What happens when we use kohlberg? His troubling functionalism and the potential of pragmatism in moral education

Educational Theory

Volumn 51, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 259-276

  Henry, Sue Ellen ^a  

^a BUCKNELL UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 27844434987     PISSN: 00132004     EISSN: 17415446     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-5446.2001.00259.x     Document Type: Article

References (46)

1. Readers interested in an examination of Kohlberg's life and the effect he had on colleagues should look at Catherine Walsh's recent article, "The Life and Legacy of Lawrence Kohlberg," Society 37, no. 2 (2000): 36-42.
2. This article discusses, among other important aspects of Kohlberg's life history, his sudden death by drowning in , which some claim was a suicide.1987
3. William Doll, "Curriculum Possibilities in a 'Post' Future," Journal of Curriculum and Development 8, no. 4 (1993): 277-92
4. Erwin Johanningmeier, "Ruminations on the Beginnings of Educational Psychology: William James and the Foundations of a Profession," Educational Theory 28, no. 2 (1978): 111-19
5. Frank Pajares and John K. Bengston, "The Psychologizing of Teacher Education: Formalist Thinking and Preservice Teacher Beliefs," Peabody Journal of Education 70, no. 3 (1995): 83-98.
6. Jean Piaget, The Moral Judgment of the Child (New York: Free Press, 1965).
7. F. Clark Power, Ann Higgins, and Lawrence Kohlberg, Lawrence Kohlberg's Approach to Moral Education (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 107
8. This book-will be referred to as LKA with page numbers in the text for all subsequent citations.
9. Lawrence Kohlberg, Dwight Boyd, and Charles Levine, "The Return of Stage 6: Its Principle and Moral Point of View" in The Moral Domain: Essays in the Ongoing Discussion between Philosophy and the Social Sciences, ed. Thomas Wren (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990): 151-81
10. This chapter will be referred to as RS6 with page numbers in the text for ail subsequent citations.
11. Lawrence Kohlberg, "The Moral Atmosphere of the School" In The Unstudied Curriculum, ed. Norman V. Overley (Washington D. C.:Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1970): 122.
12. Lawrence Kohlberg, The Philosophy of Moral Development: Moral States and the Idea of Justice (This book will be referred to as PMD with page numbers in the text for all subsequent citations. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981): 173
13. The degree to which Kohlberg accurately uses Dewey's notions of democracy is hotly debated. Though he frequently invokes Dewey's name in relation to his use of democracy in the Just Community approach, authors such as Betty Sichel contend that his use of Dewey's ideas are thin and sketchy, at best. Sec Betty Sichel, Moral Education (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988).
14. Moshe M. Blatt and Lawrence Kohlberg, "The Effects of Classroom Moral Discussion Upon Children's Moral Judgment" Journal of Moral Education 4, no. 2 (1975): 129-61.
15. Kohlberg quoted in Dwight Boyd, "The Rawls Connection" In Moral Development, Moral Education and Kohlberg, ed. Betty Munsey (Birmingham, Ala.:Religion Education Press. 1980): 185.
16. Femile Durkheim, Moral Education (New York: Free Press, 1961)
17. Talcott Parsons, "The School Class as a Social System: Some of its Functions in American Society" Harvard Educational Review 29, no. 4 (1959): 297-319
18. Kingsley Davis and Wilbert E. Moore, "Some Principles of Social Stratification" American Sociological Review 10 (April 1945): 242-49
19. Robert Dreeben, On What is Learned at School(Reading, Mass.:Addison-Wesley 1968).
20. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, "Functional Analysis in Anthropology and Sociology: An Interpietative Essay" Annual Review of Anthropology 19 (1990): 244.
21. Dreeben, What is Learned at School, 3.
22. Kathleen Bennett and Margaret D. LcCompte, How Schools Work (New York: Longman, 1990).
23. James W. Vander Zanden, Sociology: The Core, 2d ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990).
24. Robert Merton quoted in Vander Zanden, Sociology, 50.
25. Durkheim, Moral Education, 59.
26. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America (New York: Basic Books, 1976)
27. Randall Collins, Conflict Sociology: Toward an Explanatory Science (New York: Academic Press, 1975)
28. Alvin Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (New York: Basic Books, 1970).
29. Herbert Blumer, Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.:Prentice-Hall, 1969).
30. Edmund Sullivan, "A Study of Kohlberg's Structural Theory of Moral Development: A Critique of Liberal Social Science Ideology" Human Development 20, no. 6 (1977): 353-76
31. Carol Gilligan and John Michael Murphy, "Development from Adolescence to Adulthood: The Philosopher and the Dilemma of the Fact" in Intellectual Development Beyond Childhood, ed. Deanna Kuhn (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1979)
32. Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979
33. Elizabeth Iconic Simpson, "Moral Development Research," Human Development 17, no. 2 (1974): 81-106, respectively.
34. Carol Gilligan, In A Different Voice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).
35. This problem is not Kohlberg's alone, but likely to be an issue for any theory that maintains predetermined moral principles upon which a society should base its functioning.
36. Kohlberg contemporary Donald Reed, in Following Kohlberg: Liberalism and the Practice of Democratic Community (Notre Dame, Ind.:University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 218
37. suggests that one way out of this tension between the individual and social aspects of Kohlberg's theory is to reformulate Stage 6 toward more intersubjective reasoning rather than the application of a universal conception of justice: "Just community efforts toward constructing collective consciousness and collective responsibility aim toward intersubjective, socially constructed justice... the actual convergence of perspectives into an intersubjective justice reasoning is the result of radically contingent historical and cultural processes." While Reed's response may appear to rectify the problem it does not alleviate the issue entirely. Still at hand is Kohlberg's desire to articulate, both empirically and philosophically, a universalizable set of principles that would transcend particular cultural conditions, historical circumstances, and power relationships in order to maintain social equilibrium.
38. Hans Joas, Pragmatism and Social Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
39. John Dewey, The Public and its Problems (1927; reprint, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1954).
40. Dewey quoted in James Gouinlock, The Moral Writings of John Dewey (New York: Hafner Press emphasis in the original., 1976), 177,
41. Dewey, Public and its Problems, 34.
42. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916; reprint, New York: Free Press, 1944): 87
43. Gouinlock, Moral Writings, 234.
44. Joas, Pragmatism, 21.
45. Philip Selznick, The Moral Commonwealth (Berkeley: University of California Press emphasis in original., 1992): 431,
46. Ted Sizer and Nancy Faust Sizer, The Students Are Watching (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999).