Values as the core of spiritual and moral education of the individual: from research in pedagogy to normative documentation and implementation practice

The purpose of the article is to substantiate the need for a clear definition of the sequence of values that should be the basis of the core of spiritual and moral education and in accordance with which the content of education should be built, methods and forms should be selected, the possibilities of pedagogical management should be determined.The leading method of the study was the analysis of research works on pedagogy related to the issues of spiritual and moral education of the individual, as well as normative documentation of primary and basic school in Russia, observation and generalization of teaching experience.The article selects for analysis a number of dissertation studies that appeared in the Russian scientific field at the turn of the XX-XXI centuries and became a response to the challenges of the socio-cultural situation of that time, associated with the destruction of the Soviet educational system and the search for an adequate replacement for it: in them, for the first time in the post-revolutionary history of Russia, the task of spiritual and moral education of the individual, including by means of religious culture and (or) in its context. By the end of the first decade of the 21st century, scientific and pedagogical thought in Russia created the prerequisites for first justifying the inclusion of the spiritual and moral direction of personal education in normative documents, then for including a list of values that should guide students.Despite the fact that pedagogical science has found the optimal approach to the realization of spiritual and moral education of personality through the assimilation of values, there are still a number of unsolved problems. First of all, it is: the search for an adequate list of values for acceptance at a particular age of students; their clear formulation, understandable to teachers, parents and students; development of the content of education, aimed at the formation of ideas and acceptance of certain values; selection of methods, forms of educational work and its management, corresponding to the values, goals and content of education.