Learning about right and wrong: perspectives of primary students of Class 1 in a private school in Pakistan

Academic right consists of providing right answers and doing well in school. However, students have to learn not only right answers but the right way to present them. In social terms, the students learn to comply with the school rules. However, under certain circumstances they may circumvent them or even establish their own rules. They also construct a complex system of relationships with their peers, whom they categorize work friends, play friends and coworkers. Morally, the children's learning in large part involves formal religious and moral instruction in their Islamiat class. However, they also learn moral lessons in other subjects when the teacher consciously reinforces the religious morals, or spontaneously through informal remarks by teachers. Some of their moral principles-caring, compassion, kindness, fairness-appears to be independent of this background and the students may act on them independently. This inquiry examined how 4 Class 1 students in a private school in Pakistan learn about right and wrong. The study grew out of the lack of literature on young children's learning, and moral learning in particular, in a Pakistani context. Even Western studies of childhood education have largely focused on administrators' or teachers' viewpoints and on curricular matters. On the basis of these findings. I discuss the significance and implications of the study in terms of teachers' and my own practice, education in Pakistan, and the literature on children's education generally. After a review of the literature, I decided on one major research question: How do primary students of Class 1 in a private school in Pakistan learn about right and wrong?My three subsidiary questions were: (a) How do students learn right and wrong in teaching situations, within the formal and the informal curriculum in various subjects and in religion (Islamiat) classes? (b) How do students learn right and wrong from critical incidents or situations where the teacher determines acceptable or unacceptable behavior, or from school rules and routines that and set by the teacher or by others in authority? and, (c) How do students learn right and wrong from the informal spontaneous interactions with teachers, peers, Head teacher, support staff and others in the school?To capture the experience of learning from the children's viewpoint, I decided on a qualitative case study method. My participants were 3 boys and 1 girl, ages 5.5 to 6.5 years in a Class 1 section of 34 students in the ABC English-medium Private School, Karachi, Pakistan. For 5 months from October 2001 to February 2002, I collected data through participant observations of classes, structured and unstructured interviews, informal chats and conversations with the students and their teacher, students' drawings and stories, school literature, and general observation of the school and classes. Analysis of the data revealed that the students learn about right and wrong from three perspectives---academic, social, and moral. They learned about any or all three areas in any of the three contexts I was investigating---formal instruction, rules and social interactions, and spontaneous moments. Furthermore, to successfully learn how to do right from any one perspective often involved mastery of right behavior in one or both of the others. An unexpected finding was the important role of their Islamiat and class teacher as an "ethical practitioner."

Keywords: Moral education (Primary), Pakistan
School children, Pakistan