Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Conflict, Contradiction,
in Moral Development
and Education
Edited by
Larry Nucci
University of Illinois at Chicago
Preface vii
v
VI CONTENTS
There has been a surge in interest over the past two decades in issues of
moral development and what is referred to as character education. That in
terest in the topic of moral development and character formation has not
abated. A quick search on Amazon.com, for example, turned up 1,026 re-
suits for "moral education." Nearly all of these books present a picture of
moral growth and education that conforms to the general notion that chil
dren should get morally "better" as they develop, and that moral education
entails either a process of gradual building up of virtue through socialization
into one's cultural norms (Bennett, 1993; Lickona, 1991; Wynne & Ryan
1993), or movement toward more adequate (better) forms of moral reason
ing (Lickona, 1991; Nucci, 2001; Power, Higgins, &Kohlberg, 1989). This
understandable emphasis on moral education as moral improvement belies
the role of resistance, conflict, and contrarian elements in both the course of
individual moral development and moral "progress" at a societal level.
The focus of this volume, in contrast, is on the nature and functional
value of conflicts and challenges to the dominant moral and social values
framework. These challenges emerge in two realms that are not often
thought of as relating to one another. On the one hand are the conflicts,
challenges, and contradictions that children and adolescents raise in the
process of their development. On the other hand are the challenges and
contradictions to the dominant social order that occur at the level of society.
Both sets of challenges can be viewed as disruptions to normalcy that need
to be repaired or suppressed. For example, many social commentators have
written about the current period as one of moral decay or decline (Bennett,
1992, Etzioni, 1993). The source of this moral decay is generally traced to
the period of social upheaval during the 1960s and the subsequent changes
vii
Vili PREFACE
in family structure and public mores. These sentiments were perhaps best
expressed by my late colleague Edward Wynne (1987) when he wrote that
"By many measures youth conduct was at its best in 1955" (p. 56). From the
point of view of such cultural analysts, moral education is sorely needed as
an antidote to the perceived moral degeneracy of contemporary society.
Alternatively, such resistances can be seen as essential to moral growth at
an individual level and moral progress at the societal level. It is the latter
perspective that has been overlooked in recent attention to children's moral
development and education, and it is that positive role of resistance that the
bulk of the chapters in this volume zero in on. This is not to say that all of the
chapters in this volume take a purely sanguine view of moral and social con
flict. In fact some of the chapters pointedly address the risks entailed by so
cial instability and adolescent antinomianism. On balance, however, the
volume presents a new look at the role of conflict and resistance for moral
development, and its implications for moral education.
The book is divided into three parts to help frame the discussion. The first
part directly takes up the issue of resistance as it occurs at a cultural level,
and the implications of such resistance for moral education and socializa
tion. The second part explores the normative forms of adolescent resistance
and contrarian behavior that vex parents and teachers alike. This discussion
is within the context of chapters that look at the ways in which parenting
and teaching for moral development can positively make use of these nor
mative challenges. The final part brings back the issue of societal structure
and culture to illustrate how negative features of society, such as racial dis
crimination and economic disparity, can feed into the construction of nega
tive moral identity in youth posing challenges to moral education. The book
concludes with a chapter presenting an educational program designed to re
spond to such challenges among African American youth in the United
States.
The first section contains two chapters that explore the connections be
tween resistances at a sociocultural level and implications for moral educa
tion and socialization.
In the first chapter, Elliot Turiel makes the case that resistance and sub
version are part of everyday life in most cultures, and that they are integral to
the process of development. Turiel argues that as an integral part of develop
ment, it is necessary that moral education incorporate the ideas of resistance
and subversion into their programs. It is also necessary that they be inte
grated into theories of social and moral development. According to Turiel,
PREFACE IX
most of our theories either fail to account for resistance, and largely treat it
as antisocial, or view it as unusual activity sometimes undertaken by those
who have reached a high level of development. By contrast, research has
demonstrated that social conflict and resistance based on moral aims occur
in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Turiel draws on research done
within hierarchical societies in the Middle East, and from his own childhood
experiences growing up in the Mediterranean during World War II to illus
trate his points. His position is that especially among adults, conflicts occur
over inequalities embedded in the structure of social systems: the inequali
ties inherent in social hierarchies that allow greater power and personal
entitlements to some groups (e.g., social hierarchies based on gender, socio'
economic class, ethnic or racial status). In their everyday lives adults come
into conflict with others and resist moral wrongs embedded in cultural prac
tices that serve to further the interests of those in higher positions in the so
cial hierarchy. Resistance frequently entails hidden and deceptive actions
aimed at transforming aspects of the social system judged unfair and detri
mental to the welfare of groups of people. Over the long term, conflict, resis
tance, and subversion are sources of the transformation of culture.
The second chapter is by Diana Baumrind, who is widely known for her
work on children's socialization in relation to patterns of parenting and
adult authority. In this chapter she combines those issues with a neo-Marx-
ist analysis of morality and social hierarchy. Many Americans given the out
come of the Cold War have a knee-jerk response to anything labeled
Marxist. In Baumrind's hands, however, the theory speaks to fundamental
questions of moral relativism, individual moral growth, and the definitions
of moral progress and character. As Baumrind argues, moral ambiguities and
uncertainties affecting praxis are not resolvable by appeal to either
universalizable, certain, and fixed principles of justice or to cultural norms,
but arise from historically and personally situated divergent worldviews that
guide actual decision making as well as accepted criteria for validating be
liefs. Cultures then may construct radically different moral codes and value
systems. Rather than simply accept these irreconcilable differences as a fait
accompli, individuals and groups are obliged to adopt and justify a stand
point that should then mandate their moral praxis. In cases where power
disparities privilege one group, one is obliged to take the standpoint of the
least advantaged. From Baumrind's point of view, deontologists, such as
Kohlberg, fail to acknowledge sufficiently the plurality of real value systems
arising from irreconcilable worldviews, whereas culturalists fail to recognize
the multiple conflicting standpoints within a culture arising from divergent
class interests. She argues that the development of optimal competence and
character in children requires the cultivation of the ability to responsibly
dissent and accept unpleasant consequences, as well as to constructively
comply with legitimate authoritative directives. Baumrind reminds us that
X PREFACE
The final three chapters of the book explore cases where the social inequi
ties of society converge with normative youth resistance to produce nega
tive outcomes for the construction of personal identity and moral conduct.
Each chapter explores ways in which education can work toward the moral
growth of youth affected by these social cancers. Edelstein's chapter ex
plores these issues within the context of German reunification. The remain
ing chapters by Watkins and Jagers focus on racism in the United States.
This final section begins with German scholar Wolfgang Edelstein's anal
ysis of the dismaying effects of reunification on some youth from the former
East Germany. As Edelstein describes the years since the downfall of the
German Democratic Republic and the reunification of Germany a xenopho
bic, racist, and anti-Semitic youth movement has become increasingly, and
at times, murderously active, especially, but not uniquely, in eastern Ger
many. Edelstein's thesis is the conjoining of the two Germanys brought to
gether two greatly disparate economies that engendered both financial and
PREFACE X11I
personal humiliation for scores of people from the former East Germany.
The youth from families who bore the brunt of this humiliation responded
with personal anomie and attendant moral deprivation. As an action of
self-defense, these youth often have banded together and treated other
even more defenseless people, especially Jews and foreigners, as objects of
scorn and physical attack. Edelstein concludes his rather sobering chapter
with a discussion of approaches to moral education that would reconstruct
the personal identities and moral positions of these young people.
William Watson follows Edelstein's chapter with an equally sobering look
at the history of American racism as it has played out in the perspectives
White America has had of the morality of African Americans. Watson is an
educational historian and in his chapter he describes how many current
views of the morality of African Americans can be traced back to 19th- cen
tury "scientific racists," who argued that people of color were both intellec
tually and morally inferior. As Watson argues, unable to conclusively
"prove" genetic inferiority, early 20th-century racist educators and eugen
icists tenaciously clung to the moral inferiority argument as a basis for subju
gation of African Americans. Watson develops the thesis that claims of
moral deficiency have provided a rationale for "deficit" theories and manu
factured perceptions of people of color for decades. In the chapter, Watson
explores how this moral deficit argument has been applied to the education
of African Americans over the last 150 years.
Watson's chapter forms the backdrop for the chapter by Robert Jagers
that concludes the volume. Jagers's chapter describes an evolving effort to
promote social and emotional competence development among school-age
African American children. The basis of his educational work builds from
an analysis of four racialized personal identities. These identities are dis
cussed in terms of oppression, morality, community violence, and liberation.
The chapter explores the developmental implications for children's moral
competence promotion in school and extended hour settings. Jagers dis
cusses student-teacher relationships, curriculum content, and learning
contexts as they relate to the potential contributions of low- and middle-in-
come children to the collective well being of the African American commu
nity. This coordinated cultural approach is described by Jagers as an avenue
for engaging the normative resistance of African American youth with its
connection to reality-based judgments of the inequities and injustices that
remain within America's racialized society as an avenue for constructive
moral growth.
Taken together, this collection of chapters presents a rich counterpoint to
the pictures of moral growth as the progressive sophistication of moral rea
soning or the gradual accretion of moral virtues and cultural values. Instead,
we are presented in this book with a series of chapters based on careful re
search that moral life is not a straight forward journey, but rather a series of
XJV PREFACE
Larry Nucci
REFERENCES
Bennett, W. (1992). The de-valuing of America: The fight for our culture and our children.
New York: Simon & Schuster.
Bennett, W. (1993). The book of virtues: A treasury of great moral stories. New York: Simon
& Schuster.
Etzioni, A. (1993). The spirit of community: The reinvention of American society. New York:
Touchstone.
Lickona, T. (1991). Educating for character: How our schools can teach respect and responsi'
bility. New York: Bantam Books.
Nucci, L. (2001). Education in the moral domain. Cambridge, England: Cambridge Uni
versity Press.
Power, C., Higgins, A., & Kohlberg, L (1989). Lawrence Kohlberg's approach tomoral edu
cation. New York: Columbia University Press.
Wynne, E., &. Ryan, K. (1993). Reclaiming our schools: A handbook on teaching character,
academics, and discipline. New York: Macmillan.
Parti
in Everyday Life
Elliot Turiel
University of California, Berkeley
Martin Luther King, Jr. has long been recognized as a great moral leader who
spearheaded extremely significant changes toward social justice for African
Americans in the United States. However, King himself recognized that so
cial change is connected with the aspirations of large numbers of people af
fected by societal injustices. As he put it in his famous letter from a
Birmingham (Alabama) jail (King, 1963), "We know through painful expe
rience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be
demanded by the oppressed Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed
forever. The urge for freedom will come. This is what happened to the
American Negro" (pp. 6, 12).
King wrote his letter while imprisoned for leading a nonviolent demon
stration in Birmingham. The letter was in response to a public letter sent by
eight prominent clergymen admonishing King for his civil rights activities.
In the response, King challenged religious and governmental authorities to
support protest and demonstrations to combat injustice. Conflict and ten
sion, King (1963) maintained, can serve positive moral ends:
I have earnestly worked and preached against violent tension, but there is a type of
constructive tension that is necessary for growth ... to create the kind of tension in so
ciety that will help men to rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the ma
jestic heights of understanding and brotherhood, (p. 5)
Yes, because that is the rule. (WHY CAN THEY HAVE THAT RULE?) If that's what
the boss wants to do, he can do that. (HOW COME?) Because he's the boss, he is in
charge of the school. (BOB GOES TO GROVE SCHOOL. THIS IS A WARM DAY
6 TURIEL
# # : ( ! # * * # * # # * * # * # * * * * * *
No, it is not okay. (WHY NOT?) Because that is like making other people unhappy.
You can hurt them that way. It hurts other people, hurting is not good. (MARK GOES
TO PARK SCHOOL. TODAY IN SCHOOL HE WANTS TO SWING BUT HE
FINDS THAT ALL THE SWINGS ARE BEING USED BY OTHER CHILDREN.
SO HE DECIDES TO HIT ONE OF THE CHILDREN AND TAKE THE SWING.
IS IT OKAY FOR MARK TO DO THAT?) No. Because he is hurting someone else.
(Turiel, 1983, p. 62)
Even at the young age of 5 years this boy is of two minds about rules and
authority. With regard to clothing, he accepts the rules of the school as stip
ulated, but with regard to hitting he does not. He judges permitting children
to remove their clothes as acceptable because of the rule and because the
boss (i.e., the head of the school) has the authority to impose the rule or
practice. When it comes to permitting children to hit each other, however,
this boy is unwilling to grant the boss the authority to institute or implement
the rule. If we looked only at this boy's judgments about clothing, it might
appear that he is compliant (or heteronomous) about school rules and au
thorities. His judgments about the act of hitting reveal that he makes dis
criminations between different types of rules or commands and wants to
place restrictions on the jurisdiction of a person in a position of authority. In
doing so, he expresses opposition to rules and authority from a moral stand
point (autonomy).
The responses of this boy indicate that the origins of opposition are in
early childhood. Although that study was not designed to examine opposi
tion, other research has shown that children do engage in oppositional ac
tivities and get into conflicts with siblings, peers, and parents (Dunn, 1987,
1988; Dunn, Brown, &Maguire, 1995; Dunn &Munn, 1985, 1987; Dunn
& Slomkowski, 1992). These oppositional activities exist, in the same chil
dren, alongside positive, prosocial actions and emotions.
Now consider two examples illustrative of opposition, resistance, and
subversion among adultsbut implicate children as well. These examples
do not come from research, but from recollections in adulthood. The first
are my own recollections, and the second come from those of a sociologist
from Morocco, as reported in Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood
(Mernissi, 1994).
To place the first example into a cultural context, I need to provide some
personal background. I was born on the Greek island of Rhodes (my father's
birthplace), where I lived until I was 6 years old. My family then lived in the
1. RESISTANCE AND SUBVERSION IN EVERYDAY LIFE 7
city of Izmir in Turkey (my mother's birthplace) for 2 years. We then moved to
New York City. My contacts and knowledge of Greek and Turkish cultural
practices were maintained because we were part of a large community of peo
ple who had immigrated from Greece and Turkey to New York, and because I
went back to those places for extended periods many times (I have also con
ducted research in Turkey). The most relevant feature of cultural practices for
the present purposes is that, for the most part, men were in socially dominant
positions and women were in subordinate positions. In my parents' genera
tion, women did not work outside of the home and men had almost exclusive
control of the family's finances. Typically, women were given an allotted
amount of money (e.g., a weekly allowance) for household expenses.
In many respects, women were not content with the inequalities or the
control exerted by their husbands. One of the actions women took to sub
vert the situation was to, when possible, put some money into places avail
able to them and secret from their husbands. Doing so involved elaborate
deceptions, as well as a fair amount of risk. Women had several reasons for
maintaining secret funds. It was done so they could have some control over
their lives and make purchases without the continual oversight of their hus
bands. It was done to have resources to help members of their side of the
family in times of need. It was also done to ensure that resources would be
available in the case of a husband's death. The last reason was particularly
important because laws were highly unfavorable toward widows.
The hidden activities I have described were not done in isolation.
Women conspired with other women they could trust. In addition, they of
ten discussed their concerns and activities with their children. The second
illustrative example, from Fatima Mernissi's published childhood recollec
tions, shared some of the same features. Mernissi recounted stories from her
childhood living in a harem in the city of Fez during the 1940s (Mernissi,
1994). Before relating her story, let me mention that our research has identi
fied another domain that stands alongside the moral and conventional
the domain of judgments about autonomy of persons and boundaries of their
jurisdiction (Nucci, 2001). Children form judgments about various activi
ties, including recreational ones that are considered up to individual choice.
Although resistance and subversion are grounded in moral judgments, the
personal domain can be part of it. When personal prerogatives are systemat
ically restricted in unequal ways, the inequality can turn the personal into
moral issues. This can be seen in Mernissi's storywhich on the surface is
about the desire of some women to listen to music and dance. On a deeper
level, the story is about how in everyday activities there is commitment to
combating injustices and inequalities, as well as defiance of those in posi
tions of power.
