The premature sexualisation of young people is a source of intense public anxiety, often framed as an unprecedented crisis. Concurrently, a critical scholarship highlights problematic assumptions underpinning this discourse, including a positioning of young people as morally compromised passive subjects, and a disconnect between the reductionist…

Children and adolescents with hearing impairments are at risk of being excluded from activities with hearing peers. Moral emotion attributions may represent important indicators for children's identification with the moral norm not to exclude peers based on disability. Against this background, we investigated how 10-, 12- and 15-year-olds…

This article presents a case study on the political thought and citizenship conceptions of children and adolescents. Considering children and adolescents as reflexive citizens and partners in community development processes, it is our purpose to understand the development of political thought, and particularly how children conceive the exercise of…

In this article we argue that culturally variable values and morals have a key role in educational initiatives that address a global dimension. The article suggests that looking at values and morals in relation to a teaching practice is a way of adding knowledge to this field. Our study inquires into how an intercultural experience can evoke…

This study investigated the relationships among oppositional defiant attitudes, moral reasoning, moral value evaluation and self-reported delinquent behaviour in adolescents ("N" = 351, "M"[subscript AGE] = 13.8 years, "SD"[subscript AGE] = 1.1). Of particular interest were the moderating effects of age, educational…

Discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation is prohibited in South Africa. Against legal gains, however, are marked increases in homophobic violence. Schools are deeply implicated in the development of a moral education premised on democracy and sexual equality. This paper sought to examine the ways in which parents situated within diverse…

Character education considers teachers to be role models, but it is unclear what this means in practice. Do teachers model admirable character traits? And do they do so effectively? In this article the relevant pedagogical and psychological literature is reviewed in order to shed light on these questions. First, the use of role modelling as a…

The school moral atmosphere refers to informal norms and values that regulate the relationships in school and their degree of sharing among students. We tested whether the school moral atmosphere is a mediating variable between adolescents' normative orientation and their self-reported aggressive and transgressive behaviours. A total of 664…

This article maps my journey as a scholar engaged in the research of youth morality (located in the Global South); as a beneficiary of injustice having grown up as a white South African; as a navigator of complex personal histories (discovering my mixed race family origins); and arriving at restitution as a career research focus. It reflects on…

Ideological indoctrination is explicit and pervasive in China, with the school curriculum used to mould the spirit and character of adolescents, fulfilling ideological and political purposes. But the exact content varies over time. Comparing two versions of textbooks published in 1997 and 2005, this paper depicts the continuities and change in the…

The main goal of this paper is to analyse the effect of high school scholarships tied to community service on the development of secondary school students in Northwest China. Using data from three rounds of surveys of thousands of students in 298 classes in 75 high schools in Shaanxi province, the paper documents the implementation of the…

This article traces the development of moral education (ME) in Botswana from pre-colonial times to the present day. It shows how during this time ME has undergone three distinct phases of development, each emphasising a particular ideology. In pre-colonial times ME was offered as part of indigenous education in the home and community, both…

Growing research evidence on the ethic of care suggests that caring should be an integral part of the pedagogical methods implemented in schools. However, the colour blind "community of care" often described in the literature does not disaggregate lines of ethnicity or race and much of this existing literature concerns elementary- and…

This article reviews the moral dilemmas that a teacher faces in the classroom when teaching recent history which deals with military regimes, violation of human rights (1973-1990) and the transition to democracy in Chile (1990-2008). Furthermore, it explores the neutrality of the content taught; the ideological standpoints of the teachers and the…

This article reflects on the school's role in the building of citizenship, especially in socially vulnerable contexts. We argue, and try to show, that effective participation in decision-making processes is a key tool to promote conditions that help in social transformation and the formation of active citizenship. We offer a brief description of…