Lawrence kohlberg biography summary organizer

The two stages in this level are:.

Lawrence kohlberg biography summary organizer

In the conventional level, individuals begin to consider societal norms and expectations when making moral judgments. At the post-conventional level, individuals develop their own ethical principles that may conflict with societal norms. It provided a framework for understanding how individuals develop their moral reasoning abilities and shed light on the cognitive processes underlying moral decision-making.

Occasionally, staff are put on the spot, as are inmates. The inmates generally make a great effort to explore all aspects of an incident personalities, circumstances, etc. A community meeting may be called at any time by any member of the community Both staff and inmates have a single vote. What was innovative about the Niantic program, from Kohlberg's perspective, was that it conceived of the inmates' treatment in terms of moral justice rather than psychological or psychiatric categories and approaches.

An article that he published ina year after the beginning of the program, was quite optimistic in its assessment:. We have accomplished much. We have created a fair self-governing community which operates within the constraints of a larger total institution and correctional system. Half the original women have been placed in either work-release or parole programs.

None have failed as of this writing At present, two women are doing well in a local community college and others, hopefully, will enroll. The participants in the Niantic model cottage program were not systematically tested on the MJI until several years after the beginning of the program; however, most staff and inmates felt that they learned important skills of moral reasoning, group discussion, and decision making.

The inmates in particular felt that they were better prepared to return to the world outside the prison. Secondary education Following his work at Niantic, Kohlberg then began to introduce his theories regarding the role of just communities in moral education into several alternative high schools in New York and Massachusetts. Alternative high schools in general were a product of the so-called free-school movement, which reached its peak of popularity in the United States in the early s.

The free-school movement, which was influenced by the wider countercultural trends of the period, was largely led by followers of John Dewey. Alternative schools, which are also referred to as democratic schools, may be either public or private institutions. Some public alternative high schools are offered as a choice to local students, while others are designed for students at risk of dropping out of school.

Although there is no universally agreed-upon definition of a democratic school, most share the following characteristics:. An illustrative example of Kohlberg's approach is the second just community that he helped to establish within an alternative school, namely the Scarsdale Alternative High School also known as SAS or the A School in Scarsdale, New York.

The A School was founded in as a democratic alternative to the public high school. As Scarsdale is a wealthy community in which students are pressured to do well in school in order to gain admission to prestigious colleges, some parents wanted their children to be able to attend a high school with a less competitive atmosphere. Unlike many alternative schools, the A School has its own building separate from the main high school.

As of the early s, SAS had 75 students and five full-time staff. The A School declared itself a just community school inone year after the principal and two teachers attended a summer institute at Harvard. They were having difficulty building a sense of community within the school, and they asked Kohlberg to serve as a consultant at the end of the summer.

One of the major issues that emerged during the first year of the A School's adoption of the just community model concerned the tension between personal freedom and membership in a community. The use of drugs and alcohol during a school retreat provided the occasion. While most of the students responded to the faculty's request not to use drugs during school hours or at school functions, they raised the question as to whether a majority in a participatory community has the right to make rules that limit the personal freedom of the minority.

Eventually the students came to a position that Kohlberg described as follows:. In the just community school the majority cannot, in general, limit personal rights of students; it can only limit them where the personal right cannot be held to be a moral right because it violates the more essential obligation to participate in a voluntary community.

Smoking pot is not a basic right, like freedom of speechbut is rather a personal habit that can be restricted for the sake of the community and the individuals in it. Another major issue that arose during Kohlberg's work as a consultant at the Scarsdale school was cheating. Cheating is a problem in many schools because it is harder to develop peer-supported opposition to it than to offenses like stealing.

Whereas students can readily perceive that their peers are victims of unfairness when personal possessions are stolen, teachers appear to be the only victims of classroom cheating. Students, in other words, often regard themselves as a "we" group, with the teachers as a "they" group. As Kohlberg put it, "Strong collective norms against cheating can usually only develop if the peer and teacher groups are seen as parts of a common community with norms that are fair to teachers as well as students.