According to Mernissi (1994), the women, who were confined within the
walls of the compound they lived in, were prohibited from listening on their
8 TURIEL
own to a radio in the men's salon; the men kept the radio locked in a cabinet.
It seems, however, that while the men were away the women listened to mu
sic on that very radio. As it happened, one day Fatima (when she was 9 years
old) and her cousin were asked by her father what they had done that day.
They answered that they had listened to the radio. Mernissi told the rest of
the story as follows:
Our answer indicated that there was an unlawful key going around .... it indicated
that the women had stolen the key and made a copy of it.... A huge dispute ensued,
with the women being interviewed in the men's salon one at a time. But after two days
of inquiry, it turned out the key must have fallen from the sky. No one knew where it
had come from.
Even so, following the inquiry, the women took their revenge on us children. They said
that we were traitors, and ought to be excluded from their games. That was a horrifying
prospect, so we defended ourselves by explaining that all we had done was tell the
truth. Mother retorted by saying that some things were true, indeed, but you still could
not say them: you had to keep them secret. And then she added that what you say and
what you keep secret has nothing to do with truth and lies. (pp. 7-8)
The use of seemingly trivial actions, such as chewing gum, for symbolic
purposes occurred in other places and times. Another example can be seen
in the activities of women in contemporary Iran. In Iran, women are re
quired to dress in certain ways and cover their faces with veils. They are also
prohibited from wearing makeup. However, it is not uncommon for women
to defy, in safe public places, the requirements to keep their faces covered
1. RESISTANCE AND SUBVERSION IN EVERYDAY LIFE 9
and free of makeup. As was the case with the mother's use of chewing gum,
makeup is seen to serve broader purposes in Iran. As one woman put it, "Lip
stick is not just lipstick in Iran. It transmits political messages" ("Lipstick
Politics in Iran").
The restrictions imposed by Iranian governmental and religious authori
ties on women and men are extensive, including prohibitions on ways of
dressing, watching videos, listening to music, use of alcohol, and relations
between women and men. Moreover, there are serious efforts to enforce
these policies, as vividly told by Naipul (1997): "And helicopters flew over
Northern Tehran looking for satellite disks, just as the Guards walked in the
park to watch boys and girls, or entered houses to look for alcohol and
opium" (p. 65). In spite of the risks of detection, many people engage in hid
den activities in violation of the prohibitions. There is widespread use of sat
ellite dishes, videocassettes, compact disks, and alcohol. In Iran, too,
parents worry about the future of their children. The reflections of an Ira
nian woman are informative ("Beating the System, With Bribes and the Big
Lie," 1997):
We live a double-life in this country. My children know that when their school teach
ers ask whether we drink at home, they have to say no. If they are asked whether we
dance or play cards, they have to say no. But the fact is we do drink, dance, and play
cards, and the kids know it. So they are growing to be liars and knowing that to survive
in this country we have to be. That's a terrible thing, and I want to change it. (p. A4)
The features exemplified in the various examples I have discussed thus far
were writ large in events in Afghanistan that came to great public attention
toward the end of 2001. As is well known, the Taliban, which had ruled Af
ghanistan since 1996, fell in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in New
York and Washington, D.C. on September 11, 2001. While in power, the
Taliban imposed severe restrictions on people's activities. They banned tele
visions, VCRs, most music, movies, kites, and much more. They banned de
pictions of living creatures, and required men to have beards. The
restrictions imposed on women were the most severe. Women were con
fined to their homes unless accompanied by a male relative. When ventur
ing out, women were required to be totally covered by a burka. Females were
denied schooling and the opportunity to work. Furthermore, females could
not receive medical treatment from male physiciansbut women could not
work as physicians. As a consequence, the health of women suffered greatly.
Immediately after the fall of the Taliban, the sense of liberation felt by
many women and men was striking. As told in media accounts day after day,
the reaction was strong and swift. There was widespread use of the previ
1Q TURIEL
Nussbaum, 1999, 2000, for examples from India and Bangladesh) share key
features with the ones from Afghanistan. The examples demonstrate that
people resist in social conditions of inequality, injustice, and oppression. Re
sistance and subversion are connected with the domains of moral and per
sonal judgments. Moreover, the examples point to the ways in which
children are exposed to a multitude of social experiences. They often receive
mixed messages about social norms, laws, cultural practices, relations
among authorities (e.g., mother and father, parents and governmental au
thorities) , and about matters portrayed by some as moral virtues (especially
honesty and dishonesty, truth and lies). The complex and multifaceted na
ture of children's social interactions was captured by Piaget (195 l/1995a) in
his assertion that:
Socialization in no way constitutes the result of a unidirectional cause such as the pres
sure of the adult community upon the child through such means as education in the
family, and subsequently in the school.... it involves the intervention of a multiplicity
of interactions of different types and sometimes with opposed effects, (p. 276)
The idea that children's social and moral development is a function of a mul
tiplicity of different types of interactions is in accord with the proposition
that resistance and subversion reflect individuals' heterogeneous relations
to cultural practices, including individuals' efforts to evaluate and transform
those practices. In discussing the multiplicity of social interactions, Piaget
(1951/1995a) went on to caution about "sweeping generalizations" in at
tempting to "make sense of the systems of relations and interdependencies
actually involved" (p. 276). However, sweeping generalizations are by no
means uncommon when psychologists and others attempt to draw contrasts
between cultures. The most familiar set of generalizations is seen in descrip
tions of differences between Western and non-Western cultures; it is said
that Western cultures are primarily individualistic and non-Western cul
tures are primarily collectivistic (e.g., Markus &.Kitayama, 1991; Shweder
& Bourne, 1982; Triandis, 1989). By virtue of an individualistic orientation,
Westerners place at the forefront freedoms, independence, and rights.
Given the emphasis on the individual rather than the group, it may well be
that Westerners engage in resistance to cultural practices. It is not expected
that non-Westerners would typically engage in resistance, let alone subver
sive activities, given their emphasis on the group rather than individuals.
Within that viewpoint, non-Westerners accept their prescribed social roles,
which in turn produces social harmony.
The various examples I have presented contradict the proposition that
there are shared understandings regarding social roles in a system of interde
12 TURIEL
Cultures are not monoliths, people are not stamped out like coins by the power ma
chine of social convention. They are constructed by social norms, but norms are plural
and people are devious. Even in societies that nourish problematic roles for men and
women, real men and women can find spaces in which to subvert those conventions.
(P- H)
DEVIOUSNESS, SUBVERSION,
honestly admit to having done so. We can ask, would the findings be differ
ent if physicians were posed with a similar question: "Have you lied to an in
surance company in the past 12 months?" A more productive approach to
honesty among youths would be to closely examine how they understand
moral and personal consideration in relation to persons in authority, includ
ing parents and teachers.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
The most significant thing that happened when I finished registering, came out to go
my first class, there was a Black standing in the hall. I thought that looked a little
strange. And he had a broom on his arm. When I walked by he turned his body so the
broom handle would touch me. And he was delivering, probably, one of the most im
18 TURIEL
portant messages I ever got at Ole Miss. The message was that we are looking after
youevery Black eye is looking after you. That was a greater act of defiance than what
I was doing because he could have lost his job for that.
Laupa, M. (1991). Children's reasoning about three authority attributes: Adult status,
knowledge, and social position. Developmental Psychology, 27, 321-329.
Laupa, M., & Turiel, E. (1986). Children's conceptions of adult and peer authority. Child
Development, 57, 405-412.
Lewis, M., & Saarni, C. (1993). Lying and deception in everyday life. New York: Guilford
Press.
Lipstick politics in Iran. (1999, August 19). New York Times.
Markus, H. R., StKitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self: Implications for cognition,
emotion, and motivation. Psychological Review, 98, 224-253.
Mernissi, F. (1994). Dreams of trespass: Tales of a harem girlhood. Reading, MA: Addison-
Wesley.
Naipul, V S. (1997, May 26). After the revolution. The New Yorker, pp. 52-54.
Neff, K. D. (2001). Judgments of personal autonomy and interpersonal responsibility in
the context of Indian spousal relationships: An examination of young people's rea
soning in Mysore, India. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 19, 233257.
Nucci, L. R (2001). Education in the moral domain. Cambridge, England: Cambridge
University Press.
Nussbaum, M. C. (1999). Sex and social justice. New York: Oxford University Press.
Nussbaum, M. C. (2000). Women and human development: The capabilities approach.
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Okin, S. M. (1989). Justice, gender, and the family. New York: Basic Books.
Piaget, J. (1995a). Egocentric thought and sociocentric thought. In J. Piaget, Sociological
studies (pp. 270-286). London: Routledge. (Original work published 1951)
Piaget, J. (1995b). Problems of the social psychology of childhood. In J. Piaget, Sociologi
cal studies (pp. 287-318). London: Routledge. (Original work published 1960)
Shweder, R. A., & Bourne, E. J. (1982). Does the concept of person vary cross-cultur-
ally? In A. J. Marsella & G. M. White (Eds.), Cultural conceptions of mental health and
therapy (pp. 97-137). Boston: Reidel.
Sommers, C. H. (1984). Ethics without virtue: Moral education in America. American
Scholar, 53, 381-389.
Triandis, H. C. (1989). The self and social behavior in differing cultural contexts. Psy
chological Review, 96, 506-520.
Turiel, E. (1983). The development of social knowledge: Morality and convention. Cam
bridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Turiel, E. (1998). The development of morality. In W. Damon (Series Ed.) & N.
Eisenberg (Vol. Ed.), Handbook of child psychology: Vol. 3. Social, emotional, and person
ality development (5th ed., pp. 863-932). New York: Wiley.
Turiel, E. (2002). The culture of morality: Social development, context, and conflict. Cam
bridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Turiel, E., & Wainryb, C. (1998). Concepts of freedoms and rights in a traditional hierar
chically organized society. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 16, 375395.
Turiel, E., & Wainryb, C. (2000). Social life in cultures: Judgments, conflicts, and sub
version. Child Development, 71, 250-256.
Wainryb, C., & Turiel, E. (1994). Dominance, subordination, and concepts of personal
entitlements in cultural contexts. Child Development, 65, 17011722.
Weston, D. R., & Turiel, E. (1980). Act-rule relations: Children's concepts of social
rules. Developmental Psychology, 16, 417-424.
Wikan, U. (1991). Toward an experience-near anthropology. Cultural Anthropology, 6,
285-305.
2O TURIEL
Wikan, U. (1996). Tomorrow, God willing: Self-made destinies in Cairo. Chicago: Univer
sity of Chicago Press.
Wynia, M. K., Cummins, D. S., VanGeest, J. B., & Wilson, I. B. (2000). Physician manip
ulation of reimbursement rules for patients: Between a rock and a hard place. Journal
of the American Medical Association, 283, 1858-1865.
Wynne, E. A. (1989). Transmitting traditional values in contemporary schools. In L. E
Nucci (Ed.), Moral development and character education: A dialogue (pp. 19-36).
Berkeley, CA: McCutchan.
2
Pluralistic Society:
Constructive Obedience
in Moral/Character Education
Diana Baumrind
Institute of Human Development
University of California, Berkeley
Dialectical Materialism
Dialectical materialists seek to understand the driving force of personal and
social development, not in the realization of abstract universalizable ideals
such as the Kantian categorical imperative, or Rawls's original position, but
instead within the conflicting tendencies operative in everyday material
processes of nature and society.
Ontologically Marxist materialism, as opposed to idealism, means that the ob
servable world is real in its own right, deriving its reality from neither a supernat
ural nor a transcendent source, and independent of mind for its existence. Mind
"reflects" the observable world, but in Marxist materialism reflection does not
signify a mirror image passively recorded or a reproduction or exact correspon
dence. The form in which material reality is reflected in consciousness is a prod
uct of the active engagement with its surroundings of the living organism, who
does not merely perceive directly the appearance of things, but conceives of
their interconnections and causes as they relate to his or her purposes. In that
sense, although objective truth is absolute, knowledge of truth is provisional
and relative, limited as well as illuminated by each one's purposes and stand
point. We know how well the ideas consistent with our perspective correspond
to the true properties of external objects and their relations by how successfully
we can produce and change them. Through the effort of production and utiliza
tion the "thing-in-itself' becomes a "thing-for-us."
The term dialectical in dialectical materialism expresses the dynamic inter
connections of things and the universality of change owing to the fact that all
things are composed of opposing forces: A as a process is always becoming
not-A. To think dialectically is to emphasize a unity of opposites, and to at
tempt to synthesize thesis and antithesis. The opposites of mutually exclusive
and jointly all-encompassing categories interpenetrate, as with attraction and
repulsion, yin and yang, organism and environment, life and death, good and
evil. Although the principle of noncontradiction is a precondition for making
a logical argument, contradiction is inherent in the natural and social systems
to which these arguments pertain. Paradox expresses the unity of opposites in
real life. For example, how is one to preach and practice tolerance toward
ideas and conduct that are intolerant or intolerable?
The Marxist sociopolitical lens through which I view obedience and dis
sent in moral education and the disciplinary encounter cannot be charac
terized as either liberal or conservative, although Lakoff (1996), in his
consideration of the politics of morality, places my views on these matters
2. CONSTRUCTIVE OBEDIENCE AND RESPONSIBLE DISSENT 23
firmly in the liberal camp. I applaud the liberal agenda of Rawls (1971) and
his followers in their concern for social justice and equitable distribution of
resources. However, I oppose the primacy liberals place on personal freedom
and rights, exemplified by Dworkin's (1977) claim that "if someone has a
right to do something, then it is wrong for the government to deny it to him
even though it would be in the general interest to do so" (p. 269). From
where I stand, in that remark Dworkin takes rights too seriously relative to
community welfare. In the interest of community welfare (Etzioni, 1993,
2000), I advocate such restrictions on rights in this country as sobriety
checks, drug testing for those entrusted with public safety, and mandated
disclosures to health workers of serious communicable diseases. However, in
support of rights, I oppose the draconian provisions of the Patriot Act, which
would expand the United States government's power to punish dissent,
search homes and offices, and otherwise undercut the power of the judiciary
to check abuses of these broad new powers.
I argue for a rule utilitarian as opposed to a deontic theory of justification
of such normative judgments as those I propose in later sections 2 and 3 of
this chapter, because it is concerned with social utility and affirms the
assailability inherent in moral praxis. Moral praxis is assailable because the
criteria by which praxis is justified are relative to one's standpoint, and in
that sense are not incorrigible. A standpoint is a perspective from which par
ticular features of reality are brought into sharp perspective and other fea'
tures are obscured. The emphasis on praxis, that is action informed by
judgment, in the Marxist view of morality is animated by its atheism: Be
cause God does not exist it is the responsibility of fallible human beings be
reft of the certitude conferred by divine command or secular monistic
deontology to generate all the acts of creation, compassion, and justice as
signed by theists to God.
bear, and compromises will be made based on relative power. Such compro
mises, whether in the boardroom or on the playground, seldom result in gen
uine restoration of consensus.
Moral/Character Education
Character education in the classroom is a daunting and controversial en
deavor. How are children to be introduced to the complexities of moral deci
sion making? When, if ever, is lying, stealing, or killing justified? Is it right to
lie to protect family secrets? What, if anything, justifies placing corporate-
sponsored materials and products in the school? Are parents justified in re
stricting the freedom of children in ways they cannot restrict each others'
freedom? How is Virginia Durr to be judged when her work together with
her husband in fighting discrimination in the South was done at the expense
of severely neglecting the emotional needs of her own children (see Colby &
Damon, 1992, chap. 5, "Virginia Durr: Champion of Justice," pp. 91-133) ?
