Lawrence Kohlberg's Modern Western Schools of Moral Education Representation

There are three main schools of moral education in modern times in the West, one is Romanticism represented by the French thinker Rousseau, the second is Cultural Transmissionism originating from the British thinker Locke, and the third is Progressivism pioneered from the American educator Dewey. The philosophical basis of Romanticism is that morality is a nature that originates from the human heart to judge what is good and what is evil, that children have innate goodness, and that moral education is the creation of suitable conditions for children to discover and develop their own nature. The culture that comes from adults and society only suppresses their development. Contrary to Romanticism, cultural transmissivism believes that morality is formed precisely as a result of the social environment and culture, because human behavior and thought can be influenced and controlled by the external environment, and education is the process of transferring knowledge and values to the students using various methods.

In Kohlberg's view, both lines have obvious flaws, the first of which is the view of morality as variable and relative. The former viewed morality as personal and the latter viewed morality as merely a social necessity with no ultimate standard. Secondly, these two schools of thought make the naturalistic error of pushing "ought" directly from "is". In common parlance, "is" here refers to the objective psychological facts and laws that exist in the process of human physical and mental development, and "should" refers to the good results that people hope to get from education. Romanticism equates the regularity of a child's physical and mental development directly with the formation of a child's moral goodness, and advocates allowing the child to unfold his or her so-called intrinsic goodness in a state of complete freedom, which in effect ultimately abolishes education. The psychological basis for the cultural transmissivist position is the behaviorist theory, which asserts that certain human behaviors are reinforced by external stimuli, and therefore, good morals are formed as a result of positive reinforcement. The former goes to the extreme of valuing only the subjective world itself, and the latter goes to the extreme of ignoring the subjective world altogether, both of which are undesirable. Progressivism, on the other hand, sees itself as overcoming the shortcomings of both by asserting that the process of moral formation is the result of the interaction between the child and society, that morality is developmental, and that it is a process in which the subjective world of man is actively changed by the social and cultural environment. Its psychological premise is that the human psyche is a process of development of internal structures characterized by increasing levels, as a result of the interaction between the internal and the external. Both the formation of morality and moral education should be based on such a psychological foundation. In contemporary psychology, the concept of moral development is viewed differently. Two schools of thought that have been influential are Floyd's school of psychoanalysis and Piaget's school of cognitive psychology. Kohlberg can be called Piaget's successor in the field of moral development. The influence of Piaget's views is the very ideological source of Kohlberg's doctrine.

Piaget had done a lot of research on children's moral judgment and published a monograph, the book Moral Judgment of Children (1930 French edition, 1932 English edition). He reveals the trend of children's moral development from the trend of their social cognitive development. Throughout the book, there is a single development, that is, the moral development of the child is a process from "otherness" to "self-discipline". By "other-discipline" is meant that the child's moral judgments are governed by value standards other than his own, whereas by "self-discipline" is meant that the child's moral judgments are governed by his own subjective value standards. Piaget's attribution of character development, i.e., the development of moral quality, to just one aspect of moral judgment certainly has its limitations. However, studying the development of children's moral character through the development of moral judgment is one of the features of Piaget's research in this area. Based on the idea of a developmental process from otherness to self-regulation, Piaget proposed the doctrine of two stages of children's moral development, whereby children under the age of ten or eleven make judgments in a kind of dilemmatic reasoning, whereas children above that age think in a different way. That is, the former tends to view moral rules as fixed and absolute, prescribed by adults or handed down from God, while the latter possesses a degree of relativistic perspective, viewing moral rules as something that allows for change. Piaget's work on moral judgment essentially uncovered a series of changes, the key one occurring between the ages of ten and eleven, just as the child begins to enter the stage of formal arithmetic. According to Piaget's thinking, children's moral judgments are closely linked to the development of children's thinking, and during roughly the same period (10 or 11 years of age), children's moral thinking undergoes a change, with younger children basing their moral judgments on consequences and older children basing their judgments more on purpose. But the development of the intellect does not stop there; this is the time when formal arithmetic begins; and Piaget's two-stage theory of morality seems to have been able to study moral rules only to this depth of relative change. One would expect questions about moral judgment to continue to develop throughout youth. Thus, Kohlberg began work in this area, and he is an outstanding representative of research in the tradition of Piaget. Taking human moral judgment as his point of focus, he conducted a large number of experimental analyses and put forward more than Piaget's original formula for the theory of stages of moral development. The American psychologist Kohlberg, on the basis of inheriting some of the doctrines of the British psychologist W. McDougall and the Swiss psychologist Piaget, specialized in exploring the philosophical and psychological foundations of moral education, and put forward his personal propositions on the development of children's moral cognition and moral education.

Kohlberg begins by analyzing a very common phenomenon in moral education: the discrepancy between what students know and what they do. He argues that children's moral judgments are commonly inconsistent with their behavior, but that the higher the level of development of an individual's moral judgment, the higher the degree of consistency between moral judgment and behavior. Therefore, Kohlberg believed that the key to moral development is the development of students' moral judgment. Regarding moral judgment, he believes that it is reflected by the structure, or form, of a child's moral judgment. There is a difference between content and form of moral judgment. The so-called content of moral judgment is the "should" or "shouldn't", "right" or "wrong" answer to a moral question; the so-called content of moral judgment is the "right" or "wrong" answer to a moral question; the so-called content of moral judgment is the "right" or "wrong" answer to a moral question. "The so-called form of moral judgment refers to the reasons for the judgment and the way of reasoning contained in the process of justification. According to Kohlberg, there are generally only three possible answers to a moral question -- affirmative, negative and indecisive. So it is not the content of children's moral judgments that separates students' levels of moral judgment; it is the form of their moral judgments that reflects the level of moral judgment.

How to promote the development of children's moral judgment? Kohlberg argues that conflict-laden interactions and life situations are best suited to promote the development of individual moral judgment. Through the discussion of hypothetical moral dilemmas, children are able to understand and assimilate the moral reasoning of peers above their own stage, and reject the moral reasoning of peers below their own moral stage; therefore, group discussion around moral dilemmas is an effective means of promoting students' moral development. It is evident that Kohlberg attaches great importance to the construction, discussion, and application of moral dilemmas. In fact, moral dilemmas are also an important basis and evidence for his elaboration and analysis of children's moral development.