| dc.description.abstract | In this study the relationship between literature and moral
development is investigated from the point of view of readership.
Simultaneously an attempt is made to place the problems of
readership in a wider framework and against the background of a
more comprehensive picture of the human being.
At the root of this more complete picture of man is the view
that man is still in the process of realising his true being as
image of God, that is, the human being is still in the process of
developing to higher stages of morality.
The theories of Lawrence Kohlberg and especially those of
Rudolf Steiner proved to be the most valuable as illustrations of
this point of view.
Steiner's approach to moral development and education is
based upon the three dimensions of man's being, namely willing,
feeling and thinking, which develop successively in the child end
adolescent according to the principle of metamorphosis. The importance
of this view for moral education is that the child (also as concerns
his literature) can be guided during the phase of willing,
to the doing of the good by means of an example fit for imitation;
that he can be guided during the phase of feeling to an experience
of the beautiful by stimulating his life of fantasy and his
capacity for identification through feeling (empathy); that he
can be guided during the intellectual phase to the experience of
truth by promoting his life of thought and his capacity for forming
concepts.
In contrast Kohlberg's approach is directed purely towards
the cognitive dimension and can therefore be of use in educational
practice during the intellectual phase (adolescence).
The most important conclusion arrived at in the course of this
study is that literature can only have a formative influence on
moral development if the reader is capable of relating himself in
his feelings to the moral content thereof, that is, he must be
capable to identify with the characters in the book and with their
moral development.
When literature is presented at a too early stage in an intel114
lectual rather than in an imaginative and pituresque manner, it
can have the consequence that the child is harmed in his moral
development, since identification by means of empathy cannot take
place. A purely intellectual objective approach places too large
a distance between the reader and his experience of the characters
in the book. | en_US |