Moral/character education is concerned with character formation, or the
development of virtuous habits in children. To an outside observer, the
moral education and character education movements appear to ground
their educational strategies and view of virtue in divergent political ideolo
gies that pit liberals against conservatives in the culture wars. The character
education movement inclines toward a "traditionalist" or conservative view
of education as transmitting received wisdom, emphasizing the critical role
adults play in reinforcing the virtuous habits that from a traditionalist per
spective comprise good character. The moral education movement is "pro
gressive" or liberal in its rejection of directive pedagogy, believing that the
school's moral atmosphere and how teachers treat children contribute more
to their level of moral development than directed recitation of the right an
swers. In the Platonic Kohlbergian tradition, the liberal moral education
movement tends to be constructivist in its emphasis on cognition and So
cratic methods of teaching, whereas the conservative character education
movement, in the Aristotelian tradition, tends to be behaviorist in its em
phasis on behavioral control processes by which virtuous habits of obedi
ence, loyalty, and diligence are instilled through extrinsic motivation,
32 BAUMRIND
The discipline resides in three areas in a Montessori classroom: it resides in the envi
ronment itself which is controlled; in the teacher herself who is controlled and is ready
to assume an authoritarian role if it is necessary; and from the very beginning it resides
in the children. It is a three-way arrangement, as opposed to certain types of American
education in which all of the authority is vested in the teacher, or where, in the carica
ture of permissive education, all of the authority is vested in the children, (pp. 49-50)
When a child has finished his work he is free to put it away, he is free to initiate new
work or, in certain instances, he is free to not work. But he is not free to disturb or de
stroy what others are doing ... It is largelya question of balance. In a Montessori class
room the teacher does not delude herself into believing that her manipulation of the
children represents their consensus of what they would like to do. If she is manipulat
ing them insofar as she is determining arbitrarily that this must be done at this time,
she is cognizant of what she is doing, which the child may or may not be. (p. 51)
The importance of the responsibility in selecting matter for the child to learn is placed
in the hands of those adults who are aware of what the culture will demand of the child
and who are able to "program" learning in such a way that what is suitable for the
child's age and stage of development is also learnable and pleasurable to him. (p. 63)
ments for circumstances when feelings are conflicted, or when they are
called on to justify their intuitively arrived at decisions (e.g., Bargh &
Chartrand, 1999; Haidt &Hersh, 2001; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). Thus
the informational assumption about when life begins is arguably an ex post
facto justification for an already fully formed and deeply felt intuition
about whether abortion is ever morally acceptable.
Moral emotions such as empathy and moral indignation often impel ac
tion where cognitive reflection alone might not. In the eloquent words of
Mario Savio, "There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes
so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part... And you've
got to put your bodies on the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers,
upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop" (Goines, 1993, p.
361). Such visceral intuitions, however, are clearly affected by ideology, that
is a coherent examined system of factual statements and value judgments.
This was certainly true for Savio, whose socialist ideology was formed by a
liberal Catholic education and training in political philosophy. Similarly my
critique of deceptive research practices (Baumrind, 1964), in particular,
Milgram's (1963) research, was fueled by moral outrage at the indignities
Milgram and his confederates inflicted on his subjects. I argued that
Milgram's research was characterized by the very dehumanizing processes it
was designed to investigate and that his student confederates exemplified
the destructive obedience that Milgram labeled as "shockingly immoral" in
his paid volunteers. My vigorous objection to deceptive research practices
was clearly emotive, but not merely emotive, because it was rationally justi
fied by an articulated system of metaethical and normative considerations
(Baumrind, 1975, 1992).
The descriptive claim that moral reasoning is less often the cause of moral
judgment or conduct than intuitive affect-laden automatic processes is not a
prescriptive statement that moral judgments should be made intuitively and
automatically. In fact, a prime objective of moral educators should be to en
courage children to value rationality, justification, and critical evaluation of
conducttheir own, their peers', their parents', and their teachers'. Moral
educators want children to be motivated by prosocial moral emotions such
as empathy and moral indignation, and to acquire reliable habits of good
moral character. However, for children to develop as responsible moral
agents and to be able to speak truth to power, they must learn how to reflect
on and take responsibility for regulating their own conduct and the conse
quences of their intended actions. Although much of what we think of as
moral judgment occurs outside of conscious awareness and is the result of
what Tocqueville (1969) called "habits of the heart" (p. 287), the develop
ment of virtuous habits requires exercise of rational judgment. The expres
sion of Aristotelian virtues requires the capacity to judge what is the right
thing to do at the right time in the right way in the right place. Because they
2. CONSTRUCTIVE OBEDIENCE AND RESPONSIBLE DISSENT 37
ance from young children is desirable and functional from any standpoint,
the desirability of encouraging the development of dispositional compliance
in children is more open to dispute because, when predominant, this attrib
ute may result in dysfunctional obedience to unjust authority (Baumrind,
1996), as well as be a sign of insecurity.
Bold children are less dispositionally compliant, which means that they
are more likely across contexts to test the limits of adult authority and to re
quire forceful parental intervention to secure behavioral compliance,
whereas fearful children are more malleable and easily conditioned to in
hibit transgression (Dienstbier, 1984). Kochanska distinguished between
situational compliance (where children cooperate for instrumental reasons,
but without commitment) and committed compliance (where children ea
gerly embrace the caregiver's agenda). In Kochanska's study committed
compliance, which I view as a likely index of dispositional compliance, was
associated with children's fearfulness and shyness when they were required
to suppress prohibited behavior (Kochanska, Coy, & Murray, 2001). A high
level of situational or behavioral compliance is not necessarily an index of
dispositional compliance.
The importance of reducing children's level of noncompliance depends
on the type of noncompliance. Clinical psychologists focus on defiant non
compliance, whereas developmental psychologists focus on more functional
types and levels of noncompliance (Kuczynski & Hildebrandt, 1997;
Kuczynski & Kochanska, 1990). From both perspectives, a moderate to high
level of behavioral or situational compliance in young children is optimal,
although some types of noncompliance are more functional than others. For
example, refusals by young children that have self-assertion rather than op
position as their primary goal are more competent forms of noncompliance
(Crockenberg &. Litman, 1990). Less skillful expressions of noncompliance,
such as passive-aggressive noncompliance and direct defiance decrease
with age, whereas more skillful expressions, such as simple refusal without
defiance and negotiation, increase with age (Kuczynski, Kochanska,
Radke-Yarrow, & Girnius-Brown, 1987).
The task of bringing behavioral or situational compliance in the home to
normal levels is a crucial initial step for decreasing other forms of oppo
sitional and antisocial behavior (Barkley, 1981; Loeber StSchmaling, 1985;
Lorber & Patterson, 1981). Behaviorist clinicians such as Patterson (1997)
have shown that before parents can begin to have a positive influence on in
creasing children's prosocial behavior and decreasing their referral problems
(e.g., aggression, noncompliance with medical regimens), children must re
duce their level of noncompliance with parental directives to normal levels,
which from a young child when the mother is present is less than 30%. A
higher level of noncompliance with adults' directives, especially defiant
noncompliance, presages later school difficulties, impoverished moral inter
nalization and greater antisocial behavior (Kochanska & Aksan, 1995;
4O BAUMRIND
Loeber & Schmaling, 1985; Lytton, Watts, &Dunn, 1986; Patterson, Reid,
&Dishion, 1992).
Juvenile antisocial conduct disorderwith its features of defiance, de
ceitfulness, lack of remorse, impulsivity, and offensive aggressionis a pre
cursor of adult criminality; by contrast developmentally normative
oppositional behavior in 2-year-olds and adolescents is not (see Hinshaw &
Anderson, 1996). Agentic dispositional tendencies including divergent in
telligence, competitiveness, and willingness to dissent are aspects of compe
tence and manifestations of self-efficacy, even though such attributes may
conflict with the internalization of some societal norms and perhaps what
Kochanska refers to as committed compliance.
Just as dispositional compliance is not necessarily adaptive or virtuous,
aggression in children is not necessarily dysfunctional or wicked.
Berkowitz (1983) distinguished between instrumental aggression that is
strategic and not fueled by anger, which he found to be adaptive, and hostile
aggression that is emotionally charged, nonstrategic, and generally coun
terproductive. Pulkkinen (1987) distinguished between offensive and de
fensive aggression. She found that children who at age 14 aggressed
offensively (without being attacked first) at age 20 were characterized by
weak self-control and violent criminal behavior. In contrast, children who
at age 14 only aggressed defensively (after being provoked) were not char
acterized by an aggressive personality pattern, and in fact manifested good
self-control and school adjustment.
Confrontational conflict need not involve hostile aggression. Conflict is a
state of opposition or resistance between people. Conflict will have construc
tive or destructive consequences, depending on how it is manifested and
managed. Mismanaged conflict by parents will often elicit hostile aggression,
resentment, or disengagement from children. Especially during adolescence,
constructive engagement in reciprocal communication fosters adaptive con
flict resolution (Walker & Taylor, 1991). Unfortunately, too often during ado
lescence parents disengage or use developmentally inappropriate unilateral
power assertion when adolescents assert themselves forcefully as autonomous
agents (Sternberg & Dobson, 1987). Resolution of parent-adolescent con
flicts may remain unresolved when issues that parents see as prudential or
moral and therefore by right and responsibility under their jurisdiction are
perceived by adolescents to be in the personal domain and therefore by right
under their own jurisdiction (Smetana, 1995).
When parents respond to adolescents' demands for a greater measure of in
dependence and self-reliance with either coercion or disengagement rather
than with negotiation or reasoned authority, adolescents may react by defying
parental authority or by distancing themselves emotionally. Secure attach
ment to parents and trustworthy mentors optimizes the developmental goal of
individuation during adolescence, as it does in infancy. When children and
adolescents test limits they often are seeking more intimacy, not more emo
2. CONSTRUCTIVE OBEDIENCE AND RESPONSIBLE DISSENT 41
Autonomy
How the concept of autonomy is construed is central to moral politics and
educational philosophy and practice. Piagetian autonomy emphasizes
self-governance and internal regulation and is contrasted with heteronomy
or being controlled by external constraints that are perceived as fixed and
imperative. In communitarian thought autonomy is contrasted with social
order rather than with heteronomy. Communitarian autonomy is equated
with an overemphasis on individual rights and an underemphasis on social
responsibility, and order with the social responsibilities and unifying bonds
that ensure the common good. The stated aim of the communitarian agenda
(Etzioni, 1993, 2000) is to balance the claims of individual conscience and
rights, which Etzioni believes the current American milieu overemphasizes,
with the collective moral voice of the community to which the individual
owes allegiance.
Durkheim's element of autonomy in his theory of moral education em
braces a unity of opposites consistent with the Hegelian (Hegel, 1821/1952)
and Marxist (Marx, 1845/1941, 1858/1971) dialectic by synthesizing
self-determination with heteronomy and order. Moral education, according
to Durkheim (1925/1973), requires the development of three basic ele
ments of moral character that make for dependability: discipline, attach
ment, and autonomy. Discipline consists of two character traits, (a) a
preference for regularity to be developed by structure and regimen in the
classroom and home, and (b) a preference for moderation, or respect for the
impersonal Tightness of moral rules over personal disposition, as this right
ness is conveyed by a worthy educator. The second aspect of moral educa
tion, according to Durkheim, is attachment to the social group through the
faculty of empathy, which by identification with the pain and pleasure of
others can enable the student to become altruistic and socially engaged. The
third element, autonomy or self-determination, develops as the rules of soci
ety are internalized by the child. For Durkheim, these moral rules are not ini
tially self-chosen but, instead, are the rules of the educator who rationally
explains to the student the need for obeying these particular moral rules in
this particular society, and when necessary uses punishment to signal clear
disapproval of the violation of these rules. Thus for Durkheim as for Marx
(1858/1971), freedom is the appreciation of necessity. Discipline, first outer
and then inner, by channeling energy into pursuit of determinate and valued
goals consistent with the needs of others, is the precondition of, not the ob
stacle to, freedom, happiness, and self-determination.
42 BAUMRIND
Socialization
Socialization is generally thought of as an adult-initiated process by which
young persons through education, training, and imitation, acquire their cul
ture and the habits and values congruent with adaptation to that culture.
Through the disciplinary encounter, caregivers attempt to induce children
to comply with adult standards of proper conduct. Properly conceived, the
aim of the disciplinary encounter is to control children's short-term behav
ior and to influence, but not determine, their long-term behavior. Although
defiance is thought to characterize certain periods of development, namely
the negativism of the "terrible twos" and individuation during adolescence,
the dialectical interchange between obedience and resistance to authority
remains an ongoing theme in adultchild interaction.
The short-range objective of the exercise of parental authority is to main
tain order in the family subordinated, however, to parents' ultimate objec
tive, which is to further children's development from a dependent infant
into a self-determining, socially responsible, morally agentic adult. The con
temporary discipline controversy has resurrected a false polarization be
tween a hierarchical paternalistic authoritarian model that places
obedience as the cornerstone in the foundation of character (Hyles, 1972)
and a child-centered rights position that demands for children the same
2. CONSTRUCTIVE OBEDIENCE AND RESPONSIBLE DISSENT 43
CONCLUDING COMMENTS
To evaluate rationally the outcomes resulting from character education pro
grams their desired outcomes in furthering children's morality and character
2. CONSTRUCTIVE OBEDIENCE AND RESPONSIBLE DISSENT 45
REFERENCES
Bakan, D. (1966). The duality of human existence: Isolation and communion in Western man.
Boston: Beacon Press.
Bandura, A. (1999). Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities. Person
ality and Social Psychology Review, 3, 193-209.
Bandura, A., Caprara, G. V, Barbaranelli, C., Pastorelli, C., & Regalia, C. (2001). Socio
cognitive self-regulatory mechanisms governing transgressive behavior. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology, 80, 125-135.
Bargh, J. A., & Chartrand, T. L. (1999). The unbearable automaticity of being. American
Psychokgist, 54, 462-479.
Barkley, R. A. (1981). Hyperactive children: A handbook for diagnosis and treatment. New
York: Guilford.
2. CONSTRUCTIVE OBEDIENCE AND RESPONSIBLE DISSENT 47
Batson, C. D., Kobrynowicz, D., Dinnerstein, J. L., Kampf, H. C., & Wilson, A. D.
(1997). In a very different voice: Unmasking moral hypocrisy.Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 72, 1335-1348.
Baumrind, D. (1964). Some thoughts on ethics of research: After reading Milgram's "Be
havioral study of obedience." American Psychologist, 19, 421-423.
Baumrind, D. (1975). Metaethical and normative considerations governing the treat
ment of human subjects in the behavioral sciences. In E. C. Kennedy (Ed.), Human
rights and psychological research: A debate on psychology and ethics (pp. 83-102). New
York: Crowell.
Baumrind, D. (1978a). A dialectical materialist's perspective on knowing social reality.
New Directions for Child Development, 2, 61-82.
Baumrind, D. (1978b). Reciprocal rights and responsibilities in parent-child relations.
Journal of Social Issues, 34, 179-196.
Baumrind, D. (1983). Rejoinder to Lewis's reinterpretation of parental firm control ef
fects: Are authoritative parents really harmonious 1 Psychological Bulletin, 94,132-142.
Baumrind, D. (1987). A developmental perspective on adolescent risk-taking behavior
in contemporary America. In C. E. Irwin, Jr. (Ed.), New directions for child develop
ment: Adolescent health and social behavior, 37, 93-126.
Baumrind, D. (1991). Effective parenting during the early adolescent transition. In E E.
Cowan & E. M. Hetherington (Eds.), Advances in family research (pp. 111-163).
Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Baumrind, D. (1992). Leading an examined life: The moral dimension of daily conduct.
In W. Kurtines, J. L. Gerwirtz, &M. Azmitia (Eds.),The role of values in psychology and
human development (pp. 256-280). New York: Wiley.
Baumrind, D. (1996). The discipline controversy revisited. Family Relations, 45,405-^f 14.
Baumrind, D. (1998). From ought to is: A neo-Marxist perspective on the use and mis
use of the culture construct. Human Development, 41, 145-165.
Bennet, W. (1993). The book of virtues. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Benninga, J. A. (1997). Schools, character development, and citizenship. In A. Molnar
(Ed.), The construction of children's character (pp. 77-96). Chicago: University of Chi
cago Press.
