Kohlberg, Lawrence (1927–1987)

Lawrence Kohlberg was an American psychologist best known for his account of six culturally universal stages of moral development. Kohlberg also led moral education interventions in a Connecticut prison and a Cambridge, Massachusetts, high school. The Cambridge Just Community School served as a model for similar schools on which he consulted in Brookline, Massachusetts, and Scarsdale and the Bronx, New York.

Kohlberg was born in Bronxville, New York. He was the youngest of four children born to Alfred Kohlberg and Charlotte Albrecht Kohlberg. Alfred was politically active during the younger Kohlberg's youth, in directing the United Jewish Appeal during the 1940s and in the 1950s in anti-Communist work related to China, where Alfred had many business contacts. Charlotte was a “kitchen chemist,” who discovered a polymer that was incorporated into the nose cones of rockets.

Kohlberg's parents separated when he was four, divorcing a year later. Kohlberg attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and upon graduation in 1945 served for two years in Europe in the Merchant Marine. He then joined the Haganah as second engineer on an old Navy ice-breaker smuggling Jewish refugees through the British blockade from Eastern Europe into Palestine—an experience he related in his first publication, “Beds for Bananas.” The ship was eventually captured and he was interred in a concentration camp on Cyprus.

After escaping, Kohlberg attended the University of Chicago (1949) where he earned enough credits by examination to graduate in one year. He studied clinical psychology in graduate school at Chicago, including a one-year U.S. Veterans Administration clinical internship (1953–1954). Afterwards, Kohlberg changed his focus to developmental psychology. In 1955, he married Lucille Stigberg and they had two sons. Following completion of his dissertation in 1958, Kohlberg held a joint postdoctoral residency at Children's Hospital in Boston and the Harvard Human Development Laboratory.

He was Assistant Professor of Psychology at Yale University (1959–1961) and the next year was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Palo Alto, California. He then returned to the University of Chicago as Assistant and then Associate Professor of Psychology and in the Committee on Human Development. In 1967, he was Visiting Associate Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he became Professor of Education and Social Psychology in 1968. He remained in this position until his death almost 20 years later.

In 1969, Kohlberg published his theoretical masterpiece, “Stage and Sequence: The Cognitive-Developmental Approach to Socialization.” The essay was the culmination of a decade and a half of work on social cognitive development, including foundational work on gender identity development. The argument of “Stage and Sequence” was incomplete, but it was the prolegomena to a grand new theory of social development, submitted as Kohlberg moved from psychology at Chicago to education at Harvard.

The social and developmental psychology textbooks that had not already begun to report Kohlberg's work added coverage, and the Sunday New York Times featured Kohlberg in a story early in 1970. He received a National Institutes of Mental Health Research Scientist Award (1971–1972) and, in the next few years, collaborated in major grants from the Stone, Kennedy, Ford, and Danforth Foundations. These grants funded his Center for Moral Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the various educational interventions on which he worked during the 1970s. These included the first Just Community School and the Cluster School, which operated from 1974 to 1979 at the Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School a few blocks from Harvard.

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