Why feeding the imagination is crucial to children’s moral development

Even though we tend to structure our own idea on morality, we often find ourselves referring to a seemingly invisible moral law that dictates what is right and what is wrong. To make matters more tricky, we also seem to be expecting others to obey its unspoken rules.
It can be argued that morality is a socially constructed phenomenon; one that we both engage in and partly reconstruct in order to make it suit our own moral beliefs.
Looking at the issue through the lens of developmental psychology, this cognitive process is only possible because we as children are indirectly taught how to understand and relate to morality through using our imagination.
This is exactly why the moral development of children has to be taken seriously early on; to ensure that our educational structures also have room for the aspect that deals with the little people behind the students.
Not only do we improve and challenge our current pre-K-12 education in doing so, but we also succeed in questioning the pedagogical frames it runs within and force them to take a moral development into account.
Psychologists Lev Vygotsky and Jean Piaget were both born in 1896 and shared a great interest in what happens when children play. In spite of their differences, they both linked moral development to play and therefore highlighted the latter as rather important when educating children.
In his chapter, ‘Play and Its Role in the Mental Development of the Child’, first published in 1966, Lev Vygotsky states that children learn to relate to reality and its moral systems by interacting and playing with other children. Imagination thereby serves as a link between the young child and the outer world; a link that both provides them with the opportunity to play and enables them to mirror themselves and review the rule sets they live by. As a result, play creates a relationship to the world; a thesis that revealed Vygotsky’s socio-cultural tradition and beliefs.
Looking into Jean Piaget’s theory on the early stages of moral development as explained in ‘The Moral Judgement of the Child’ from 1932, the ability to imagine also seems to be the tool with which the child comes to understand this: what at first appears as moral realism is in fact moral relativism. Moral realism can be explained as follows:
“This rule is part of the given world and can no more be changed than the tides can be meddled with or the rhythm of the seasons altered. This “moral realism” is more typical of the younger child; as the child grows older he becomes more flexible and more imaginative” (Bloom: 1959).
This elasticity is a significant cornerstone in children’s moral development, and activities feeding the early imagination should therefore under no circumstances be compromised. Paying attention to the phases that altogether ensure this development helps us understand how the child indirectly perceives morals and learns to interact with its restraints.
According to Piaget, moral development evolves in different stages that all differ depending on how the child relates himself to play and how far along in his cognitive development he is. From birth and until the age of two, the child is said to play individually and with a set of rules based on his own feelings and habits. In fact, he has no interest in including rules that do not come from himself.
After this follows the egocentric phase that defines the years up until the age of five. For the first time, the child now discovers that other people can set rules without his influence. He still plays after his own rules, but the rules set from outside himself slowly start to create a pattern in the play. He now knows how to include other children, but no one gets to decide the rules, because they have already been set by him.
In the years following, the mentality of the play changes. The child now wants to win wherever there is a competition. He pays great attention to clear definitions of the set of rules however, he still does not understand their complete definitions. In Piagets experiments, children would give different answers when asked about the rules of the same play.
Not until children reach the age of eleven or twelve do they all understand the same rules and know how to observe them, so that all codifications for the rule set are obeyed.
After looking into these transitions, Piaget noticed that the young child experiences rules as almost untouchable, whereas the older child rather seeks approval and social support among his playmates. This change is what proves that the child now comprehends that moral realism is in fact moral relativism, and in doing so he starts carrying out what can later be defined as a moral awareness.
The combination of Vygotsky’s and Piaget’s respective perspectives provides us with an insight of utmost importance; it is through playing that children create a relationship to the world and begin to understand what it means to be a moral being.
This knowledge can be implemented in the pre-k-12 policy in several ways. One is to make sure that children are fed with activities that challenge their imagination, and that they are encouraged to play and mirror themselves in the world that they are expected to engage in. This requires that they are given both the time and the freedom to do so.
The ideas we carry out in our educational institutions possess great power and influence. By making sure that the right values are passed on in the ideology we practice, we ensure that the children we are preparing for a conflicted world will welcome it with morally developed minds; nuanced enough to relate to differences and fully aware that all understanding calls for a process.