Benninga, J. A., Tracz, R. K., Sparks, D., Solomon, V, Battistich, K., Delucchi, L., et al.
(1991). Effects of two contrasting school task and incentive structures on children's
social development. Elementary School Journal, 92, 149-167.
Berkowitz, L. (1983). Aversively stimulated aggression: Some parallels and differences
in research with animals and humans. American Psychologist, 38, 11351144.
Bronfenbrenner, U. (1970). Two worlds of childhood: U.S. and U.S.S.R. New York: Russell Sage.
Cohen, H. (1980). Equal rights for children. Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams.
Colby, A., & Damon, W. (1992). Some do care: Contemporary lives of moralcommitment.
New York: The Free Press.
Crittenden, R M., &DiLalla, D. L. (1988). Compulsive compliance: The development
of an inhibitory coping strategy in infancy. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 16,
585-599.
Crockenberg, S., & Litman, C. (1990). Autonomy as competence in 2-year-olds: Mater
nal correlates of child defiance, compliance, and self-assertion. Developmental Psy
chology, 26, 961-971.
Dienstbier, R. A. (1984). The role of emotion in moral socialization. In C. Izard, J. Kagan,
& R. B. Zajonc (Eds.), Emotions, cognitions and behaviors (pp. 484-513). New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Dobson, J. (1992). The new dare to discipline. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House.
48 BAUMRIND
Durkheim, E. (1973). Moral education. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. (Original work pub
lished 1925)
Dworkin, R. (1977). Taking rights seriously. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Engels, F. (1941). Ludwig Feuerbach and the outcome of classical Germanphilosophy. New
York: International Publishers. (Original work published 1888)
Etzioni, A. (1993). The spirit of community: Rights, responsibilities, and the communitarian
agenda. New York: Crown.
Etzioni, A. (2000). Epilogue. In E. W. Lehman, Autonomy and order: A communitarian
anthology (pp. 219-236). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Powers, B. J., & Richardson, F. C. (1996). Why is multiculturalism good? American Psy
chologist, 51,609-621.
Frankena, W. K. (1973). Ethics. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Goines, D. L. (1993). The free speech movement: Coming of age in the 1960s. Berkeley, CA:
Ten Speed Press.
Grusec, J. E., Goodnow, J. J., &Kuczynski, L. (2000). New directions in analyses of parenting
contributions to children's acquisition of values. Child Development, 71, 205-211.
Habermas, J. (1979). Communication and the evolution of society (T. McCarthy, Trans.).
Boston: Beacon Press.
Habermas, J. (1993). Justification and application: Remarks on discourse ethics (C. Cronin,
Trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach
to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108, 814-834.
Haidt, J., & Hersh, M. (2001). Sexual morality: The cultures and reasons of liberals and
conservatives. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 31, 191221.
Hartshorne, H., &May, A. (1928-1930). Studies in the nature of character: Vol. 1. Studies
in deceit. Vol. 2. Studies in self-control. Vol. 3. Studies in the organization of character. New
York: Macmillan.
Hegel, G. (1952). The philosophy ofrightand the philosophy of history. Chicago: University
of Chicago, Great Books. (Original work published 1821)
Hinshaw, S. P, & Anderson, C. A. (1996). Conduct and oppositional defiant disorders.
In E. J. Mash &R. A. Barkley (Eds.), Child Psychopathology (pp. 113-149). New York:
Guilford.
Hume, D. (1960). A treatise of human nature. Oxford, England: Claredon. (Original work
published 1739)
Hyles, J. (1972). How to rear children. Hammond, IN: Hyles-Anderson.
Hyman, I. A. (1990). Reading, writing, and the hickory stick: The appalling story of physical
and psychological abuse in American schools. Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath.
Kochanska, G., & Aksan, N. (1995). Mother-child mutually positive affect, the quality
of child compliance to requests and prohibitions, and maternal control as correlates
of early internalization. Child Development, 66, 236-254.
Kochanska, G., Coy, K. C., &Murray, K. T. (2001). The development of self-regulation
in the first four years of life. Child Development, 72, 1091-1111.
Kohlberg, L. (1970). Education for justice: A modern statement of the Platonic view. In
N. F. Sizer &.T. R. Sizer (Eds.), Moral education; Five lectures (pp. 57-83). Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Kohlberg, L. (1978). Revisions in the theory and practice of moral development. In W
Damon (Ed.), New directions for child development: Moral development (pp. 52-73).
New York: Wiley.
Kohlberg, L. (1981). Essays on moral development: Vol.1. The philosophy of moral develop'
ment: Moral stages and the idea of justice. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
2. CONSTRUCTIVE OBEDIENCE AND RESPONSIBLE DISSENT 49
Resistance, Conflict,
and Contrarianism in Youth
Implications for Education
and Parenting
This page intentionally left blank
3
of Teaching
William Ayers
University of Illinois at Chicago
In the opening scene of the Cohen brothers film Miller's Crossing (Cohen &
Cohen, 1990), Johnny Caspar says, "I'm talkin' about friendship." Johnny, a
two-bit thug, is struggling to explain to the big crime boss, Leo, how he's
been wronged by an associate mobster, Bernie Bernbaum. The camera lin
gers on the repulsive and horrifying Johnnywe see the frothy saliva form
ing in the creases of his thin, menacing smile; we watch him sweat. We are
fascinated and disgusted by his insistent physicality and the bizarre case he
presents.
"I'm talkin' about character," he pleads. "I'm talkin' abouthell, Leo, I
ain't embarrassed to use the wordI'm talkin' about ethics" (or, as pro
nounced by Johnny, "e-tics").
Johnny is indeed talking about ethics. Apparently, Bernie Bernbaum is a
cheat and a liar. "When I fix a fight," Johnny proceeds indignantly, "Say I
play a three-to-one favorite to throw a goddam fight. I got a right to expect
the fight to go off at three-to-one." Then Bernie Bernbaum hears of the
deal, manipulates the situation, brings in out-of-town money, and "the odds
go straight to hell."
"It's gettin' so a businessman can't expect no return from a fixed fight,"
complains Johnny. "Now, if you can't trust a fix, what can you trust?" With
out ethics, "we're back into anarchy, right back in the jungle ... That's why
53
54 AYERS
ethics are important. It's what separates us from the animals, from beasts of
burden, beasts of prey. Ethics!"
Leo is not so sure. How does Johnny know Bernie is the problem, when
lots of other people share the same information? Couldn't someone else be
selling him out? No, Johnny assures him, it has to be Bernie: Everyone else in
the loop is under his direct control, and, most tellingly, "Bernie's kinda
shaky, ethics- wise."
"Do you want to kill him?" asks Leo.
"For starters," Johnny replies.
William Bennett, Secretary of Education under President Ronald Rea
gan, former "drug czar," and editor of The Book of Virtues (Bennett, 1993),
has recently written a book for our times with the forbidding title Why We
Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism (Bennett, 2002). Reading
Bennett on right thinking is a bit like hearing Johnny Caspar discuss eth-
icsunreal but nonetheless disturbing.
In The Book of Virtues Bennett (1993) gathers together an enormous
amount of material Rush Limbaugh hails in a jacket blurb as "a superb col
lection, certain to fortify you and yours for a lifetime of morality, goodness,
and right thinking."
In any collection there is the problem of who and what to include. How
ever, an editor has to choose, leaving readers variously irritated and de
lighted. Bennett undoubtedly felt himself stretching for inclusionRosa
Parks is here, for example, and so is a Hanukkah Hymn, and an excerpt from
the Dhammapada. On the other hand, he chose to exclude, for example,
Toni Morrison and W.E.B. DuBois; the excerpt he includes from Mary Woll-
stonecraft's pioneering "A Vindication of the Rights of Women" focuses on a
peripheral argument, her faith that we improve ourselves in concert with
God's plans; and the letter he chooses from F. Scott Fitzgeralda really ap
palling model of fatherhoodto his daughter advises her, among much else,
to make her "body a useful instrument" (Bennett, 1993, p. 226).
The proclaimed virtues under consideration hereself-discipline, com
passion, responsibility, friendship, work, courage, perseverance, honesty, loy
alty, faithtake on a distinctly ideological cast in Bennett's embrace. Leaving
aside what he chooses not to reflect onsay, humility (never!), solidarity,
thoughtfulness, integrity, passion, generosity, curiosity, humor, and commit
ment (forget it!)look at Bennett's perspective on work, for example.
In 94 packed pages we endure several poems about bees and ants, Bible
verses, "Wynken, Blynken, and Nod," "The Little Red Hen," "The Three
Little Pigs," "The Shoemaker and the Elves," "How the Camel Got His
Hump"on and on. They all add up to a scolding on the importance of do
ing as you're told, the rewards of acquiescence and compliance, and the ne
cessity of hierarchy and staying at your post no matter what. Theodore
Roosevelt writes "In Praise of the Strenuous Life," and Ralph Waldo Emer
3. WHO IN THE WORLD AM I? 55
son praises "Great Men." Booker T. Washington describes his climb "Up
From Slavery" and Bennett, without a hint of irony or conflict, introduces
him as a "soul who is willing to workand work, and workto earn an edu
cation" (Bennett, 1993, p. 404). From Shakespeare, Bennett selects this bit
of Henry V: "So work the honeybees;/Creatures, that, by a rule in nature,
teach/The act of order to a peopled kingdom" (Bennett, 1993, p. 388).
Of course there is no Marx here, but neither do we find Herman Melville,
B. Traven, nor Charles Dickens. There's no Studs Terkel, either, someone
who might have relieved the righteous sermonizing and probed the com
plexities and contradictions of work, the violence it can contain; who might
have explored the ways in which human effort can lead to the transforma
tion of people and their world, the ways in which labor can be sometimes lib
erating, sometimes enslaving. Instead, we are instructed on the natural state
of things: Kings rule, soldiers fight and pillage, masons build, and porters
carry heavy loads. End of story.
What Bennett has accomplished is a McGuffey's Reader for the ideal fam
ily of his imagination, a list of dos and don'ts served up in simple stories for
simple livinglittle virtues celebrated at the expense of great ones. There
are "Table Rules for Little Folks" and instruction on how to "retire for eve
ning" and "how to conduct our conversations." Boys and girls, naturally, re
ceive separate instruction: One is informed that "Modest as a violet/As a
rosebud is sweet-/That's the kind of little girl/People like to meet" (Bennett,
1993, p. 28); the other is entreated to "Take your meals my little man,/Al-
ways like a gentleman" (p. 43). There are, too, the requisite evil stepmothers
and wicked women.
Bennett (1993) called this collection a " 'how-to' book for moral literacy,"
and separated the "complexities and controversies" of a moral life from the
"basics" (p, 11). Presumably that is why none of the stories he offered attempt
to investigate and interrogate the inadequacy of self-knowledge, the conflict
and contest between the facts and the aspirations of our identities.
He also distinguished lessons in ethics, which he favored, from moral activ
ity, which he advised suspending until maturity. For Bennett it is important
that youngsters remain in effect passive recipients rather than active cocon
structors of values. This view leads to the claim that "these stories help an
chor our children in their culture, its history and traditions" (Bennett, 1993,
p. 12). For Bennett, "our culture" is permanently settled and smug, lacking
any sense of unease or obligation to think or question. A big believer in uni
culture, Bennett has blinded himself to the vivid, dynamic, colliding, con
flicting, and propulsive power of culture as it is experienced and lived by
human beings. The ethical world he sees is inert, and largely disembodied.
Bennett (1993) noted the "quarry of wonderful literature from our cul
ture and others is deep," and explained that his collection "is drawn from the
corpus of Western Civilization," material "that American school children,
56 AYERS
once upon a time, knew by heart" (p. 15). If there is any doubt who "Ameri
can school children" are in Bennett's dreams, check out the illustrations:
tiny woodcuts and little sketches of farms and fields and frolicking children,
all White. The text echoes the vision, giving us children "with golden hair"
and the "blue'eyed banditti." Bennett's hackneyed nostalgia for a Golden
Age in American schoolsthat rosy period preceding the turbulent 1960s,
when schools were strictly segregated and education mainly the prerogative
of the privilegedpermeates these pages.
In Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism (Bennett, 2002),
his newest effort, we feel the full force of Bennett unleashed. The events of
September 11 have unhinged himthe gate is swinging wildlyand his
standard sanctimonious sermonizing is delivered here at full volume and
with a take-no-prisoners intensity. He wrote the book, he shared, because "I
sensed in my bones that if we could not find a way to justify our patriotic in
stincts, and to answer the arguments of those who did not share them, we
would be undone" (Bennett, 2002, p. 12).
In case we wonder who exactly might "not share" his brand of patriotic
values, Bennett named names: the historian Eric Foner, the English profes
sor Stanley Fish, the editors of The New York Times, scholars with whom he
disagrees, feminists, and all "members of the peace party"whoever and
wherever they might be. These infidels, he claimed, "have caused damage,
and they need to be held to account" (Bennett, 2002, p. 14). The form of his
proposed inquisition is left to the imagination, but its scale and direction are
clear: "A vast relearning has to take place," he instructed, one undertaken
by everyone everywhere, but the burden of the effort "falls [especially] on
educators, and at every level" (p. 149).
Bennett's (2002) greatest fear is "the erosion of moral clarity ... as a thou
sand voices discourse with energy and zeal on the questionable nature, if not
the outright illegitimacy, of our methods or our cause" (p. 169). He claimed
that "rooting out" the sloppiness and the danger of relativism, postmodern
ism, multiculturalism, feminism, and left-wing thinking, and "replacing it
with healthier growths, will be the work of generations" (p. 70). Clearly, it is
the soul and spirit of democracythose thousand energetic voicesthat
Bennett, finally, cannot abide. Moral clarity, certainty, dogma: These are
best delivered from above.
What is fundamentally missing in Bennett is a sense of morality or moral
literacy or virtue embedded in a stance, a set of relationships and commit
ments. We are instructed in rationalist ethics at the expense of relational
morality, deprived an angle of regard that enlarges our view. Bennett is the
stern father with austere regulations: He rebukes, he scolds, he shows us an
iron hand. His moral authority relies for its power on structure, a structure
secured by fear and the absence of dissent. Bennett nowhere linked moral
stance to moral conductespecially his own.
3. WHO IN THE WORLD AM I? 57
Which brings us back to Johnny Caspar, talking about ethics. The bully is
whining, wheedling, hectoring, and threatening as required. He is comical
and menacing in the same gesture.
Bennett squarely places responsibility for the "vast relearning" of moral'
ity on educators. Is "moral education" gaining or losing in our schools, or in
our consciousness? How shaky are we, ethicswise?
It seems to me the world of values and moral thinking and behavior is as
natural to children as any other, and that moral thought and virtuous action
in schools begins with caring and acceptancea fundamental belief in both
the unique value of each human being and the recognition of our shared
predicament. Moral action is about more than individual behavior, it is also
about questioning and engaging the world we live in. Unlike Bennett, for
whom morality is about making sure the establishment does not come "un
done," I believe the fundamental message of the good teacher, inherently a
moral one, rests on transformation: a changed view of the world and of the
student's self. Who am I? What is my place in this world?
The moral effort of teachers is based on seeing each child in this dynamic,
growing waythrusting for life, for learning, for valuingand finding ways
to support the child in that quest. Lillian Weber, founder of the Workshop
Center of City College in New York, characterized this as "unreasonable car
ing, unconditional acceptance." She also pointed out that "the moral state
ment is not a statement guaranteeing perfection. The moral statement that
releases courage is Til try! I'll try!' " (L. Weber, personal communication,
Feb. 12, 1992).
When the moral or the ethical is invokedwhether in education, or a
meeting of mobstersit is wise to proceed with caution. To that end, I
would offer three simple caveats. First, morality is not a word like other
words, a noun like other nouns: It describes an entire realm, one without
stable borders. The kingdom of the moral and the ethical is peopled with
good guys and bad guys, with heroes, conquerors, exploiters, madmen, and
con men, all of whom have evoked elaborate descriptions of morality and a
moral universe to justify their efforts. Many have found morality a conve
nient hammer to beat their opponents into submission. It is simply untrust
worthy and unreliable as a word referring to any one, immutable thing, and
operates best in context.
