A questioning of old beliefs that moral stages can provide the

sole basisfor moral education and that moral indoctrination

is necessarily invalid, as well as new mews of the moral role
of the community and the status of stage 6.

revisions in the theory

and practice of
moral development
lawrence kohl berg

The two articles which follow represent reports of the methods and findings of
two major three-year projects of the Harvard Center for Moral Education.
One common thrust to the two projects is a practical one, the desire to
develop a coherent approach to assessing the effects of our deliberate efforts
at moral education in the schools. Colby’s chapter reports the development of
an instrument useful for assessing stage change through deliberate moral edu-
cation. Power and Reimer report pilot efforts to assess the stage and phase of
the moral atmosphere of a school. These efforts at assessment reflect a shift in
our aims and methods of moral education, as well as some modification in our
theory from a decade ago (Kohlberg, 1969, 1970, 1971; Kohlberg and Turiel,
1971).
My earlier statements on moral education arose in the context of
Blatt’s replicated finding (Blatt and Kohlberg, 1975) that Socratic classroom

Anne Colby reports the thinking of a group involved in a National Institute of

Child Health and Development project on the measurement of moral judgment (the
group includes John Gibbs, Dan Candee, Betsey Speicher-Dubin,Marcus Lieberman.
and myself). Clark Power and Joseph Reimer report the thinking of a group involved in
a study funded by the Ford and Danforth Foundations assessing the effects of demo-
cratic school governance on students’moral development (the group includes Marvin
Berkowitz, Ann Higgins-Trenk,and myself).

New Directionsfor Child Development. 2, 1978 83

84

discussions of hypothetical moral dilemmas lead to upward movement (typi-

cally one third of a stage) that is significantly greater than that demonstrated
by control classrooms without such discussions. Building on these findings, I
suggested an approach to moral education based on the idea of moral stages.
The claim that stimulating the advance of moral reasoning stages through
discussions should be the basis of moral education arose not only from the
Blatt findings but also from findings supporting the cultural universality of
the moral stages, as well as the necessity of moral judgment for certain types
of moral action. In addition, this educational claim was based in turn on a
philosophic stance, which was a restatement of Dewey’s view that “develop-
ment is the aim of education” (Kohlberg and Mayer, 1972) and of the Pla-
tonic view of education for justice (Kohlberg, 1970). My argument was that
education for development through moral stages was education for justice in
a culturally universal sense and that a developmentally later stage was a
morally better stage (Kohlberg, 1971). Education for moral stage develop-
ment, I argued, was nonindoctrinative, since it consists of the stimulation
through a culturally universal sequence of structures of valuing rather than
the transmission of some fixed, arbitrary cultural content of values.
Some years of active involvement with the practice of moral education
have led me to realize that my notion that moral stages were the basis for
moral education, rather than a partial guide to the moral educator, was mis-
taken. As I have reported elsewhere (Kohlberg, 1978), this recognition of the
limits of moral stages does not invalidate the idea of education for moral
development, in the sense of Dewey, or the idea of moral education for jus-
tice, in the sense of Socrates. It is rather a recognition that the psychologist’s
abstract concept “moral stage” is not a sufficient basis for moral education.
Abstracting moral “cognition” (judgment and reasoning) from moral action
and abstracting structure in moral cognition and judgment from content are
necessary for certain psychological research purposes. Although the moral
stage concept is valuable for research purposes, however, it is not a sufficient
guide to the moral educator, who deals with concrete morality in a school
world in which value content as well as structure, behavior as well as reason-
ing, must be dealt with. In this context the educator must be a socializer,
teaching value content and behavior, not merely a Socratic facilitator of
development. In becoming a socializer and advocate, the teacher moves into
“indoctrination,” a step that I originally believed to be invalid both philo-
sophically and psychologically. I thought indoctrination invalid philosophi-
cally because the value content taught was culturally and personally relative
and because teaching value content was a violation of the child‘s rights. I
thought indoctrination invalid psychologically because it could not lead to
meaningful structural change.
I no longer hold these negative views of indoctrinative moral educa-
tion, and I now believe that the concepts guiding moral education must be
partly “indoctrinative.” This is true by necessity in a world in which children
engage in stealing, cheating, and aggression and in which one cannot wait
until children reach the fifth stage in order to deal directly with their moral
behavior. It is also true in an even more basic sense in that education for
 85

