Meaning in Life and Ethical Education

• Main Author: Martin Brestovanský
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Society for Spirituality Studies 2020-05-01
• Series: Spirituality Studies
• Subjects: meaning in life; ethical education; character education; virtue ethics; dialogic approach; philosophy of dialogue
• Online Access: https://www.spirituality-studies.org/dp-volume6-issue1-spring2020/24/

From the educational psychology perspective, the article bridges three concepts that are important, albeit implicit, in Slovak ethical education model: meaning in life, self-transcendence, and virtue ethics. It brings empirical data to support the idea about relations between these three in educational practice. Two studies are presented: in the first study (N=354) Ethical Education Evaluation tool (EEE, Brestovanský et al. 2016) was used to explain how students view the school subject, as well as the revised version of the Noo-Dynamics Test (T.ND, Popielski 1991) and Prosocial Behavior Questionnaire (Roche and Sol 1998) to investigate how prosocial behavior and ethical education predicted meaning in life. In the second study (N=266) the Questionnaire on Teacher Interaction (QTI, Wubbels and Levy 1991, in Vašíčková 2015) and Scale of Life Meaning (SLM, Halama 2002) were added to reveal the impact of teacher’s interaction with students as mediator in associations between ethical education and meaning in life. Using regression analysis, it was possible to set up a predictive model using the prosocial behavior of the students that explains 16% of the variance in meaning in life among 6th grade students (Mage=11.93), but ethical education increases the prediction to 25%. In the second study prosocial behavior explained 19% of the variance among 8th graders, and ethical education has strengthened the model only to 21%. For 9th graders the model dropped to only 5%, and neither ethical education nor teacher interpersonal behavior added additional power to the models.