This brings us to the second caution: It helps to distinguish between mo
rality in general and morality in particular. Didion's (1961) "On Morality"
begins with her struggle to write about the subject at all, until her "mind
veers inflexibly toward the particular" (p. 142). She described several events
close at hand where people reach out to help each other for no other reason
except that is what they were taught, and therefore, knew they should do.
Didion called this a "primitive morality," focused on survival and not on an
ideal of goodness. The ideal, for Didion, turns out to be treacherous in two
58 AYERS
directions, outward and inward. Unlike doing the right thing in specific in
stances, invoking the ideal good typically involves turning a beneficent gaze
outward toward others. Unfortunately, history teaches us that objects of
concern are quickly enough reconstructed into objects of coercion; the
gleam in the eye of the righteous is a powerful tractor beam foretelling fire
and brimstone, death and destruction. Turning inward, on the other hand,
brings its own hazardsit can be a move toward self-deception:
When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking we want something or need some
thing, not that it is a pragmatic necessity ... but that it is a moral imperative that we
have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the whine of
hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we
are already there. (Didion, 1961, p. 147)
The third and last caution involves a distinction between humanistic and
religious morality. Humanistic approaches begin with the idea that human
beings are the measure of all things. As de Zengotita (2003), who teaches at
the Dalton School, put it, "all else being equal, every human life is, by na-
turethat is, simply by virtue of being humanequal in value to every
other" (p. 39). Our human task is to make life more robust, more full, and
more livable for each human being. Certain religious beliefs, ones that prom
ise a better world, a place without the pain and suffering and hard work of
this one, or that value God above humans, can work against the goals of sec
ular humanism. In "Reflections on Gandhi," Orwell (1949) pointed out the
difference between loving God, or humanity as a whole, and loving particu
lar individual persons. "The essence of being human," he wrote, "is that one
does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the
sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes
friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be de
feated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's
love upon other human individuals" (Orwell, 1984, p. 332). Orwell argued
that most people are not, in fact, failed saints, but rather find both fun and
sorrow in life and have no interest in sainthood at all, and noted that some
who "aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human be
ings" (p. 332). When the choice is God or man, Orwell chose the latter, and
in actual practice most of us agree. As educators our goal is not sainthood;
our task is to fasten our gaze on particular children, our students.
In all of thisstaying in context, focusing on the specific, valuing each hu
man life as equal to all othersmy aim is to think of morality, in education as
in any facet of existence, as something worked out on the ground, in the
dailyness of lived life. It serves us well to remember the systems of moral
thought that preceded us alongside their gaps, failures, and inadequacies. We
want to make choices on principle, avoiding the deadening effects of ortho
doxy, to embrace moral commitments and at the same time maintain a critical
3. WHO IN THE WORLD AM I? 59
mind. We want to act, yet we need to doubt. This stance asks us to proceed
with caution, with humility, and with our eyes wide open to face a chaotic, dy
namic, and perspectival world, with hope but without guarantees.
Gwendolyn Brooks was Poet Laureate of Illinois for many years, a public
intellectual and citizen, a teacher with a huge following of students and
other admirers. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in the early 1950s, but
never left the neighborhood or the themes that animated her entire life
the people, the families, and especially the youngsters of Chicago's south
side. Her most widely anthologized poem is "The Pool Players Seven at the
Golden Shovel," more commonly known as "We Real Cool" (Brooks, 1960).
When Brooks passed away there was a moving, daylong memorial cele
brating her life and her work at the University of Chicago's Rockefeller Cha
pel, where family and friends honored her huge contribution to literature
and to humanity. On that day Anthony Walton, one of her students, read a
poem he had written for the occasion called simply "Gwendolyn Brooks
(1917-2000)"1 (Walton, 2000):
Sometimes I see in my mind's eye a four- or five-
year-old boy, coatless and wandering
a windblown and vacant lot or street in Chicago
on the windblown South Side. He disappears
but stays with me, staring and pronouncing
me guilty of an indifference more callous
than neglect, condescension as self-pity.
Walton and Brooks set me to wondering about the less visible and yet
somehow central dimensions of our workethical dimensions embedded in
'Copyright 2001. Anthony Walton. Reprinted with permission. Anthony Walton is the author of
Mississippi: An American Journey. He teaches at Bowdoin College
6Q AYERS
The short answer is at the center, and in every fiber, branch, and limb. To at
tempt to disentangle the moralmatters of right and wrong, normative ques
tions and concerns, aspirationsfrom education is to do violence to each.
Education, of course, is always a realm of hope and struggle. Its hope hov
ers around notions of a future, and struggles over everything: what that fu
ture should look like, who should participate and on what terms, what
knowledge and experiences are of most value, who should have access to
that valuable stuff, and how.
Hope and struggle are manifested and animated each day in every class
room by two powerful, propulsive, and expansive questions that all students,
from kindergarten through graduate school, bring with them to school. Al
though largely unstated and implicit, and often unconscious, these ques
tions are nothing less than essential. Who in the world am I? What in the
world are my choices and my chances?
These are, in part, questions of identity formation and in part, questions
of geography: of boundaries and limits, but also of aspirations and possibili
ties. When my oldest son was in his first months at college and we were
checking in by phone, he told me he was particularly moved by a philosophy
course he was taking. "You never told me about Kierkegaard," he said almost
accusingly, and I thought, "That's not the half of it." His location in an ex
panding universe was altered, as it was meant to be. Recognition and
growth, the moral possibility, were in play; on the other side lay the degrada
3. WHO IN THE WORLD AM I? 61
understanding; labeling shrinks our view and with it, our awareness and
compassion as teachers.
That this labeling business has run amok is rarely acknowledged, but it
has, and it was perfectly exposed in The Onion, a satirical newspaper. The
headline proclaimed, "New Study Reveals Millions of American Children
Suffering from YTDYouthful Tendency Disorder." A sidebar contained
the Ten Early Warning Signs of YTD, behaviors like "Talks to imaginary
friend," or "Subject to spontaneous outbursts of laughter." A mother is
quoted saying she was concerned to learn her daughter was diagnosed with
YTD, but relieved to know that she wasn't a "bad mother" ("New Study Re
veals," 2000).
Like all cultural satire, this story works because it reveals a deeper truth
about the predicament we have created for ourselves. We would do well to
remember that all children are unruly sparks of meaning-making energy, al
ways dynamic, in motion, and on a journey. The best teachers know this, and
try to be aware of their own quests and their own journeys.
The environment is itself a powerful teacher, the critical variable that classroom
teachers can discern, critique, build, and rebuild to everyone's advantage.
A basic, if formidable, task for teachers is to create an environment that
will challenge and nurture the wide range of students who actually enter our
classrooms, with multiple entry points toward learning and a range of routes
to moral action and success. The teacher builds the context; the teacher's
values, instincts, and experiences are worked up in the learning environ
ment. It is essential to reflect on our values, our expectations, and our stan
dards, bearing in mind that the dimensions we work with are measured not
just in feet and inches, but also by hopes and dreams, moral reflection, and
ethical possibilities. Think about what one senses walking through the door:
What is the atmosphere? What quality of experience is anticipated? What
technique is dominant? What voice will be expressed?
When I was first teaching, I took my 5-year-olds to the Detroit Metropoli
tan Airport to watch the planes take off and land. I did not have much in
mind beyond an enjoyable field trip, but soon discovered that the concourse
in any airport has a powerful message for all of us: Move this way, keep mov
ing, move rapidly.
To a 5-year-old, the message of the concourse is more specific, and simply
says, "Run!" It took me three field trips to realize that my instructionsstick
3. WHO IN THE WORLD AMI ? 63
RULES
No running.
No shouting.
No throwing food.
No fork fights.
No fork fights? One's mind boggles, imagining the incident that led to the
inclusion of that rule. Beyond that, one wonders, why no fist fights or knife
fights? Here we find echoes of Bennett, the small moral matters emphasized
rather than the great ones. Where in this environment is there a place for
ethical reflection or creation?
Too many to enumerate. Just as a 2-year-old must turn his back on his
mother and the security of family to find himselfthe endless no, no, no;
the so-called terrible twosso a 12-year-old must find herself, in part, by
pushing away, broadening her base of affiliation, and finding values, mean
ing, and a cause to commit to beyond the safety, but also the constraint, of
home. Just as adults can be deceived by the 2-year-old's use of language into
64 AYERS
thinking we share an entirely common meaning, so, too, can adults be con
fused by the grown-up bodies and sophisticated intelligence of adolescents,
and assume that we share an identical moral space.
In reality, the coming of age of the young is always a little scary. The kids
are overwhelmed with the changes going on inside themselves and painfully
aware of their limitations as they stride into adulthood. Emblematic adoles
cents in literature and popular culture are often deeply good, acting with the
best of intentions and sometimes even heroically; yet at the same time, they
are typically uncomfortable with their transformations and surprised by
their sudden super powers, and society inevitably misunderstands them:
Spiderman and Edward Scissorhands immediately come to mind. We adults
feel the implied or explicit criticism of our failures, the gaps and deficiencies
in the world we have left to them. "You're hypocrites and liars!" they shout at
us, and we cannot stand the sound of it. "We can do it better," they insist,
and we assume a defensive crouch. In The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare la
mented, "I would that there were no age between ten and three and twenty,
or that boys would simply sleep out of rest, for there is nothing in between
but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancestry, stealing and fight
ing" (Shakespeare, 1611).
Knowing what the game is, parents, educators, and the society we create
can surely do better. The game can be summed up in two lines from another
poem by Brooks called "Boy Breaking Glass" (in Allison et al., 1983): "I shall
create! If not a note then a hole. If not an overture then a desecration." Moral
education is, in part, a matter of opening: the creative vent, the inventive
mind, the productive option. Openings allow for alternatives to be seen and
chosen, and for destructive routes to be challenged and even closed.
Education lives an excruciating paradox precisely because of its associa
tion with and location in schools. That is because education is about open
ing doors, opening minds, and opening possibilities. School is about sorting
and punishing, grading and ranking, and certifying. Education is uncondi-
tionalit asks nothing in return, except that the student seize it and make it
his or hers. Education is surprising and unruly and disorderly, whereas the
first and fundamental law of school is to follow orders. An educator un
leashes the unpredictable, whereas a schoolteacher starts with an unhealthy
obsession with classroom management.
Ethics is different from conventions, different from simple rule following,
in that it involves reflection and thought and judgment. As Bennett proves,
one person's moral principle is another's dogma, one's guidelines for the
good life nothing more, for another, than genuflection to the status quo.
Most of us, most of the time, follow the conventions of our culture. Most
Spartans act like Spartans, most Athenians like Athenians. For better or
worse, most Americans act like Americans, and we live in a culture that has
traditionally valued individuality over interrelatedness.
3. WHO IN THE WORLD AMI ? 65
REFERENCES
Allison, A. W. et al. (Eds.). (1983). The Norton anthology of poetry (3rd ed.). New York:
Norton.
68 AYERS
Adolescent-Parent Conflict:
as Developmental Process
Judith G. Smetana
University of Rochester
tially more negative beliefs about adolescents. Fully 71% of the adults and
74% of parents surveyed described teenagers in negative terms, such as lazy,
disrespectful, or wild. A further question revealed that "not learning values"
tops the public's list of problems facing youth today. Nearly half (45%) of
their sample believed that the major problem facing the current generation
of children is that they have not learned respect and rules.
Some prominent commentators and moral educators also have promoted
this negative perception of adolescents. For instance, Bennett (1992,1997)
argued that there is a rising tide of juvenile delinquency, adolescent drug
and alcohol use, and teenage pregnancy and childbearing and that this re
flects a breakdown in the moral fabric of society. In Bennett's view, as well as
that of other prominent moral educators (Lickona, 1991, 1997), adoles
cents are rejecting parents' moral values and resisting adult authority, and
this has led to widespread moral decay.
In this chapter, it is asserted that these concerns may be misplaced. At the
outset of the chapter, evidence is presented to suggest that for the most part,
youth today are not rejecting adults' moral authority and that evidence for
rebellion and rejection of adult standards is widely overstated. Instead, it is
proposed that moderate amounts of resistance to parental authority may be
normative, both historically and developmentally, that resistance and sub
version may be developmentally appropriate, and that, under certain condi
tions, they may be functional for adolescent development.
The assertion that juvenile delinquency is on the rise also has come under
attack (Fuentes, 1998). Citing data from the National Center for Juvenile
Justice, Fuentes asserted that changes in youth crime are not nearly as dra
matic as the public's perception of it and that although there have been fluc
tuations in juvenile crime rates over the past 30 years, there has been little
overall change. Adolescents' access to guns has increased, and with it has
come a drastic increase in youth violence involving guns. However, in con
trast to the arguments raised by some character educators, it appears that
rates of juvenile delinquency and adolescent pregnancy actually are on the
decline.
Finally, the evidence from psychological research on adolescent-parent
relationships likewise suggests that resistance to parental authority has been
a relatively constant feature of adolescent-parent relationships and that for
most families, its scope and intensity are limited. The results of several
large-scale survey studies, conducted almost 50 years ago, have indicated
that extreme alienation from parents, active rejection of adult values and
authority, and youthful rebellion are the exception, and that close, warm,
and supportive family relations during adolescence are the norm. For in
stance, based on a questionnaire study of approximately 3,500 American
teenagers, Douvan and Adelson (1966) concluded that middle adolescents
and their parents agree on basic values and that adolescents generally ad
mire and trust their parents and believe that their parents' rules are gener
ally fair and just. Likewise, Kandel and Lesser (1972) compared nearly 2,000
mother-adolescent dyads in the United States and Denmark and found that
most American and Danish adolescents reported close or very close rela
tionships with both mothers and fathers and that most adolescents reported
relying on their parents (particularly their mothers) for advice on morality
and values. Finally, in a landmark epidemiological study of parents and
teachers of the entire population of 2,303 adolescents on the Isle of Wight in
Great Britain, Rutter, Graham, Chadwick, and Yule (1976) concluded that
most adolescents shared their parents' values and that they respected their
parents' rules, although they wished their parents were less strict. At the
same time, each of these studies did find increases with age in adolescents'
disagreements with parents over issues like choice of clothing, hair, dating,
and being allowed to go out (Douvan & Adelson, 1966; Kandel & Lesser,
1972; Rutter et al., 1976). Indeed, disputes over these issues were found to
be fairly common and sometimes quite heated.
More recently, these studies have been criticized because of their use of
global assessments of family closeness, intergenerational tension, and inde
pendence. None of these early studies utilized observations of actual family
interactions, nor did they provide detailed accounts of conflicts in daily life
(Silverberg, Tennenbaum, & Jacob, 1992). Nevertheless, the findings from
more recent studies employing more sophisticated methods, including
72 SMETANA
age) in Hong Kong (Yau & Smetana, 1996), and the People's Republic of
China (Yau& Smetana, 2003a).
The findings from these studies indicate that parental authority and so
cial order are much on the minds of parents, much as Demos and Demos
(1969) observed from their historical analyses of childrearing advice books.
Across the different studies, the majority of parents' justifications for their
perspectives on disputes referred to parental authority and social regulation.
However, parents' justifications did not focus on disobedience or disrespect,
but rather reflected parental concern with maintaining family and cultural
social conventions, instilling a sense of responsibility in their teenagers, es
tablishing modes of organization that facilitate the effective functioning of
the family (e.g., coordinating chores so that everyone helps out and does
their part), and concerns about avoiding social condemnation (e.g., disap
proval or embarrassment for not fulfilling expectations).
Two aspects of the findings are notable. First, our findings indicate that al
though parents were concerned with the effective functioning of the family
social system and maintaining and enforcing familial and broader cultural
norms, everyday conflicts rarely entailed disagreements over basic values or
moral issues. Drawing on social domain theory (see Killen, McGlothlin, &.
