Mind and body in pre-adolescent moral development
Mario Rizzardi, Barbara Tognazzi
IIn order to provide educational and training contexts immediately after school age with a reflection on the characteristics of the physiological and cognitive development of pre-adolescents from a psycho-pedagogical point of view, this article describes the main changes that occur in the body and in thought in the years of lower secondary school and the effects of these modifications on moral development. It emerges that brain and body development in puberty and formal operative thinking provide the pre-teen with themes, methods and tools, which, despite being evolved, require for their development formal and non-formal interventions and appropriate experiences regarding the domains of school, family and in a broader sense, social domains. This is because moral development in pre-adolescence does not consist in the passive reception of cultural norms and values to be accepted or not, but in an active development of forms of moral thought in the transition from one stage to the next.
Keywords
Early adolescence, Moral development, Cognitive development.
