ABSTRACT
Most of the applications of developmental research to moral education have roots in the work of Lawrence Kohlberg and his colleagues (Lapsley, chap. 2, this volume; Power, Higgins, & Kohlberg, 1989a). As depicted within Kohlberg’s theory, moral development moves from earlier stages, in which morality is intertwined with self-interest and social norms, to later, more mature stages, in which morality as justice is differentiated from and displaces social convention as the basis for moral judgments. During the 1960s and early 1970s a considerable amount of evidence was generated in support of this description of moral development (Kohlberg, 1984). The nonarbitrary directionality and seeming universality of moral growth as described in this research had considerable appeal among educators hoping to avoid the relativism of values clarification (Raths, Harmin, & Simon, 1976), and perceived limitations of traditional approaches to socialization. Whereas traditional values education emphasized the inculcation of students into the norms of society (Ryan, 1989), the emphasis on moral reasoning advocated by Kohlberg liberated teachers from the charge of inculcating children within a particular value system favored by one or another cultural or religious group within society. At the same time, the Kohlberg sequence provided teachers with a clear rationale for challenging the moral positions of their students, thus avoiding the value neutrality of values clarification. By the mid-1970s, enough interest had been generated by the Kohlbergian approach to lead one educator, Fraenkel (1976), to write about what he perceived to be the “Kohlberg bandwagon.” By the mid-1980s, however, the interest in the Kohlbergian approach to moral education had begun to wane (Power, Higgins, & Kohlberg, 1989b; Turiel, 1989).
