**1. Introduction**

The twenty-first-century society enjoys significant benefits from advances in science, research, and communication technologies, which have improved lifestyles. Humanity has an instantaneous transmission network of information, ideas, and value judgments in all areas. These changes should facilitate mutual understanding and collaboration among all people; cultural barriers should no longer exist, much less geographical ones. However, the gap of misunderstanding, injustice, and the desire to expand power is present in all their cruelty. On the other hand, education has been commercialized; human beings are not trained with ethical and moral values, and knowledge acquisition is promoted for profit. This is reflected in the choice of university careers since the youngest people choose courses that allow them to have

economic gains and social status in the very near future. In contrast, humanistic careers such as education are undervalued, with minimal demand.

This reality leads to a critical reflection on the role of education in the society of the twenty-first century. It is impossible to stop violence, the destruction of man by man, if we continue with the same perspective, we have had up to now. In this sense, Álvarez [1] states that it is necessary to carry out an ethical screening that addresses the values that today, more than ever, are in crisis; a process that must involve reflection and diagnosis of the situation necessary to steer a new course.

The ethical and moral values crisis in today's society is evident. It is a problem that should concern everyone, especially education professionals, who transmit skills, knowledge, and values required for coexistence and social cohesion in academic practice and the classroom context. In this same sense, Ovelar [2] says that ethics unfolds in the way of life that is felt in the family, community, school, and society of which one is a part. Ethical and moral values are related to the belief system and the forms of organization of the community or social group. Hence each society has its values and norms system that guide people in their civic and personal lives.

From an ethical point of view, educators can only ask themselves about the purpose of their actions when putting them in front of the student. It is a matter of considering the child as the subject, not the object of education. Ronda [3] maintains that in teaching practice, there is a direct and constant relationship between educators and students; so that this relationship does not violate human dignity and the participants' rights, codes of conduct, principles, and values that favor the development of teaching and learning processes oriented to the integral formation of students and the harmonious exercise of the profession are needed.

This article emphasizes the ethical performance that early childhood education career's students must to have in the development of the pre-professional internships, as a prerequisite for obtaining a bachelor's degree. In this context, the questions guiding this research are: Should the behavior and attitude of students be permeated by ethical values? Should moral and ethical issues be taught in teacher training?

Considering that university students are adults or are finishing the stage of adolescence, the ethical issue is relevant, being necessary to include in the professionals' training some ethical and moral postulates. This work aims to identify the importance of ethics in developing preprofessional practices in the Early Education career and propose strategies to promote the ethical learning of university students. It is necessary to guarantee a space for ethical learning based on each person's individuality through the analysis of principles and counter-values and that they assume and elaborate their own matrix of values. In this context, it is necessary to reflect on the lack or deficit of ethical principles in the educational field, specifically in developing preprofessional practices.

This paper is a reflective essay focusing on the author's ideas and reflections on the importance of formal education for children from 0 to 6 years old and the need for ethics and moral values in the preprofessional practice's development. It is necessary to clarify that these ideas and reflections are based on UNICEF research, the Political Constitution of Ecuador, the Organic Law of Education, and the Code of Childhood and Adolescence, among other contributions of significant research on this topic. For this reason, a bibliographic review was conducted in scientific databases such as Redalyc, SciELO, Google Scholar, Scopus, ResearchGate, and the Catholic University of Cuenca library, in which scientific articles, and others, were located. Considering the inclusion and exclusion criteria, the former included relevance, scientific novelty, pertinence, and time of publication. Information that did not help answer the

scientific question, research questions, exhaustive analysis of the variables under study, and fulfillment of the objectives were excluded.