moral action, as distinct from reasoning, always presupposes a concern about

moral content for its own sake. I now believe that moral education can be in
the form of advocacy or “indoctrination” without violating the child’s rights,
as long as teacher advocacy is democratic (or subject to the constraints of
recognizing student participation in the rule-making and value-upholding
process), recognizing the shared rights of teachers and students.
This revision in our conception of moral education led us to recast our
intervention research and assessment efforts in moral education. As the Power
and Reimer chapter suggests, our efforts focused on an attempt to integrate
stage theory and method with theories of content and content learning (or
“socialization”). We chose to integrate our analysis of socialization content
with our analysis of structural development by moving in a sociological rather
than a psychological direction. The theory of moral socialization that we
chose to come to terms with was Durkheim’s theory of moral education
(1961). This was chosen partly because it was the theory that best rationalized
what appeared to us (after research observation) to be a valid and effective
practice of moral education: kibbutz collective education (Reimer, 1977). In
this practice, adult educators advocate and facilitate the functioning of moral
peer-group collective norms that are based on a strong sense of community (or
group cohesion).
The way in which moral stages are integrated with Durkheimian col-
lective norms guides our educational practice in the Cambridge Cluster
School (where I have consulted for four years), as discussed in the Reimer and
Power chapter. As a research project, as distinct from a document of an edu-
cational approach, the endeavor described in this chapter departs from pre-
vious moral development research in two ways. First, we have moved from the
study of individual development to the study of group development (the stages
and phases in the norms of the group qua group). And second, we have
passed from a study of the internal mental structure of moral reasoning to an
analysis of something which is neither internal consciousness nor external
behavior, but something in between: group norms and expectations, ethno-
graphically defined. We believe the behavioristic approach to studying indi-
vidual moral conduct first taken by Hartshorne and May (1928-1930) to have
failed, and we have chosen instead the group approach. Thus we examine
behavior not in terms of individual moral character but in terms of the char-
acter or “moral atmosphere” of a group or community.
The Anne Colby chapter represents not a departure from earlier inter-
ests and assumptions but, as she elaborates, a bootstrapping process entailing
a revision of conceptual definitions and methods in the study of moral stages.
The project that she reports started four years ago and arose from an aware-
ness of the defects in our previous methods of assessing moral stages. These
defects had been critiqued by Kurtines and Greif (1974), but their analysis
had a number of errors in scholarship and in understanding of the stage para-
digm, as pointed out by Broughton (1978). In particular, Kurtines and Greif
were in error in believing that defects in methodology can lead to a disconfir-
mation of a stage construct and in believing that the usual personality-test
concepts of external validity (for example, predicting behavior) are appropri-
86

ate for assessing the validity of a stage methodology. The misunderstanding of

critics like Kurtines and Greif, however, does not justify the unsatisfactory
reliability and validity that we found in our clinical method of assessing stage.
Still, the high effort and expense it took to overcome these defects could best
be justified by the practical importance of developing a standard and reliable
method of assessing the effects of moral education programs. The major obvi-
ous theoretical payoff of this development in methodology is that it leads to
“confirmation” of the invariance-of-stage-sequenceexpectation of the theory
in longitudinal data from America and Turkey (by blind, intersubjectively
reliable scoring methods). As Colby points out, such confirmation of our
sequence expectation is not theory demonstration, in the sense of prediction
from a prior theory, but rather the result of a circular process involving a revi-
sion of the theory in light of previous data. Nevertheless, it does mean that the
sequence exists in the samples studied, though replication or other samples are
needed. The confirming side of these research results is pointed out by some
disconfirming results: the failure to find a sixth stage in American and Turk-
ish longitudinal data. This result indicated that my sixth stage was mainly a
theoretical construction suggested by the writings of “elite” figures like Martin
Luther King, not an empirically confirmed developmental construct. In light
of Colby’s analysis of substages, we now think the safest interpretation would
be to view the construct of a sixth stage as representing an elaboration of the
B (or advanced) substage of Stage 5.
Colby suggests that the progress of the methodology project is progress
in successive differentiation of stage structure from normative content in
moral judgment. Colby stresses the increased reliability and validity of the
stage-structure concept and method which has resulted from the differentia-
tion. Of equal importance, however, is the development of our knowledge of
content which has resulted. The method now makes it possible to analyze the
development of content as well as of reasoning stmcture in terms of culturally
universal (and culturally unique) norms and elements of moral values- the
“atoms” of moral value content. This analysis of content immediately finds its
use in the research described by Power and Reimer. The development over
time of the content of the Cluster School moral atmosphere can now be
described as the formation of new norms and new elements; and the idea of
an “element” finds its use in our analysis of a child’s sense of community.
It is my hope that these chapters will illustrate, as well as encourage,
the movement of moral development research beyond either a cultist focus on
moral judgment stages or a countercultist critique of them to an examination
of the enduring problems of moral development and moral education.
refecences

Blatt, M.,and Kohlberg, L. “The Effects of Classroom Moral Discussion upon Chil-
ren’s Level of Moral Judgment.”Journul of Moral Education, 1975,4, 129-161.
Broughton,J. “Dialectics and Moral Development Ideology.” In P. Scharf (Ed.),Read-
ings in Moral Education. Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1978.
Durkheim, E . Moral Education: A Study in the Theory and Application of the Sociol-
ogy ofEducation. New York: Free Press, 1961.
 87

Hartshorne, H . , and May, M. S. Studies in the Nature ofCharacter. 2 vols. New York:
Macmillan, 1928-1930.
Kohlberg, L. “Stage and Sequence: The Cognitive-Developmental Approach to Social-
ization.” In D. G o s h (Ed.), Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research. Chi-
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Kohlberg, L. “Education for Justice: A Modem Statement of the Platonic View.” In T.
Sizer (Ed.), Moral Education. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press. 1970.
Kohlberg, L. “From Is to Ought: How to Commit the Naturalistic Fallacy and Get
Away with It in the Study of Moral Development.” In T. Mischel (Ed.), Cognitive
Development and Epistemology. New York: Academic Press, 1971.
Kohlberg, L. Introduction to P. Scharf (Ed.), Readings in Moral Education. Minne-
apolis: Winston Press, 1978.
Kohlberg, L., and Mayer, R. “Development as the Aim of Education.” Haruatd Edu-
cation Review, 1972, 42, 4 .
Kohlberg, L., and Turiel. E. “Moral Development and Moral Education.” In C. Beck
and E. Sullivan (Eds.), Psychology and Educational Practice. Glenview, Ill. : Scott,
Foresman. 1971.
Kurtines, W., and Greif. E. “The Development of Moral Thought: Review and Evalu-
ation of Kohlberg’s Approach.” Psychological Bulletin, 1974,81(8), 453-470.
Reimer, J. “A Study in the Moral Development of Kibbutz Adolescents.” Unpublished
doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1977.

Lawrence Kohlberg is professor of education and social

psychology at Hanxrrd University.