The article deals with the issue of crises, which is increasingly making its presence felt in scientific studies, as well as in everyday life. Crises, seen as a transitional moment in the whole of human life, are inscribed in development and are also subject to certain regularities and possibilities of periodization along with developmental periods. Among the many approaches to crises, the search for the pedagogical and ethical meaning of crises is marked, in which, through a phenomenological description of the phenomenon, its essence and meaning is sought. As Stefan Kunowski (1909-1977) notes, we need such a search also from the position of pedagogy, in order to go beyond the narrowed and specialized elaborations of this issue and to try to grasp physical, social or spiritual development in a meaningful way. According to Kunowski, this need is answered by “pedagogy as a science of comprehensive human development”, developing a theory of stratified human development, “which brings together all the developmental possibilities of people”. The appropriate resolution of a crisis projects into the subsequent phases and successively experienced subsequent crises that accompany human life, causing differentiation in the experiences gained and resulting in the results in the form of unique – individual and social effects of development and upbringing.