Tasks of Higher Education in The Field of Moral Education. From The Perspective of Research on Secondary School Students in Poland

In the article, we ask about the place and meaning of stimulating moral development at the stage of higher education. When looking for an answer to this question, we refer to different visions of higher education. We consider the idea that the moral shaping of a human being should be one of the more important goals pursued during college or university studies  (not only in philosophical-ethical and humanistic fields of study) as particularly important and necessary. We also present the results of research conducted among 304 students of Polish secondary schools. We look at them as young people who will face the possibility of starting college or university in the near future. We ask what they represent in moral terms.  For this purpose, we use a research tool: the Ethics Questionnaire (Wojciszke, 2000), which measures the degree of identification with the values included in five ethical codes: the ethics of autonomy, the ethics of collectivism, the ethics of the common good, the ethics of dignity and the ethics of productivity. Academic staff can look at the sample group as their potential future students. In this perspective, the research results help to answer the question to what extent it is necessary to include issues related to stimulating moral development in higher education.