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Moral development: children's conceptions of politeness

This text starts with reflections about the relationship between virtues and morality, and between politeness and the moral development. Then, we present and discuss four studies involving 6, 9 and 12-years old children in an attempt to find an empirical answer to the following questions: 1) Does politeness belong to the child's moral universe? 2) Is politeness already seen by young children in its specificity as regards moral rules? Our data show that 1) Politeness does belong to the moral universe of 6 to 12-years old children, but with a peculiarity: its lack is not liable to punishment; 2) The absence or presence of politeness is, for the 6-years old child, a sign of the moral character of the person and 3) The lack of politeness is seen as quite a serious fault by the majority of our subjects. We close our paper with some theoretical considerations about the place of politeness in young children's moral education.


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