Moral education at its most effective is philosophical education conducted at the elementary school level within the context of classroom communities of inquiry. Such an education assumes that children are thinking persons and given the right environment and the right teacher, they can learn to do philosophy with integrity and can discuss ethical issues in a thoughtful, objective and reasonable manner. Participation in such a community of inquiry over many years can afford children opportunities to inculcate procedures of inquiry in a reflective and self‐corrective manner and cooperatively construct a reasonable understanding of the world and ways in which individuals can be said to live well. Such an education is the antithesis of indoctrination as it aims to give children the intellectual tools that they need to think autonomously about moral issues, to explore the metaphysical, logical and aesthetic dimensions of these issues and eventually move toward the formation of their own answers.
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Ann Margaret Sharp (1984) studied this question.