Lee-Kim, 2002; Nucci, 2001; Smetana, ;995b, 2002; Tisak, 1995; Turiel,
1983, 1998, 2002, for overviews), morality in these studies was defined as
prescriptive judgments of right and wrong pertaining to others' welfare
(harm), fairness, or rights. A great deal of research has shown that moral
concepts are separable, both developmentally and conceptually, from the
types of concerns with social conventions and social organization that par
ents in our studies articulated in the context of everyday disagreements.
Morality regulates interpersonal relationships, whereas social conventions
pertain to individuals' descriptive understandings of social systems. Moral
issues were infrequent sources of conflict in adolescent-parent relationships
and accounted for only a small proportion of disputes (primarily over how
adolescents got along with siblings or others). However, in these different
studies, social-conventional reasons predominated in parents' responses
and accounted for the majority of their justifications. In lesser frequencies,
parents also articulated practical (pragmatic) concerns, prudential con
cerns (which focused on adolescents' comfort, health, and safety), and psy
chological concerns (entailing judgments about their personalities or
traits), with parents' responses distributed among these different categories.
Thus, our findings are consistent with findings from earlier studies (Douvan
& Adelson, 1966; Kandel & Lesser, 1972; Rutter, 1980; Rutter etal., 1976)
indicating that parent-adolescent disagreements do not entail adolescents'
rejection of parental moral values.
The second aspect of the findings that deserves note is that whereas par
ents were concerned with social conventions, social regulation, and paren
74 SMETANA
tal authority, these concerns were rarely voiced by adolescents, and when
they were, adolescents appealed primarily to peer group conventions, not
parental or cultural conventions. In contrast, attaining greater personal
freedoms and maximizing personal choices were much on the minds of ado
lescents. Adolescents' perspectives on conflicts largely entailed claims to
personal choices and personal jurisdiction. Thus, adolescents' reasoning
about conflicts focused on statements that the issues were inconsequential
or unimportant, because they did not affect others, assertions of personal
preferences and choices, and claims to individuality and autonomy. "It's my
room," "It's part of who I am," "I should be able to decide," and "It's my
choice" were frequent adolescent refrains.
These findings are very robust. They emerged when adolescents' justifi
cations were obtained in individual, semistructured interviews (Smetana,
1989; Smetana & Gaines, 1999; Smetana et al., 2003), when justifications
were coded from a structured, videotaped family interaction task (Smetana,
Braeges, & Yau, 1991), and when adolescents rated or endorsed different
reasons through questionnaires (Smetana & Asquith, 1994; Smetana &.
Berent, 1993). Regardless of method, appeals to personal jurisdiction pre
dominated in adolescents' responses, with the remaining responses distrib
uted among other types of justifications (pragmatic, prudential, moral,
psychological, and conventional).
Moreover, when asked to reason from their parents' perspectives (re
ferred to as counterarguments), adolescents clearly understood their par
ents' conventional perspectives on disputes, but reformulated the issues
instead in terms of asserting personal choices and personal discretion. Their
counterarguments demonstrated that these redefinitions of parents' con
ventional arguments as issues of personal choice did not entail wholesale re
jection of parents' conventional authority or values. Rather, adolescents
questioned whether parents' authority extended to the particular issue or
instance or to the way the expectation was performed. For instance, parents
treated conflicts over chores as conventional expectations that serve to
maintain the family social system. Adolescents' personal justifications often
pertained to whether chores needed to be done according to parents' expec
tations (e.g., at the times that parents specified), rather than whether chores
needed to be done at all or whether parents had the legitimate authority to
set those expectations.
Adolescents' appeals to personal jurisdiction were found, in very similar
frequencies, in different samples of European American, African American,
and Chinese adolescents. The findings for European American youth may
not be surprising, given that concerns with personal goals and individualism
are said to characterize individuals in North American societies. However,
reflecting their West African cultural heritage, African American families
are said to be oriented toward communalism and harmony (but see
4. RESISTANCE AS DEVELOPMENTAL PROCESS 75
AUTONOMY IN A BROADER
DEVELOPMENTAL CONTEXT
Eccles and her colleagues (Eccles et al., 1993; Eccles, Wigfield, &Schiefele,
1998) have examined what they called stage-environment fit, or the fit be
tween the environment and children's developing needs. They have
claimed that schools, particularly junior high schools, restrict adolescents'
autonomy precisely when they need it most, in early adolescence. Eccles and
her colleagues provided evidence from several studies indicating that, de
spite students' increasing maturity, junior high school classrooms emphasize
greater teacher control and discipline and offer fewer opportunities for stu
dent involvement in decision making, choice, and self-management than do
elementary school classrooms. Increases in teacher control have been found
when the same students and their teachers were followed through the tran
sition from sixth to seventh grade (Midgley & Feldlaufer, 1987). This re
sulted in increased discrepancies, or mismatches, between early
adolescents' desires for autonomy over decision making and their percep
tions of their opportunities to engage in decision making in their classrooms.
Eccles et al. (1998) reported that this mismatch resulted in declines in in
trinsic motivation and interest in school.
In their discussions of this research, Eccles and her colleagues (Eccles et
al., 1993; Eccles et al., 1998) called for more developmentally appropriate
environments for early adolescents, including more opportunities for stu
dent input into decisions regarding their learning, as well as classroom deci
sion making. The research on adolescents' conceptions of school and
teacher authority discussed previously (Smetana & Bitz, 1996) adds speci
ficity to these recommendations by providing some indications of the types
of issues over which students seek greater involvement and decision-mak-
ing autonomy. The findings indicate that students desire greater autonomy
over contextually conventional and personal issues in school.
In a similar vein, research has shown that adolescents who view parents
as intruding too deeply into their personal domains view their parents as psy
chologically controlling (Smetana & Daddis, 2002), and in turn, greater
perceived psychological control has been related to a variety of psychologi
cal problems, including both internalizing problems like depression and
anxiety, and externalizing problems, like conduct disorders (Barber, Olsen,
& Shagle, 1994). Research also has found that parents who are authorita
tive in their parenting style are able to draw clear boundaries among moral,
conventional, multifaceted, and personal issues (Smetana, 1995c). That is,
authoritative parents make clear distinctions between moral and conven
tional issues, while being responsive in granting adolescents authority over
personal issues. They are also relatively restrictive and do not view adoles
cents as having personal jurisdiction over issues that entail overlaps be
tween conventional and personal issues (multifaceted issues). Thus, it
appears that authoritative parents are relatively demanding in constructing
the boundaries of legitimate parental authority, while still granting adoles
84 SMETANA
mapped the social world of adolescent crowds by placing them along two di
mensions: the extent to which youth are involved in the social institutions
controlled by adults, and the extent to which they are involved in the more
informal peer culture. "Jocks" and "populars" are examples of crowds that
are heavily invested in both adult institutions and peer culture. "Brains" and
"nerds" may be heavily involved in adult'controlled institutions but not in
peer culture, and "partyers " occupy the opposite end of the social map. They
are heavily invested in peer culture but not in adult institutions. An espe
cially ironic aspect of adolescent identity development is that adolescents
typically use their crowd membership as a reference group in their attempts
to establish a unique identity. Personal identities typically are woven out of
crowd values, and the less that crowds are invested in adult social institu
tions, the more their behaviors may entail resistance to or subversion of
adult standards. Some character educators have seen this as evidence of
moral decay and a decline in moral values (Bennett, 1992, 1997; Wynne,
1986). Noting that peer cultures can create norms that are antithetical to
good character, Lickona (1997) argued for the need for a more positive peer
culture. Although the names have changed, their social mapping has not
the major adolescent crowds have remained relatively constant over the
past 50 years. Thus, much of adolescents' resistance and rule breaking may
be seen as attempts at socially constructing and elaborating different social
identities whose uniqueness stems from their differentiation from adult con
ventions. Perhaps it is this contrarian featurethe apparent rejection of
adult tastes and conventionsthat provokes the persistent concern of the
adult generation.
CONCLUSIONS
REFERENCES
Damon, W., & Hart, D. (1988). Self-understanding in childhood and adolescence. Cam
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Demos, J., & Demos, V. (1969). Adolescence in historical perspective. Journal of Mar
riage and the Family, 31, 632-638.
DeVries, R., &Zan, B. (1994). Moral classrooms, moral children: Creating a constructivist
atmosphere for early education. New York: Teachers College Press.
Dornbusch, S. M., Ritter, R L, Mont-Reynaud, R., &.Chen, Z. (1990). Family decision-
making and academic performance in a diverse high school population. Journal of
Adolescent Research, 5, 143-160
Douvan, E., & Adelson, J. (1966). The adolescent experience. New York: Wiley.
Dreikurs, R., Grunwald, B. B., & Pepper, F. C. (1982).Maintaining sanity in the classroom:
Classroom management techniques (2nd ed.). New York: Harper & Row.
Duffet, A., Johnson, J., & Farkas, S. (1999). Kids these days '99: What Americans really
think of the next generation. New York: Public Agenda.
Eccles, J. S., Midgley, C., Wigfield, A., Buchanan, C. M., Reuman, D., Flanagan, C. et al.
(1993). Development during adolescence: The impact of stage-environment fit on
adolescents' experiences in schools and families. American Psychologist, 48,90-101.
Eccles, J. S., Wigfield, A., & Schiefele, U. (1998). Motivation to succeed. In W. Damon
(Series Ed.) &.N. Eisenberg (Vol. Ed.), Handbook of Child Psychology: Vol. 3. Social,
emotional, and personality development (5th ed., pp. 1017-1095). New York: Wiley.
Emery, R. E. (1992). Family conflicts and their developmental implications: A concep
tual analysis of meanings for the structure of relationships. In C. U. Shantz & W. W.
Hartup (Eds.), Conflict in child and adolescent development (pp. 270298). Cambridge,
MA: Cambridge University Press.
Erikson, E. H. (1958). Identity, youth, and crisis. New York: Norton.
Fuentes, D. (1998, June 15). The crackdown on kids. The Nation, 20-22.
Fuligni, A. J. (1998). Authority, autonomy, and parent-adolescent conflict and cohe
sion: A study of adolescents from Mexican, Chinese, Filipino, and European back
grounds. Developmental Psychology, 34, 782792.
Furman, W, & Buhrmester, D. (1992). Age and sex in perceptions of networks of per
sonal relationships. Child Development, 63, 103115.
Grotevant, H. D., & Cooper, C. R. (1985). Patterns of interaction in family relationships
and the development of identity exploration in adolescence. Child Development, 56,
415^28.
Grotevant, H. D., & Cooper, C. R. (1986). Individuation in family relationships. Human
Development, 29, 82-100.
Hauser, S. T, Powers, S. L, Noam, G. G., Jacobson, A. M., Weiss, B., & Follansbee, D.
(1984). Familial contexts of adolescent ego development. Child Development, 55,
195-213.
Hill, J. (1987). Research on adolescents and their families: Past and prospect. In C. E.
Irwin, Jr. (Ed.), New directions for child development: Vol. 27. Adolescent social behavior
and health (pp. 1331). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Holmbeck, G. N. (1996). A model of family relational transformations during the transi
tion to adolescence: Parent-adolescent conflict and adaptation. In J. A. Graber, J.
Brooks-Gunn, & A. C. Petersen (Eds.), Transitions through adolescence: Interpersonal
domains and context (pp. 167-199). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Kandel, D. B., & Lesser, G. S. (1972). Youth in two worlds. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Killen, M., McGlothlin, H., & Lee-Kim, J. (2002). Heterogeneity in social cognition and
culture. In H. Keller, Y. Poortinga, & A. Schoelmerich (Eds.),Between biology and cul
4. RESISTANCE AS DEVELOPMENTAL PROCESS 89
Offer, D. (1969). The psychological world of the teenager. New York: Basic Books.
Oyserman, D., Coon, H. M., &.Kemmelmeier, M. (2002). Rethinking individualism and
collectivism: Evaluation of theoretical assumptions and meta-analyses. Psychological
Bulletin, 128, 3-72.
Phelan, T. W. (1998). Surviving your adolescents: How to manage and let go of your 13-18
year olds (2nd ed.). Glen EUyn, IL: Child Management Press.
Robin, A. L, & Foster, S. I. (1989). Negotiating parent-adolescent conflict: A behavioral
family systems approach. New York: Guilford.
Rutter, M. (1980). Changing youth in a changing society. London: Nuffield Provincials
Hospital Trust.
Rutter, M., Graham, R, Chadwick, O. F. D., & Yule, W. (1976). Adolescent turmoil: Fact
or fiction? Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 17, 35-56.
Silverberg, S. B., Tennenbaum, D. L., & Jacob, T. (1992). Adolescence and family inter
action. In V B. Van Hasselt & M. Hersen (Eds.), Handbook of social development: A
lifespan perspective (pp. 347-370). New York: Plenum.
Smetana, J. G. (1988). Adolescents' and parents' conceptions of parental authority.
ChUd Development, 59, 321-335.
Smetana, J. G. (1989). Adolescents' and parents' reasoning about actual family conflict.
Child Development, 60, 1052-1067.
Smetana, J. G. (1995a). Conflict and coordination in adolescent-parent relationships.
In S. Shulman (Ed.), Close relationships and sodoemotional development (pp. 155-184).
Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Smetana, J. G. (1995b). Morality in context: Abstractions, ambiguities, and applica
tions. In R. Vasta (Ed.), Annals of child development (Vol. 10, pp. 83-130). London:
Jessica Kinglsey.
Smetana, J. G. (1995c). Parenting styles and conceptions of parental authority during
adolescence. Child Development, 66, 299-316.
Smetana, J. (1996). Adolescent-parent conflict: Implications for adaptive and mal
adaptive development. In D. Cicchetti & S. L. Toth (Eds.), Rochester Symposium on
Developmental Psychopathology: Vol. VII. Adolescence: Opportunities and challenges (pp.
1-46). Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press.
Smetana, J. G. (2000). Middle class African American adolescents' and parents' concep
tions of parental authority and parenting practices: A longitudinal investigation.
Child Development, 71, 1672-1686.
Smetana, J. G. (2002). Culture, autonomy, and personal jurisdiction in adolescent-par-
ent relationships. In H. W. Reese & R. Kail (Eds.), Advances in Child development and
behavior (Vol. 29, pp. 51-87). New York: Academic Press.
Smetana, J. G., & Asquith, P (1994). Adolescents' and parents' conceptions of parental
authority and adolescent autonomy. Child Development, 65, 1147-1162.
Smetana, J. G., &Berent, R. (1993). Adolescents' and mothers' evaluations of justifica
tions for disputes. Journal of Adolescent Research, 8, 252-273.
Smetana, J. G., & Bitz, B. (1996). Adolescents' conceptions of teachers' authority and
their relations to rule violations in school. Child Development, 67, 1153-1172.
Smetana, J. G., Braeges, J. L., & Yau, J. (1991). Doing what you say and saying what you
do: Reasoning about adolescent-parent conflict in interviews and interactions. Jour
nal of Adolescent Research, 6, 276-295.
Smetana, J. G., & Chuang, S. S. (2001). Middle class African American parents' concep
tions of parenting in early adolescence, journal of Research on Adolescence, 11,
177-198.
4. RESISTANCE AS DEVELOPMENTAL PROCESS 91
Risk-Taking, Carnival,
and the Novelistic Self:
Adolescents' Avenues
to Moral Being and Integrity
Cynthia Lightfoot
Pennsylvania State University
According to the buzz and chatter in the popular press, and aided and abet
ted by the scientific community, adolescents either are running with scissors
or on the high road to a quality of life that their progenitors could only imag
ine. By the first account, they have never been more poorly educated, pre
maturely pregnant, reckless, drugged, depressed, apathetic, suicidal, and
violent. Responding to this apparent moral crisis is a legion of studies mar
shaled to rout out the blameworthy, pointing fingers in turn at broken fami
lies, chaotic neighborhoods, declining religiosity, eroding social controls,
peer group exclusion, violent media, inattentive parents, and just plain
boredom (e.g., Polakow, 2000). It was written of boys in particular:
Americans are worried about their boys. Large numbers of boys roam the streets with
out much adult supervision or even surveillance. They gather in peer groups and seem
to flaunt adult values in their dress and speech. Large numbers of them are foreign
93
94 LIGHTFOOT
born. These male peer groupsgangs, reallyengage too often in aggressive and vio
lent behavior ... One sociologist's book, The Boy Problem, has labeled this the most
challenging social problem for the generation, (p. xv)
What is the difference between a risk that you would take and one that you
wouldn't take?
