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SPIRITUALITY AS A GUARANTEE OF MORAL DEVELOPMENT OF A PERSONALITY
Authors: O. Grytsiuta
Number of views: 277
The article highlights the issue of the development of spirituality of a personality in
Ukraine. The relevance is due to the crisis of traditional family, inflation, high
unemployment rates, uncertain moral compass in daily life and politics and living
standards decline. The article also indicates that promoting the cult of money, violence
and cruelty by mass media greatly affects the society and consequently leads the children
and youth away from morality even up to a complete denial of spirituality and morality as
personally meaningful things.
Moral development of personality includes the terms «ethics» and «morality» that
ensure the person’s compliance with rules, norms and behavior principles existing in
society. It is stated that not every moral personality is necessarily spiritual, but every
spiritual man is moral. The loss of spirituality as the highest level of reflective ability of
person’s consciousness is identical to the loss of humanity
The person’s spiritual identity is inwardly motivated; it is connected with moral
values, humanity, and views on the environment. Spiritual identity develops and
undergoes changes throughout the person’s lifetime under the influence of internal
factors (such as natural inclinations, character traits, values and principles) as well as
the external ones (such as the family education peculiarities, interaction with adults as
role models, community’s spiritual atmosphere, person’s activities and self-realization).
The person’s spirituality reflects in their faith in God and the immortality of the human
soul, their respect for social norms, their ability to acknowledge their own mistakes, their
unselfish willingness to help others, to show charity, gratitude, forgiveness and
repentance.
The article proves that family and school are two important environments for
personality development and moral education; in those environments the learning of
ethic norms, the formation of moral feelings and virtues, the development of moral
motives and behavioral skills are achieved through purposeful interaction of adult and
child. The parents’ spiritual level (since they are the first teachers of the child),
contributes to the children’s ability for the development of creativity, gaining their self-
dependence and learning of universal spiritual, moral, ethical and aesthetic values.
The revival of family’s and nation’s values and traditions, conducting the
educational and preventive work among parents, creating conditions during the
educational process for spiritual self-development and self-identity, encouraging the
children to be involved in teamwork in schools, non-governmental organizations and at
homes; all those measures should be taken in order to eliminate many negative
phenomena in our society.