The author purports the need to treat moral education as a serious academic subject and suggests ways educators can manage it in an intellectually defensible way. Ethical education must avoid indoctrination, yet it should not be a mere training in philosophical ethics. The domain of moral education should include four partially interdependent goals. The goals are (1) to teach children what are and are not moral phenomena, (2) to teach children the role of morality in the development of the personality and in the organization of society, (3) to help children to become aware of their own values, and (4) to train children to consider the moral consequences of their own actions. These goals must then be adapted to the kinds of issues most relevant at the particular point in the child's life. Much research remains to be done in the field of moral instruction. Most crucial is the area of early education programs for "disadvantaged" children, which would be directed toward moral, as distinguished from cognitive, education. Other vital areas for future research are: the design of measures of moral development both reliable and sensitive to change; the instruction of teenagers, as potential parents, in how to teach moral education themselves; the establishment of criteria for selection of teachers of moral education; and the instruction of these teachers in how to teach it. (Author/MK)