Kohlberg's involvement with high-school education was significant in that it led him to modify some of his early views on the process of moral development. In particular, his first lawrences kohlberg biography summary organizer emphasized the separation of form and content in moral reasoning; that is, he argued that the structure of the student's moral reasoning was more important than his or her lawrence kohlberg biography summary organizer answer.

As Kohlberg dealt with adolescents at the stages he identified with conventional morality, however, he could no longer keep a safe academic distance from the content of their reasoning; in other words, the rules that a school community decides to institute and enforce are as important as the reasons guiding the decisions. At a minimum, life in any community requires adherence to some conventional moral norms.

In Kohlberg's words. In addition, the moral conventions that Kohlberg thought he could take for granted in the s were more fragile than he recognized at the time; even a decade later it was obvious to most observers that commonly held beliefs had lost much of their force and authority. The second major modification that Kohlberg made as a result of his experiences with alternative high schools was to rethink the distinction between making a moral judgment about a situation and assuming personal moral responsibility for one's actions.

Some describe this distinction in terms of two questions: "What is right to do in this situation? Kohlberg's reanalysis of Milgram's data indicated that very few of the subjects thought that it was "right" to continue administering the shocks. The experimenter, according to Kohlberg, "did not influence their determination of what was right as much as excuse them from taking responsibility for the consequences of their actions.

Later founds the Center for Moral Devlopment and Education there. Kohlberg suffered the effects of the illness for 16 years. Professional ethics and law enforcement One area in which Kohlberg's stage theory of moral development has received increased attention since the s is the field of professional ethics, followed by that of law enforcement.

In response to a number of much-publicized scandals, such professions as medicine, accounting, journalism, public relationsand business are making use of Kohlberg's tests of moral maturity for self-policing and self-evaluation. In some cases, the effects of professional education itself on students are investigated. For example, an article published in a Canadian accounting journal reported on recent research concerning the moral development of accounting students and professional accountants relative to that of lawrence kohlberg biography summary organizer groups in Canadian society.

The article mentioned such findings as the fact that women in the profession generally scored higher on Kohlberg's measures of moral development than did men. In law enforcement, Kohlberg's stages are sometimes used to evaluate the motivations of lawbreakers. Watson Research Center reported that of these four groups, only the adult virus writers "appeared to be ethically abnormal, appearing below the level of ethical maturity which would be considered normal [for their age group] on the Kohlberg scale.

As of the early s, Kohlberg's work was more directly relevant to educators than to psychologists. In addition, the so-called "culture wars" of the s and the rise of the home schooling movement have tended to polarize educators; in general, Kohlberg's views are more congenial to teachers or parents involved in progressive education or alternative school programs than they are to those who regard themselves as traditionalists or neoclassicists.

Some researchers aligned with the character education movement have attempted to reconcile their approach with Kohlberg's, but others consider cognitive developmentalism to be fundamentally incompatible with character education in terms of underlying assumptions and basic philosophy. Moreover, feminist educators have little patience with what they lawrence kohlberg biography summary organizer as the built-in sexism of Kohlberg's stage theory.

The area of research in which Kohlberg's contributions are most likely to affect contemporary readers outside the field of education is ethical analysis. Kohlberg's stage theory and his Moral Judgment Interview are still used to evaluate the moral maturity of students and practitioners in occupations ranging from finance and journalism to law enforcement and health care.

Given ongoing concern about the trustworthiness of people in positions of public trust, one can predict that ethics research has a productive future. Blatt, Moshe, and Lawrence Kohlberg. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Boyd, Dwight. Chazan, Barry. Crain, William C. Dykstra, Craig. Louisville, KY: Geneva Press, Fowler, James. San Francisco: Harper and Row, Gilligan, Carol.

