Moral knowledge of students – prospective teachers as a subject of a pedagogical analysis

The goal of this paper is to study the current state of moral knowledge of students majoring in «Education». The author explains the need to study the moral knowledge of students about the content of the categories «moral», «morality», «value» and the golden rule of morality. The author finds a leading method that can be used while studying the moral knowledge of future teachers – it is the method of the conceptual vocabulary. The paper reveals common and different ideas of freshmen and graduating students about morality, value and the golden rule of morality. It is substantiated that the moral knowledge of freshmen is mostly ordinary knowledge, while the moral knowledge of graduating students is connected with scientific meaning. It is proved that graduating students, realizing that morality is a reflection on themselves, understand the relationship between morality and behavior in relation to another person, they understand that the relationship is the link between the side of consciousness and the behavioral side of the teacher’s morality; The author reveals graduating students’ orientation towards those taking the form of a guideline of their activities, the ideal to which the prospective teacher aspires, and values. The development of students’ ability to moral and pedagogical reflection of moral knowledge is defined as a prospect of upbringing the morality of prospective teachers.