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…

In spite of numerous HIV/AIDS-prevention education efforts, the HIV infection rates in sub-Saharan Africa remain high. Exploring and understanding the reasons behind these infection rates is imperative in a bid to offer life skills and moral education that address the root causes of the pandemic. In a recent study concerning effective…

One of the priorities of societies emerging from identity-based conflict is to signal a new society, with new values that stand in stark contrast with the old. Education policy becomes a critical arena for highlighting these political values when schools, particularly teachers, are identified as key agents of social change. However, the legacy of…

Burundi, like the rest of the Great Lakes region, has been shaken by widespread inter-communal divisions and violent conflict. It is commonly believed that the troubled history of Burundian society has been due to the lack of a consistent moral dimension in school curricula. It is this obvious gap that the Catholic Church, through its Moral…

In this article we provide a theoretical reconstruction of sub-Saharan ethics that we argue is a strong competitor to typical Western approaches to morality. According to our African moral theory, actions are right roughly insofar as they are a matter of living harmoniously with others or honouring communal relationships. After spelling out this…

Throughout the centuries the ownership of wealth has been used as the measure for the determination of status in a community or society. Exactly what constituted wealth differed from one period to the next. The nature and extent of power within the narrow confines of the family and the wider political context was defined on the basis of ownership…

School bullying continues to plague students around the globe. Bullying research to date has largely employed empirical methodologies, including both qualitative and quantitative approaches. Using a philosophical lens, this paper seeks to better understand the intentionality of bullying by considering the satisfaction derived in the tears of…

The aim of this study was to investigate relationships between care and justice reasoning, dispositional empathy variables and meta-ethical thinking among 128 students from a university of applied sciences. The measures were Skoe's Ethic of Care Interview, the Defining Issues Test, Davis's Interpersonal Reactivity Index and Meta-Ethical…

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…

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of parenting and adolescent fearfulness on adolescents' pro-social values and pro-social and antisocial behaviour. A total of 134 adolescents (M age = 16.22, 72 girls, 62 boys) responded to questions regarding their own fearfulness, pro-social values and pro-social and antisocial behaviour, as…

Moral education is concerned with depolarising the tension between loyalty and sedition, but little work has been done in the field to describe and map the territory between these poles. This paper proposes that the concept of "dissent" accomplishes this task and satisfies the need for a construct which describes the condition of "sitting apart…

This article presents the psychometric qualifications of a new video-based measure of school professionals' ethical sensitivity toward issues of racial intolerance in schools. The new scale, titled the Quick-Racial and Ethical Sensitivity Test (Quick-REST) is based on the ethical principles commonly shared by school-based professional…

In this paper we argue that moral behaviour is largely situation-specific. Genetic make-up, neurobiological factors, attachment security and rearing experiences have only limited influence on individual differences in moral performance. Moral behaviour does not develop in a linear and cumulative fashion and individual morality is not stable across…

This paper considers some empirical research into the modelling of moral values in schools, which highlights the hidden impact of working environments on classroom relationships. After an initial survey and pilot study, a range of primary, secondary and student teachers, selected for their empathy, were interviewed and observed in order to…

This paper explores the idea that moral thought/reasoning and moral actions are actually two separate phenomena that have little relationship to each other. The idea that moral thinking does or can control moral action creates a difficult dualism between our knowledge about morality and our everyday actions. These differences run parallel to the…