ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the issues of authority; norms, reciprocity, justice, and autonomy coexist in the social interactions between children and adults as well as among peers. The contemporary study of moral development began with Piaget's classic studies of children playing the game of marbles. Piaget's assumption at the time was that one could best understand a young child's emerging morality through observation of their indigenous rule-governed activities. In essence, for Piaget, the structures of moral understanding, as in the case of all operative knowledge, begin at the level of activity. The chapter discusses the child's construction of moral concepts and social norms emerges out of qualitatively differing patterns of social interaction that correspond to moral, conventional, and personal domains of social knowledge. Subsequent work on children's moral and social growth has affirmed Piaget's emphasis on the child's social interactions for the construction of social knowledge, but has altered our view of how morality and social experience are related.
