Cyber-wisdom education: Integrating moral theory to tackle online harms

Online harms – including cyberbullying, trolling, and other forms of digital harassment – affect many children and young people. Educators are often not adequately equipped or supported to help children navigate and cope with such harms. There is relatively little compelling empirical evidence about how teachers can help tackle online harms. This chapter draws on moral theory to propose a new approach by (1) reviewing how schools and teachers usually promote internet safety through educating students about online harms; (2) discussing how deontology, utilitarianism, and virtue ethics can be integrated and put to work by teachers; and (3) explaining how to cultivate the neo-Aristotelian quality of cyber-wisdom – a quality that can help children and young people to autonomously make the right decision at the right time, when using the Internet. This chapter also highlights how teachers should enforce rules and teach pupils about the consequences of their online actions as part of the task of cultivating cyber-wisdom. Informed by moral theory, this chapter concludes with an overview of promising practices that can help tackle online harms through cyber-wisdom education. Insights related to values education – framed here as overlapping with virtue-based character education – that might be adapted and then adopted by schools around the world are also provided.