I wouldn't do anything that's immoral.
I wouldn't do anything that would make my parents totally lose trust
in me.
It wouldn't hurt anyone else. It might hurt me, but I probably
wouldn't take a risk that is going to affect someone elsemy friends,
or someone I don't know. Like drinking and driving. I would never do
that, no matter what the situation, no matter how much trouble I
could get in with my parents (i.e., by calling parents to get a ride home, or
"crashing" at the party and not going home at all).
When people hurt each otherthat's the worst. You have no right to
do that. (Like what?) Like drunk driving.
I have friends who steal and shoplift. To most people it's not that big a
deal, but to me it is because you're hurting someone else.
What about someone who tries to get his or her good friend to try pot, even
though he or she doesn't really want to?
That would make me really mad because since you don't do it (smoke
pot), it's breaking the code. (What code is that?) The code is that you
don't put someone in that position.
If we cannot imagine ourselves as different from what we are ... we cannot impose a
discipline upon ourselves though we may accept one from others. Active virtue, as dis
tinguished from the passive acceptance of a code, is therefore theatrical, consciously
dramatic, the wearing of a mask. (1959, p. 334)
Thanks to these two instruments, i.e. the formal operations and a "personal" hierar
chy of values, the adolescent plays a fundamental role in our societies of liberating
coming generations from older ones. This leads the individual to elaborate further
the new things that he acquired during his development as a child at the same time
that it frees him, at least in part, from the obstacles issuing from adult constraints.
(Piaget, 1995, p. 299)
Consistent with his overall theory, Piaget linked these momentous shifts
in moral life to the grand sweep of cognitive development. Bakhtin
(18951975), a Russian literary scholar and a contemporary of Piaget,
would have objected to Piaget's endorsement of abstract structuralism and
its accoutrements of "disinterested" moral norms and value hierarchies.
There are, however, points of conceptual contact between the two theorists,
including their desire to characterize the emergence of a consciously aware
ethical life that is personally meaningful and relatively free of the shackles of
imposed authority.
Where Piaget spoke of obligation and goodness as two fundamental forms
of moral life, Bakhtin spoke of discourseone that is primarilyauthoritative,
the other internally persuasive. He illustrated the distinction between them
by drawing parallels to two familiar pedagogical modes: reciting by heart and
retelling in one's own words. In the psyche, reciting by heart is analogous to
authoritative discourse. It is imposed; demands allegiance; does not permit
one to argue with it, play with it, or integrate it; or merge it with other beliefs,
values, or knowledge. It cannot be representedit is only transmitted:
98 LIGHTFOOT
It is, so to speak, the word of the fathers. Its authority was already acknowledged in the
past. It is a prior discourse. It is therefore not a question of choosing it from among
other possible discourses that are its equal. It is given (it sounds) in lofty spheres, not
those of familiar contact. (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 342)
It is this lost sense of the word that characterizes Bakhtin's theory of aes
thetics. His aesthetic object is not one of sacred and self-sufficient beauty
born of unexamined compliance, but one of purpose, power, and under
standing born of inspiration. The person listens; Calliope whispers; the per
son creates. The aesthetic work is not an offering, but an answer.
Of particular moment in Bakhtin's theory were his efforts to relate the ethi
cal and aesthetic aspects of human action. He drew extensive parallels be
tween the self and the novel, arguing that both involve a highly complex
combination and dialogue of noncoincident discourses and ways of speak
ing, each expressing a particular worldview or stance. Bakhtin considered
dialogue to be essential to self-development; he described selfhood as "es
sentially novelistic, that is, in terms of inner dialogues and the processes that
shape them over time into a personality" (Morson & Emerson, 1990, p.
1OQ LIGHTFOOT
216). Both self and novel constitute artistically organized systems for bring'
ing different languages in contact with one another; both have the goal of il
luminating one language by means of anotherof carving out an image of
one language in the light of another.
Artistically organized systems vary in the way that languages are repre
sented or interilluminated, or the degree to which they are directly mixed.
At one extreme is direct stylization, an artistic image of another's language
that preserves its integrity while intending to establish resonance with the
language of the stylizer and his or her contemporaneous audience. Although
only one image is constructed, it nevertheless requires the presence of two
individualized consciousnesses: the one that represents, and the one that is
represented. At the other extreme is parodic stylization, in which the artistic
intentions of the representing discourse are explicitly and directly destruc
tive to that which is represented. To be authentic and productive, which is
to say successful, the parodied language must be represented as fully formed
and possessing its own internal logic, however profaned and despised it be
comes through the discourse of parody.
For Bakhtin, the mutual illumination of multiple discourses takes place
between these two extremes. What is crucial for the evolution of the ideo
logical consciousness is the artistic rendering, the intentional giving of form,
and the dramatization and objectification of coherent languages or socio
ideological points of view:
Bakhtin argued that the product of such engaged language play is pro
foundly ethical. Through it, we are not only liberated from the hegemony of
a unitary, authoritative discourse, but sensitized to the internal form of the
other and, indeed, the internal form of our own inner discourses that them
selves become reified and alien, objects of consciousness illuminated as such
by the other. When consciousness emerges of one's own inner discourse as
only one among others, the fusion of discourse and ideology is disrupted and,
"only then will language reveal its essentially human character; from behind
its words, forms, styles ... faces begin to emerge, the images of speaking hu
man beings" (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 370). Thus, a deeply involved participation
with alien languages and cultures gives rise to a verbal-ideological de-
centeringa dissociation of language from the intentions, meanings, and
truths that it embodies and, therefore, an undoing of mythological and mag
ical thought. According to Bakhtin, a healthy self strives for exposure to
multiple perspectives, strives toward a novelized state, to increase its own
5. RISK-TAKING, CARNIVAL, AND THE NOVELISTIC SELF 1O1
choices and responsibility and reduce its impotence in the world. Individu
als, as well as cultures, that open only to others like themselves, or do not
open at all, become rigid, inert, and impoverished.
Bakhtin's theory of the novel and the novelized self contains a transpar
ent humanism that biographers and critics see as responsive to the Russian
political and intellectual movements of his time. Within this broader con
text, the concept that we consider nextthat of carnivalassumes a par
ticularly ambiguous posture due at least in part to Bakhtin's own
reformulation of both carnival and the novel as he struggled to make both
cohere with his overall theory. However, in all its ambiguity, and perhaps be
cause of its ambiguity, carnival has special relevance for understanding ado
lescents' risk-taking as a medium for self-development.
val lasts, while the carnival self is eating, drinking, fornicating, or puking, it is
cultivating its alibi for beinglaughter.
The collective orientation of carnivalits laughing alibi, absence of his
tory, and absolute openness to the carnival surroundoperate against the
dialogic goals of the novelized self. Where carnival presupposes fusion, dia
logue insists on distinctiveness; that is, it requires at least two noncoinci
dent consciousnesses, each outside the other. However, the two Utopian
visions of selfone effaced in carnival, and one striving romantically for
definition and individuation by giving form to the otherwere to find a
more conciliatory relationship in Bakhtin's later writings. This is seen most
clearly in his argument regarding the form-generating function of "outsided
ness" in carnival laughter.
Bakhtin (1970/1986) considered outsideness to be "the most powerful le
ver of understanding" (p. 7). It is a concept that runs throughout his work,
and one seen by Russian scholars and critics as the common ground of his
ethics and aesthetics. At every turn, Bakhtin insisted on the necessary sin
gularity and separateness of each individual in relation to another as an en
abling condition for constructing the forms of things, be they aesthetic
works or persuasive ideological discourses. This holds as much for the form
ing and representation of self as it does for forming and representing the
other. Speaking of the author-creator, Bakhtin (1981) wrote:
(He) can represent the temporal-spatial world and its events only as if he had seen and
observed them himself, only as i/he were an omnipresent witness to them. Even had he
created an autobiography or a confession of the most astonishing truthfulness, all the
same he, as its creator, remains outside the world he has represented in his work. If I re
late (or write about) an event that has just happened to me, then I as the teller (or
writer) of this event am already outside the time and space in which the event oc
curred. It is just as impossible to forge an identity between myself, my own "I," and that
"I" that is the subject of my stories as it is to lift myself up by my own hair. (p. 256)
always "bestowed," not merely decreed or revealed. It looks different, and differently
perfected, to each person who beholds it. Human beings are form-bestowing crea
tures. It is part of our nature to crave to finalize. This craving, according to Bakhtin, is
the aesthetic instinct, (pp. 220-221)
We try not to get into that (social scene) anymore, because they're all typical high
school students. They'll go to college and they fit in with school. A lot of the people I
hang out with are dropouts and we are extremely prejudiced against the great percent
age of the school and we try not to get into that kind of grouping.
LOWRIDER ART
Over time, the magazine editors began to receive artwork in such quan
tity that they decided in 1992 to start a new magazine devoted to it entirely.
Of particular note is the transformation of the form over the course of the
past decade. As illustrated in Fig. 5.2, the artwork began to introduce dis
tinctly Mexican cultural motifs. There are now repeated themes in lowrider
art that include Aztec and other pre-Columbian images, including the Vir
gin of Guadalupe, and the Mexican Revolution. In fact, as illustrated in Fig.
5.3, the art has become increasingly symbolic, often leaving out of the pic
ture its own namesake (the lowrider car) in the process of constructing
works of cultural and political, as welll as aesthetic significance.
Lowrider art is seen in the Hispanic community as a means of celebrating
Mexican heritage. In an interview conducted by Grady (2002) as a part of a
larger ethnographic study, one of the magazine editors quoted the editorial
policy printed in the submission guidelines that "artwork must be free of
gang slogans, violence, weapons, drugs and/or alcohol" (p. 175). The editor
sees the magazine as a tool of cultural expression; others have described it as
a way to demonstrate that Mexicans "could do other things besides work in
the fields" (Grady, 2002, p. 175). Indeed, the genre has been an inspiration
to Hispanic adolescents of both genders: It is traced onto school notebooks,
According to his biographers and translators, Bakhtin was the first to formu
late a comprehensive philosophy of the ordinaryof the disorganized, un
systematic, moment- to -moment prosaics of experience, as distinct from the
ordered, abstract, and idealized poetics. The distinction plays out in one of
Bateson's "metalogues" with his daughter, who is interested to know why
things get in a muddle: "People spend a lot of time tidying things, but they
never seem to spend time muddling them. Things just seem to get in a mud
dle by themselves. And then people have to tidy them again" (in Morson &
Emerson, 1990, p. 29). Deflecting his daughter's call for a poetics of mud
dling, Bateson replied simply that the world includes a lot more messiness
than tidiness. Messiness just is.
So, too, for Bakhtin, who argued, in contrast to the leading intellectuals
of his time (including Freud), that it is not disorder and fragmentation that
requires explanation, but integrity, unity, and wholeness. Set against the
messiness of everyday life, unity is always a matter of work. In the case of
developing a self, it is a lifelong and incomplete project. According to
Bakhtin, the self is neither discovered or given, or even fully constructed;
it can only be posited. In this regard, he struck a chord sympathetic to that
of Baldwin, who argued that an essential ingredient to self-development is
"the intent to be a subject," that is, a forward-pressing striving to be what
one is not but may yet become. For Baldwin and Bakhtin, the self leaning
into the future as hypothesis and potentiality, the positing (i.e., of a self for
ever poised to become something else), is aesthetically formed and provi
sionally achieved by virtue of the ethical obligations of each moment and
each situation. In his first published essay, "Art and Responsibility,"
Bakhtin wrote that, "personality must become responsible through and
through. All its aspects must not only arrange themselves along the tem
poral flow of its life, but must also intersect one another in the unity of
blame and responsibility" (translated in Morson & Emerson, 1990, p. 31).
Only a "pretender" would do otherwise. Such a person, according to
Bakhtin, does not feign the identity of another, but rather avoids the pro
ject of selfhood altogether, either by living according to the lofty abstract
norms and demands of another, or by failing to do so; that is, by failing to
engage the other dialogically. An example of this is provided by our teen
5. RISK-TAKING, CARNIVAL, AND THE NOVELISTIC SELF 1O9
age subjects who "are extremely prejudiced against the great percentage of
the school," and refuse to "get into that kind of grouping." Whether the in
dividual succumbs to a moral order not of his or her own making, or rails
against the other in the absence of engaging a process of objectification,
the person is "washed on all sides by the waves of an endless, empty poten
tiality" (translated in Morson & Emerson, 1990, p. 31); personal responsi
bility is null and void.
By Bakhtin's logic, the unity of self, its integrity, does not answer to the
question, "Who am I?" This is rather the question of self-continuity as for
mulated by Erikson and pursued in modern approaches to identity develop
ment (Chandler, Chandler, Lalonde, Sokol, & Hallett, 2003; Moshman,
2004). However, the lasting and perdurable "I" persisting across time, space,
and accrued experience is not what Bakhtin is after. Only part of the project
of becoming involves arranging oneself diachronically along the "temporal
flow of life" and embracing the twinned epistemological and moral impera
tives of knowing oneself and being true to oneself. Left in the dust of con
temporary scholarship as it stampedes toward the integral self continuous in
time is what Bakhtin considered the most difficult task of self-development:
the creation of a self unified within the synchronous, ethically weighted mo
ment, whose integrity I can stand behindwhich I can respect. Only then
will I seek no "alibis" (Emerson, 1997, p. 238).
For Piaget, respect constituted the very source of moral law and led ulti
mately to the "morality of goodness." His particular version of respect,
however, is of the type given by one to another, bestowed on another by vir
tue of his or her location on our personal metric of value. Missing from his
argument, missing from the entire contemporary enterprise devoted to the
study of moral life and identity, is the self-respect envisioned by Bakhtin as
essential to engaging in any communicative act that I can stand behind.
This leaves out a lot. What I have attempted to accomplish here, in admit
tedly fledgling form, is to map out an argument that implicates his theory of
aesthetics, including his conceptions of carnival, the novelistic self, and
the development of an ideological consciousness, as relevant to contem
porary discourse on self-development. In light of the currently divided and
divisive approaches to adolescent risk-taking, in light of the ambiguity in
herent to adolescents' very own reflections on their risk-taking ("Stealing
beer from a truck shows what lengths you'll go to to be with the group"; "I'd
never do anything that's immoral"), Bakhtin's reading of "becoming a per
son" is a particularly promising antidote. The binocular view that it brings
into focus suggests that much of adolescents' social action, however carni-
valesquebecause it is carnivalesquemay be profitably explored as an
aesthetic ground for testing and developing the self-respect and construct
ing the Muse necessary to navigate the ordinary and messy moral land
scape of their lives.
1 1O LIGHTFQOT
REFERENCES
Acland, C. (1995). Youth, murder, spectacle: The cultural politics of "youth in crisis." Boul
der, CO: Westview.
Bakhtin, M. (1968). Rabelais and his world. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bakhtin, M. (1984). Problems ofDostoevsky's poetics. (Emerson, Ed. & Trans.). Minneap
olis: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1963)
Bakhtin, M. (1986). Response to a question from Novy Mir. In C. Emerson & M.
Holquist (Eds.), Speech genres and other late essays: M. M. Bakhtin (pp. 1-7). Austin:
University of Texas Press. (Original work published 1970)
Bakhtin, M. (1993). Toward a philosophy of the act. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Calasso, R. (1993). The marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. New York: Knopf.
Chandler, M., Chandler, M., Lalonde, C., Sokol, B., &Hallett, D. (2003). Personal per
sistence, identity development, and suicide: A study of native and non-native North
American adolescents. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 68
(Whole No. 273).