Gilligan, Carol, Nona P. Lyons, and Trudy J. Hanmer, eds. Kohlberg, Lawrence. Wolins and M. Gottesman, eds. New York: Gordon and Breach, Baltes and K. Warner Schaie, eds. New York: Academic Press, Sizer, James M. Gustafson, and Nancy F. Sizer, eds. Sizer, ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Sills, ed. New York: Macmillan, Overly, ed. Kohlberg, Lawrence, and Elliott Turiel.

Lesser, ed. Lee, James Michael. Nucci, Larry. Education in the Moral Domain. Walberg and G. Haertel, eds. Berkeley, CA: MacCarchan, Piaget, Jean. The Moral Judgment of the Child. Translated by Marjorie Gabain. New York: Simon and Schuster, Power, F. Clark, Ann Higgins, and Lawrence Kohlberg. Lawrence Kohlberg's Approach to Moral Education.

New York: Columbia University Press, Rest, James. Rieff, Philip. New York: Harper and Row, Taylor, Charles. Haste, Helen E. Hunter, James Davison. Hymowitz, Kay S. Jang, Raymond W. Kohlberg, Lawrence, and Carol Gilligan. Kohlberg, Lawrence, and Rochelle Mayer. Lickona, Thomas. Powers, Elizabeth. Snell, Robin S. Twemlow, Stuart, MD.

Walsh, Catherine. Zalaznick, Edward. Campbell, Robert L. Gordon, Sarah. Watson Research Center, Brown, Lyn Mikel, and Carol Gilligan. Cortese, Anthony Joseph Paul. New York: Bantam Books, Modgil, Sohan, and Celia Modgil, eds. Lawrence Kohlberg: Consensus and Controversy. London: The Falmer Press, Reed, Donald R. Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography.

January 8, Retrieved January 08, from Encyclopedia. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia. Lawrence Kohlberg virtually developed the fields of moral psychology and moral education through his pioneering cognitive developmental theory and research.

Kohlberg's work grew out of a lifelong commitment to address injustice. After graduating from high school at the end of World War IIhe volunteered as an engineer on a ship that was smuggling Jewish refugees from Europe to Palestine through the British blockade. He was captured, interred in Cyprusescaped, fled to a kibbutz in Palestine, and made his way back to the United States where he joined another crew transporting refugees.

A passionate reader of the Great Books throughout his life, Kohlberg completed his undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago in one year. In he received his doctoral degree in psychology after writing a dissertation on developmental changes in children's moral thinking. This dissertation, which evaluated children's responses to the fictional dilemma of an impoverished man who steals an expensive drug for his dying wife, became one of the most cited unpublished dissertations ever.

When Kohlberg began his graduate studies, American psychologists, who were for the most part behaviorists, did not even use the word moral. Kohlberg's broad intellectual pursuits, which embraced philosophy, sociology, and psychology, led him to challenge mainstream thinking. In his dissertation and subsequent research, he drew on a moral philosophical tradition extending from Socrates to Kant that focused on the importance of moral reasoning and judgment.

Although Kohlberg was heavily influneced by Jean Piaget 's research and played a major role in advancing Piaget's cognitive developmental paradigm in the United StatesJames Mark BaldwinJohn Deweyand George Herbert Mead also significantly affected Kohlberg's thinking. Kohlberg's empirical research yielded an original and fecund description of moral development.

In his dissertation, he presented a cross-section of children and adolescents with a set of moral dilemmas and asked them to justify their judgments with a series of probing questions. Using an abductive "bootstrapping" method, he derived a sequence of moral types, which became the basis for his well-known six stages of moral judgment. Kohlberg modified his descriptions of the stages and method for coding them from the time of his dissertation to the publication of the Standard Issue Scoring Manual in Stage one is characterized by blind obedience to rules and authority and a fear of punishment.

Stage two is characterized by seeking to pursue one's concrete interests, recognizing that others need to do the same, and a calculating instrumental approach to decision-making. Stage three is characterized by trying to live up to the expectations of others for good behavior, by having good motives, and by fostering close relationships.

Stage four is characterized by a concern for maintaining the social system in order to promote social order and welfare. Stage five is characterized by judging the moral worth of societal rules and values insofar as they are consistent with fundamental values, such as liberty, the general welfare or utility, human rightsand contractual obligations.

