and Waldorf schools judge moral dilemmas in fictional stories. Students’ (N=1144) responses to single-choice selective closed-ended (yes or no?) and open-ended (why?) questions about the reason for their choice were used to judge the decisions of the characters in three realistic, believable, age-appropriate stories. In the first story, taking unlawful advantage was accepted most by public school students and least by Catholic school students. In the second story, the actors’ solution method was rejected mainly by Waldorf students, with social justification. In the third story, there was no significant difference between the perceptions of the school models’ pupils, with a similar pattern of rejection. The results are only valid for Hungary.