Moral Education

Moral Education Defined

American models of moral education have been informed by leading theorists in psychology, philosophy, and religion. Proponents of moral education in American public schools believe that existing pedagogy fails to account for the vital need to train young children in the complicated and ambiguous subject of ethics. Although certain models of moral education are rooted in particular normative or faith communities, such as Jewish, Muslim, Mennonite, Protestant, or Catholic, many academics and educators are motivated to support moral education as a secular component of public schooling that promises to enrich the lives of all citizens in a pluralistic nation.

Psychologist Jean Piaget's groundbreaking studies of the moral lives of children connected the development of moral thinking to lived experience. Later scholars built on and expanded Piaget's work; these scholars include Lawrence Kolhberg, who mapped out six distinct stages of moral development. Kolhberg believed that children progressed through these stages as part of their cognitive development and that each stage represented a fundamental shift in the social-moral perspective of the individual. Because he also believed that moral growth occurred through lived experience, Kolhberg proposed that teachers create opportunities for children to take moral action designed to help them advance through the various stages of moral growth. He located these moral stages in the realm of human cognition and therefore outside of the realm of culture. The work of psychologists like Kohlberg seemed to offer a moral education pedagogy that was immune to charges of cultural relativity. By the mid-1960s, reformers crafted Kohlberg's theories into a promising curriculum called “values clarification.” This new curriculum was intentionally nonprescriptive. Instead of instructing students in the specifics of moral thoughts and deeds, the goal was to help students identify those values that were important to them. This was especially valuable, according to proponents, because values clarification would remain flexible in the face of changing or contradictory values that were only natural given the complications of modernity.

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