Stage six is characterized by universal principles of justice and respect for human autonomy. Kohlberg hoped that his stages could provide a framework for moral education. He noted, however, that one could not simply assume that a higher stage was a better stage; one had to make a philosophical argument that the higher stages were more adequate from a moral point of view.

It was only then that educators could find a warrant for pursuing moral development as an aim of education. In his provocative essay, "From Is to Ought: How to Commit the Psychological Fallacy and Get Away with It in the Study of Moral Development," Kohlberg demonstrated a parallelism between psychological descriptive and philosophical-normative analyses of the stages, a parallelism, which, he contended, led to a complementarity and even convergence of the two analyses.

In addition to the moral hierarchy of the stages, Kohlberg made four other fundamental claims for his moral stage approach that are directly relevant to moral education. First, he, like Piaget, conceived of the stages as constructed and reconstructed by individuals through interacting with their social environment. Second, he posited that the stages of moral development are universal.

Third, he held that the stage formed an invariant sequence of development without skips or reversals. Finally, he maintained that his stages were holistic structures or organized patterns of moral reasoning. Kohlberg and his colleagues attempted to support these claims through twenty years of longitudinal and cross-cultural research. When he turned his attention to moral psychology to moral education, Kohlberg was faced with the objection that any form of teaching virtue involved the imposition of an arbitrary personal or religious belief.

Kohlberg appealed to the U. Constitution to demonstrate the principles of justice upon which the American government is based are, in fact, the very principles at the core of his highest stages. For Kohlberg civic and moral development are one and the same. Kohlberg endorsed Dewey's view that development intellectual as well as moral ought to be the aim of education and that schools ought to provide an environment conducive to development.

As a constructivist, Kohlberg advocated that schools provide an environment that encouraged active exploration rather than passive learning. Later Kohlberg would put these ideas into practice when he instituted the just community first in prisons and later in schools. Kohlberg's first research-based contribution to moral education was the moral discussion approach.

He started working on the approach in after his graduate student, Moshe Blatt, had found that the discussion of moral dilemmas led to a modest but significant development in moral reasoning. The moral discussion approach offered educators a way of promoting moral development while avoiding the Scylla of indoctrination and Charybdis of values relativism.

The key to the moral discussion approach was to stimulate a lively exchange of points of view that would lead to the disequilibrium necessary for cognitive development. The discussion leader acted as a facilitator and Socratic questioner, encouraging students to consider the perspective of others and to examine the adequacy of their own arguments.

The moral discussion approach should not be confused with the values clarification approach that was very prevalent in the s and s. The values clarification approach, which started with the assumption that values were a matter of individual preference, represented the extreme of individual relativism. According to this approach, the role of the teacher was limited to helping individual students to become aware of their own values and to tolerate the values of others.

Kohlberg saw the moral discussion approach as one way of promoting development to higher stages of moral reasoning through thoughtful and critical dialogue about moral issues. He was concerned that traditional approaches to character education with their emphasis on exhortation and role-modeling oversimplified the process of moral development and encouraged conformity.

Kohlberg wanted an approach to moral education that could address the social issues of his day, such as racism and social inequality. He also wanted an approach to moral education that went beyond cultural relativism. Dilemma discussions in schools was another method proposed by Kohlberg to increase moral reasoning. Unlike moral exemplars, Kohlberg tested this method by integrating moral dilemma discussion into the curricula of school classes in humanities and social studies.

Results of this and other studies using similar methods found that moral discussion does increase moral reasoning and works best if the individual in question is in discussion with a person who is using reasoning that is just one stage above their own. The final method Kohlberg used for moral education was known as "just communities". InKohlberg worked with schools to set up democracy-based programs, where both students and teachers were given one vote to decide on school policies.

