Moral education as a pedagogical category in the works of Russian enlighteners

Abstract

The article reconstructs the formation of moral education as a system-forming pedagogical category in the Russian Enlightenment tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, tracing the transition from a religious-normative understanding of virtue to a secularized ethics of civic duty and further to an anthropologically grounded morality based on conscience, dignity, and freedom of choice. Drawing on an extensive corpus of primary texts (works, letters, diaries of leading thinkers and educators, as well as normative documents of departmental regulation), a historical-pedagogical interpretation and hermeneutic reading are conducted, supplemented by content analysis and comparative procedures that enable tracing the dynamics of the conceptual apparatus and practices of educational influence. Quantitative analyses demonstrate a sharp decline in the dominance of obedience rhetoric alongside a simultaneous increase in the frequency of categories of honor, conscience, and humanity, interpreted as an indicator of the humanization of domestic pedagogical consciousness. The transformation of the arsenal of educational means is revealed: from the predominance of direct instruction to the enhancement of indirect environmental influence and the pedagogy of personal example; meanwhile, comparable statistical reconstructions of disciplinary records show that the tightening of the regime correlates with the growth of gross violations and academic dishonesty, whereas liberalization alters the structure of offenses in favor of less severe regime deviations. A special place is accorded to the analysis of the labor component as an ethical factor, which reveals differences in emphases between Ushinsky and Tolstoy—between orientation toward public benefit and personal moral self-affirmation—while converging in the recognition of labor as the foundation of human dignity. The resulting picture allows assessing the relevance of Enlightenment models for the contemporary design of educational systems oriented toward the holistic development of personality and the ethical expertise of educational practices.