Ethics Across Early Childhood Education

Abstract

Early childhood ethics education has been of longstanding interest for philosophers, psychologists, and those with interests in child development and education more generally. The significance of early childhood education remains vital today, with an expanding focus on ethical, social, and emotional education in pre- and primary classrooms. Taken together, and given the confluence of several areas of development in early childhood—cognitive, moral, social, and emotional—this period of life presents robust opportunities for ethics education. I conceptualize ethics education in early childhood in two broad ways: first, as an educational process embedded in the child’s experience of the school as a sociomoral environment that can provide important, if indirect, opportunities for ethical learning and development. Second, I take up ethics education in the child’s participation in specific ethics and social-emotional learning programs for classroom, home, and broader community use. While presenting a range of approaches to early childhood ethics education, I argue for the benefits of methodological pluralism, identifying the many continuities and opportunities for collaboration across the theoretical and practical divisions set up in the field of ethics education, and call for collaborative teacher-researcher partnerships in order to develop effective ethics education programming.