Kohlberg's idea and development of "just communities" were greatly influenced by his time living on a kibbutz as a young adult in and when he was doing longitudinal cross-cultural research of moral development at Sasa, another kibbutz. Some of Kohlberg's most important publications were collected in his Essays on Moral DevelopmentVols.

Carol Gilligana fellow researcher of Kohlberg's in the studies of moral reasoning that led to Kohlberg's developmental stage theory, suggested that to make moral judgments based on optimizing concrete human relations is not necessarily a lower stage of moral judgment than to consider objective principles. Postulating that women may develop an empathy-based ethic with a different, but not lower structure than that Kohlberg had described, Gilligan wrote In a Different Voicea book that founded a new movement of care-based ethics that initially found strong resonance among feminists and later achieved wider recognition.

Kohlberg's response to Carol Gilligan's criticism was that he agreed with her that there is a care moral orientation that is distinct from a justice moral orientation, but he disagreed with her claim that women scored lower than men on measures of moral developmental stages because they are more inclined to use care orientation rather than a justice orientation.

Firstly, many studies measuring moral development of males and females found no difference between men and women, and when differences were found, they were attributable to differences in education, work experiences, and role-taking opportunities, but not gender. Kohlberg's detailed responses to numerous critics can be read in his book Essays on Moral Development: Vol.

Another criticism against Kohlberg's theory was that it focused too much on reason at the expense of other factors. One problem with Kohlberg's focus on reason was that little empirical evidence found a relationship between moral reasoning and moral behavior. Kohlberg recognized this lack of a relationship between his moral stages and moral behavior.

In an attempt to understand this, he proposed two sub-stages within each stage, to explain individual differences within each stage. According to Kohlberg, [ 34 ] an individual first interprets the situation using their moral reasoning, which is influenced by their moral stage and sub-stage. After interpretation individuals make a deontic choice and a judgment of responsibility, which are both influenced by the stage and sub-stage of the individual.

If the individual does decide on a moral action and their obligation to do it, they still need the non-moral skills to carry out a moral behavior. If this model is true then it would explain why research was having a hard time finding a direct relationship between moral reason and moral behavior. Another problem with Kohlberg's emphasis on moral reasoning is growing empirical support that individuals are more likely to use intuitive "gut reactions" to make moral decisions than use reason-based thought.

This expanding of the moral domain from reason has raised questions that perhaps morality research is entering areas of inquiry that are not considered real morality, which was a concern of Kohlberg when he first started his research. Scholars such as Elliot Turiel and James Rest have responded to Kohlberg's work with their own significant contributions.

While doing cross-cultural research in Belize inKohlberg contracted a tropical parasitic infection, [ 36 ] causing him extreme abdominal pain. The long-term effects of the infection and the medications took their toll, and Kohlberg's health declined as he also engaged in increasingly demanding professional work, including "Just Community" prison and school moral education programs.

He left his wallet with identification on the front seat of his unlocked car and apparently walked into the icy Boston Harbor. His car and wallet were found within a couple of weeks, and his body was recovered some time later, with the late winter thaw, in a tidal marsh across the harbor near the end of a Logan Airport runway. After Kohlberg's body was recovered and his death confirmed, former students and colleagues published special issues of scholarly journals to commemorate his contribution to developmental psychology.

Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikiquote Wikidata item. American psychologist — Bronxville, New YorkUS. Winthrop, MassachusettsUS. Early life and education [ edit ]. Career [ edit ]. This section needs additional citations for verification. Level 3 centers on social contracts and universal ethics.

Experiments with these stages of moral theory were often conducted by presenting subjects with moral dilemmas and seeing how they responded to them. Later in his studies, Kohlberg felt that it might be possible to extend the stages to include moral regression. The theories and work of Kohlberg can be examined in his published texts — Essays on Moral Development, Vols.

Lawrence Kohlberg suffered depression throughout the later years of his life. It is believed this stemmed from treatment related to a parasitic infection suffered in On January 19,Kohlberg literally walked into the freezing Boston Harbor to commit suicide by drowning. His body was recovered not long after and colleagues were shocked at what had occurred.

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