Study on the elements of moral education included in the curriculum documents for preschool education in Romania (2000-2022)

Abstract

The particularly complex issue of the curriculum for preschool education remains an open one, given the rapid social changes of the current period, but also the results of research in educational sciences and psychology. All of theses force reconsiderations from multiple perspectives, especially related to the cognitive training-development and from the perspective of the child's moral education. The present research aimed to analyze the editions of school programs, the curriculum and methodological benchmarks, official documents approved by the Romanian Ministry of Education, from 2000 to 2022, considering the moral aspects they include. At the same time, a series of comparative analyzes were carried out, at the level of trends, purposes or approach, with similar documents from other countries. The conclusions show that in Romania moral education is not addressed in preschool education as a distinct subject, with its own objectives and contents, some of its own elements are found in other areas addressed by these documents, and the moral model is very little addressed in these documents. Under these conditions, teachers are forced to draw up their own reference documents for the didactic activities they carry out in relation to this classical dimension of education.