Moral development of a personality in the concept of Yakym Yarema

Abstract

The purpose of the work was to investigate the ideas of Yakym Yarema regarding the moral development of a personality. The content of his report «The Stages of Moral Development» (1937) is analyzed for this purpose. In order to achieve the goal, the digitization of this work was carried out, its scientific and literary editing and analysis. The study of the stages of moral development is carried out in accordance with the logics applied by Ya. Yarema: firstly, a general overview of the concepts and criteria of moral and immoral, then – periodization in accordance with different criteria and analysis of recommended methods of educational influence, relevant at different stages of the development of morality. Moral and immoral Yakym Yarema categorizes from the point of view of the participation of consciousness in the implementation of morally evaluated acts, which significantly distinguishes it from traditional educational approaches. Concerning the criteria for the classification of degrees, the scholar distinguishes between three: the common course of social and moral development; the basis of the legitimization of moral norms; development of the quality of motivation as a motive for moral development. According to each criterion, Ya. Yarema described three levels of moral development: premoral (neutral, immoral), second and third (different names according to the classification criterion). His conclusions on the transition from the second to the third stages and the conditions under which it occurs (or does not happen), the completion of moral development (quantitatively) in the second stage and incompleteness as a specific characteristic of the development of qualitative indicators of moral consciousness are pedagogically important. The methods of moral education proposed by Yakym Yarema are correlated with age characteristics, qualitative characteristics of individual degrees and social environments of different magnitude.