Moral Education

Piaget: Moral Development as an Aspect of Cognitive Growth

In the 1930s, Jean Piaget questioned children about invented rules for marbles. Younger children, he reported, objected that the new rules weren't part of the game. This moral orientation he characterized as heteronomous: Morality and obligation were imposed from outside. Older children, by contrast, were autonomous in orientation. They did not regard rules as sacrosanct. They considered new ones and evaluated them based on their fairness.

Piaget attributed these differences to two factors. First, interacting with peers and settling disputes without adult aid helps children understand the function of rules and recognize that they are negotiable. Second, older children have developed more complex cognitive structures. Whereas younger children see rules in terms of rewards and sanctions applied to themselves, older children are able to consider effects on other people and consequently can evaluate social arrangements in light of participants' interests.

Piaget's work challenged Émile Durkheim's influential view that moral development is the assimilation of a society's norms. In contrast to Durkheim's transmission model, Piaget conceptualized moral development as an active process in which the child begins to question rules and social expectations. This account anticipates constructivist learning theory and is widely reflected in current educational practices—for example, explicit teaching of sharing and turn-taking in preprimary settings and group problem solving by older children.

Kohlberg: Stages in the Development of Moral Reasoning

In the 1950s, Lawrence Kohlberg extended Piaget's approach by constructing a series of moral dilemmas and analyzing subjects' response to them (see Table 1). Kohlberg identified five stages of reasoning that he claimed characterized all moral development regardless of a person's beliefs. A sixth stage, proposed as an ideal endpoint of development, has not been verified empirically. The stages are holistic, encompassing all of a person's judgments, and invariant, with no possibility of regression or skipping stages.

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