ABSTRACT
[Abstract] Chapter 7 centers on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Sorbonne lectures on Child Psychology and Pedagogy (1949–52) and their implications for current approaches to character education. Based on extensive research in the fields of psychology, psychoanalysis, physiology, anthropology, sociology and cultural studies, Merleau-Ponty presented a critique of the prevailing cognitivist and behaviorist views on child development represented by Jean Piaget and John Watson. Whilst acknowledging the difficulty of accessing the child’s world, Merleau-Ponty emphasized the need to appreciate that the child experiences and perceives the world in her own terms as an embodied, social person. His phenomenological assumptions, therefore, led him to challenge behaviorist psychology and a pedagogy of child development premised on the Cartesian ontology of separation and its reductive scientific method. Although Merleau-Ponty did not focus on moral emotions as such, nonetheless, his view of pedagogy as both a science-based activity and a moral practice provides valuable insights into the current approaches to character education, with their reliance on Aristotelian virtue ethics and emotions work based on behaviorist techniques for habit formation strongly resonant of Piaget and Watson.
