Education to Ethical Values in the Family – Between Tradition and Contemporary Times

Abstract

The article addresses the problem of family ethical  upbringing as one of the fundamental issues of contemporary pedagogical-theological education. The family which is the principal community of life makes an irreplaceable milieu of man’s formation in moral, social and spiritual dimension. Ethical education is not merely reduced to norms transmission but embraces the totality of relations and experiences in which the child learns how to love, how to be responsible and how to distinguish good from evil.

Contemporary times, however, make the family face numerous challenges – globalization, development of cyber-technology, pluralism  of values and the crisis of interhuman  ties, all of which make the process of formation of integral ethical system difficult. The fundamental of upbringing is love and  responsibility understood as the principles which order moral life and protect life against relativism. In this context the family appears as “the school of richer humanity” in which everyday life and the parents’ testimony make the basis of formation of mature personality.

Despite civilizational and  technological  transformations, the family retains a central role in the transmission of values and building of moral order. Its task is to harmoniously unite the tradition with the challenges of contemporary times so that the ethical upbringing remains the process of integral development of man and his responsible participation in social life.