Dohrn, B. (2000). "Look out, kid, it's something you did": The criminalization of chil
dren. In V. Polakow (Ed.), The pubhc assault on Americas children: Poverty, violence and
juvenile injustice (pp. 157-187). New York: Teachers College Press.
Emerson, C. (1997). The first hundred years of Mikhail Bakhtin. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Fornas, J., & Bolin, G. (Eds.). (1995). Youth culture in late modernity. London: Sage.
Goldman, D. (1997). Down for La Raza: Barrio art t-shirts, Chicano pride, and cultural
resistance. Journai of Folklore Research, 34, 123-138.
Grady, K. (2002). Lowrider art and Latino students in the rural Midwest. In S. Wortham,
E. Murillo, & E. Hamann (Eds.), Education in the new Latino diaspora: Policy and the
politics of identity. Westport, CT Ablex.
Hancock, L. (2000). Framing children in the news: The face and color of youth crime in
America. In V. Polakow (Ed.), The public assault on America's children: Poverty, violence
and juvenile injustice (pp. 7898). New York: Teachers College Press.
Lightfoot, C. (1997). The culture of adolescent risk-taking. New York: Guilford.
Lightfoot, C. (2000). On respect. New Ideas in Psychokgy, 18, 177-185.
Lightfoot, C. (2003). Breathing lessons: Self as genre and aesthetic. In T. Brown & L.
Smith (Eds.), Reductionism and the development ofknowledge (pp. 177-198).Mahwah,
NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Males, M. (1999). Framing youth: 10 myths about the next generation. Monroe, ME: Com
mon Courage Press.
Mechling, J. (2001). On my honor: Boy Scouts and the making of American youth. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Morson, G., &. Emerson, C. (1990). Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation ofaprosaics. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Moshman, D. (2004). Theories of self and selves as theories: Identity in Rwanda. In C.
Lightfoot, C. Lalonde, &M. Chandler (Eds.), Developing conceptions of psychological
life (pp. 183206). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Nucci, L. (1996). Morality and the personal sphere of actions. In E. Reed, E. Turiel, &. T.
Brown (Eds.), Values and knowledge (pp. 41-60). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates.
5. RISK-TAKING, CARNIVAL, AND THE NOVELISTIC SELF 1 11
Adolescents' Peer
Interactions: Conflict
Stacey S. Horn
University of Illinois at Chicago
Peer group exclusion, teasing, and harassment are a part of most adolescents'
lives. As adults we are often left asking why it is that adolescents frequently
treat each other with such cruelty and meanness. Some argue that it is be
cause of a moral decline in our society and that adolescents are out of con
trol. Is this the case, however? Are adolescents today simply lacking
morality? Or, rather, is it that adolescents' social worlds are complex and as
such they are faced with coordinating conflicting needs or values in negoti
ating their peer relationships? For example, do adolescents sometimes view
exclusion as a legitimate form of social regulation? In this chapter I discuss
the unique complexity of adolescents' peer groups and some of the ways in
which this complexity may be related to the types of decisions adolescents
make about how to treat one another.
COMPLEXITY IN ADOLESCENTS' PEER GROUPS
Peers and peer relationships (or lack of them) are a critical part of adoles
cents' social worlds. During the transition into adolescence, the peer social
113
1 14 HORN
support the emergence of a peer system that is based not on "who hangs
around with who" but rather on prototypic group representations that are
based on the types of activities, attitudes, behaviors, and values different
groups of individuals have in common (McLellan & Youniss, 1999). As
such, this larger peer group system is a more abstract representation of the
peer world than adolescents' actual social networks (McLellan & Youniss,
2000). In turn, these peer group or identity prototypes have associated with
them particular social norms and conventions for behaviors, activities, and
other modes of personal expression that adolescents use in developing their
own personal identities and in stratifying the broader social milieu. Newman
and Newman (1976) argued that peer groups not only provide the proto
types available to and venues through which adolescents test out their iden
tities, they also provide them with critical information, feedback, and
support (or nonsupport) regarding these varying identities. Through this
feedback system then, peer groups and peer group norms set the boundaries
for what is considered appropriate or "cool" individual expression and who is
granted status within that peer system.
It appears then, that one of the complexities of adolescence is trying to
balance the needs to create a personal identity and to "fit in" to the peer
group or peer groups to which you want to belong. In doing this, adolescents
are also taking notice of their peers, their peers' emergent identity construc
tions, and the larger groups' reactions to these identities. Thus, in evaluat
ing and interacting with one's peers, adolescents are then confronted with
having to negotiate and coordinate not only moral considerations, but also
salient personal and social ones. Sometimes, an adolescent's identity expres
sion may coalesce with the norms and conventions valued by the peer group.
In this case there will likely be little conflict between the peer group and this
individual. Conversely, an adolescent's identity expression may be outside
the norms or conventions valued by the group, thereby creating conflict for
both the individual and the others within that peer system. In this circum
stance, how do adolescents negotiate and coordinate these conflicting di
mensions? More specifically, what is the relationship among personal
expression, social group norms, and adolescents' evaluations of the treat
ment of others? Using social cognitive domain theory as a framework, I have
been investigating these issues for the past few years.
Specifically, I have been investigating the ways in which adolescents rea
son about issues of exclusion, harassment, and unfairness based on peer
group membership, gender identity, and sexual orientation. I chose these
three social categories because they are highly salient to adolescents' lives.
Additionally, these categories seem to be dimensions along which adoles
cents get excluded, ostracized, teased, or harassed in schools. Further, unlike
race and biological sex, which are perceived by most individuals to be in
nate, peer group membership, gender expression, and sexual orientation are
1 16 HORN
more often seen as chosen expressions of one's identity, and therefore as cat
egories that can be changed. As such, there seem to be more social norms
that serve to regulate adolescents' identity expressions within these three
categories. This research has begun to illuminate the ways in which adoles
cents coordinate the different dimensions of their social interactions and
the factors that impact their reasoning regarding these interactions. In the
next section of this chapter, I briefly describe social cognitive domain theory
and its usefulness in studying how adolescents reason about peer group rela
tionships. Then I discuss relevant findings from two empirical studies inves
tigating these issues. In the last section of the chapter I discuss implications
of these results for moral education.
In social cognitive domain theory (Turiel, 1983, 1998; Turiel, Killen, &
Helwig, 1987) it is proposed that social judgments are influenced by the
reasoning processes that individuals bring to bear on those judgments.
Specifically, it is posited that there are three conceptually distinct domains
of social reasoningmoral, societal, and psychologicalthat individuals
use when understanding and making decisions about their social worlds
(Turiel, 1983, 1998). The moral domain pertains to issues of others' wel
fare (harm), justice (comparative treatment and distribution), and rights.
The societal domain pertains to issues involving the rules, norms, and con
ventions that coordinate the social interactions of individuals within so
cial systems. In the psychological domain, knowledge pertains to
interpersonal relationships, the understanding of individuals as psycho
logical systems, and those issues over which individuals have personal ju
risdiction (Smetana, 1995; Turiel, 1983).
Recent research on peer relationships utilizing this theoretical frame
work has investigated issues of gender and racial exclusion in diverse peer
group contexts (Killen, Lee-Kim, McGlothlin, & Stangor, 2002; Killen &
Stangor, 2001), the impact of stereotypes of adolescent peer groups on ado
lescents' reasoning about retribution (Horn, Killen, & Stangor, 1999); the
impact of ambiguity on adolescents' reasoning about exclusion based on ad
olescent peer groups (Horn, 2003), as well as how adolescents' beliefs about
gender norms and sexuality impact their reasoning about the treatment of
others based on gender expression or sexual orientation (Horn, 2002; Horn
&.Nucci, 2002, 2003). Overall this research suggests that adolescents pre
dominantly view exclusion, teasing, and peer harassment as wrong and that
they think it is wrong because it is unfair or hurtful. Thus, it would seem
then, based on this research, that adolescents do have a moral sense when it
comes to relating with their peers. This research, however, has also delin
6. ADOLESCENTS' PEER INTERACTIONS 1 17
Group Description
Dirties Wear old, dirty, or grunge -style clothing, disengaged from school and
teachers, smart, participate in moderate to heavy amounts of
delinquent activity (drinking, smoking pot, trouble at school). Male
and female.
Gothics Wear black clothes and makeup, engage in deviant behavior such as
witchcraft, like music and concerts, indifferent or defiant attitudes
toward school and teachers, loners and outcasts. Mixed gender but
more female.
Jocks Participate in sports and other school activities, part of the popular
peer culture, favored by teachers, not smart, participate in a moderate
amount of delinquent activity (drinking, smoking pot). Male.
Gender, Sexual
Orientation, Gender
Expression Description
Male, gay, George is a gay male high school student. He plays on the school
gender- conforming baseball team. He is a B student. He dresses and acts like most of
the other guys at school. To all outward appearances, he seems just
like any other boy at the school.
Male, straight, Steve is a straight male high school student. He plays on the school
appearance baseball team. He is a B student. He dresses and acts differently
nonconforming from most of the other guys at school. For example he acts
feminine, and sometimes wears fingernail polish and eyeliner.
Male, gay, Mark is a gay male high school student. He plays on the school
appearance baseball team. He is a B student. He dresses and acts differently
nonconforming from most of the other guys at school. For example he acts
feminine, and sometimes wears fingernail polish and eyeliner.
Male, straight, Todd is a straight male high school student. He is a member of the
activity local ballet company. He is a B student. He dresses and acts like
nonconforming most of the other guys at school.
Male, gay, activity Matt is a gay male high school student. He is a member of the local
nonconforming ballet company. He is a B student. He dresses and acts like most of
the other guys at school.
Female, lesbian, Jenny is a lesbian high school student. She plays on the school
gender- conforming volleyball team. She is a B student. She dresses and acts like most of
the other girls at school. To all outward appearances, she seems just
like any other girl at the school.
Female, straight, Ashley is a straight female high school student. She plays on the
appearance school volleyball team. She is a B student. She dresses and acts
nonconforming differently from most of the other girls at school. For example, she
acts masculine, has a crew cut, and never wears makeup or dresses.
Female, lesbian, Mary is a lesbian high school student. She plays on the school
appearance volleyball team. She is a B student. She dresses and acts differently
nonconforming from most of the other girls at school. For example, she acts
masculine, has a crew cut, and never wears makeup or dresses.
Female, straight, Talia is a straight female high school student. She is a running back
activity on the high school football team. She is a B student. She dresses
nonconforming and acts like most of the other girls at school.
Female, lesbian, Amy is a lesbian high school student. She is a running back on the
activity school football team. She is a B student. She dresses and acts like
nonconforming most of the other girls at school.
12O
6. ADOLESCENTS' PEER INTERACTIONS 121
OF OTHERS
SOCIAL IDENTITY
AGE-RELATED DIFFERENCES
DISCUSSION
The results presented in this chapter suggest that as adolescents are trying to
make sense of themselves and their expanding social world they are negoti
ating and coordinating personal, conventional, and moral considerations in
their peer interactions. As adolescents are trying on and testing out different
identity expressions they are also doing this within a peer group structure
that has norms and conventions that impact how those identity expressions
are perceived by others. Within the peer system certain identity expressions
are seen as more normative than others and adolescents view the exclusion
of those who are perceived as nonnormative as more legitimate.
Additionally, the results suggest that adolescents who have more of an in
vestment in the peer social system will be more likely to view exclusion as le
gitimate. For example, adolescents who identify with a peer group that
benefits from the system (through status) are more likely to view the exclu
sion of those whose identity expressions are nonnormative as legitimate.
Additionally, middle adolescents for whom adherence to conventions and
norms is imperative to the maintenance of the system are also more likely to
evaluate the exclusion of those whose identity expressions are counter to
the system as legitimate.
Research on the development of the self also suggests that during middle
adolescence (14-16), when identity exploration is at its peak, adolescents
are grappling with the conflicts and contradictions within their own self-
constructs (Harter, 1999), putting them in a vulnerable position regarding
their own sense of self. This vulnerability makes them extremely sensitive to
the norms and conventions of the peer structure and the feedback this sys
tem gives them regarding their emergent sense of who they are. If the peer
system provides positive and affirming feedback regarding their personal
identity expressions, they will try to maintain the norms and values inherent
in that system by excluding and teasing others who they view as a threat to
this system. On the other hand, if the peer system provides them with nega
tive and rejecting feedback regarding their personal identity expressions,
they may try to do one of three things. They may try to change themselves to
fit into the peer system, they may try to change the peer system, or they may
place themselves (and their values) outside of the peer system completely.
124 HORN
At the extremes, either of these options can lead to violence and harm di
rected toward the self or others. For some adolescents, the only way to re
solve the conflict between who they are (their identity expression) and the
norms and conventions of the adolescent social world is to kill themselves.
For other adolescents, the way to resolve this conflict is to harm those that
they perceive as negating or rejecting their identity expressions.
which multiple identity expressions are valued and supported. This in turn
reduces the likelihood that certain identity expressions will be privileged
over others, reducing the stratification of the peer group system. Addition
ally, classrooms in which a diversity of opinions and voices is presented,
sought, and valued and in which respectful argument and negotiation are
fostered can help students understand how to negotiate the complexity of
the peer group world. Further, schoolwide conflict resolution programs that
help adolescents analyze the different facets or perspectives within a conflict
also help adolescents to practice coordinating the personal, social, and
moral dimensions of the situation.
Finally, a third goal of moral education should be to encourage adoles
cents to interact with a diversity of people within their school and commu
nity environment. Simple exposure to diverse groups, however, is not
enough (Allport, 1954). These interactions should involve diverse adoles
cents working together toward a mutually beneficial goal. Through interact
ing with others, adolescents get to know one another on a more personal
level, thus breaking down the stereotypes or assumptions they might have of
one another. Additionally, by working toward a common goal, adolescents
come to depend on one another and can begin to value the unique skills and
knowledge that each person brings to the group.
CONCLUSION
REFERENCES
Brown, B. B. (1990). Peer groups and peer cultures. In S. S. Feldman & G. R. Elliot
(Eds.), At the threshold: The developing adolescent (pp. 171-196). Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Brown, B. B., Mory, M, &Kinney, D. (1994). Casting adolescent crowds in a relational
perspective: Caricature, channel, and context. In R. Montemayor, G. R. Adams, &T.
P Gullotta (Eds.), Personal relationships during adolescence (pp. 123-167). Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage.
Bukowski, W., & Sippolla, L. (2001). Groups, individuals, and victimization: A view of
the peer system. In J. Juvonen & S. Graham (Eds.), Peer harassment in school: The
plight of the vulnerable and victimized (pp. 242-262). New York: Guilford.
Dunphy, D. (1963). The social structure of urban adolescent peer groups. Sodometry, 26,
230-246.
Erikson, E. (1959). Identity and the life cycle. Psychological Issues, I, 1-171.
Erikson, E. (1968). Identity: Youth and crisis. New York: Norton.
Harter, S. (1999). The construction of the self: A developmental perspective. New York:
Guilford.
Horn, S. S. (2002, November). Living outside the box: The impact of social norms on
adolescents' evaluations of peer exclusion and harassment. In S. Horn (Chair), Con
flict, contradiction and contrarian elements of tolerance for others: Implications for educa
tion. Paper symposium conducted at the annual meeting of the Association for Moral
Education, Chicago.
Horn, S. S. (2003). Adolescents' reasoning about exclusion from social groups. Develop
mental Psychology, 39, 71-84.
Horn, S. S., KillenrM., & Stangor, C. (1999). The influence of stereotypes on adoles
cents' moral reasoning. Journal of Early Adolescence, 19, 98-113.
Horn, S. S., &Nucci, L. P (2003). The multidimensionality of adolescents' beliefs about
and attitudes toward gay and lesbian peers in school. Equity and Excellence in Educa
tion, 36, 1-12.
Horn, S. S., &Nucci, L. P. (2002, April). Adolescents' conceptions of sexual orientation and
gender conventions in relation to their moral evaluations of the treatment of gay, lesbian, and
transgender peers. Paper presentation at the biennial meeting of the Society for Re
search in Adolescence, New Orleans, LA.
Killen, M., Lee-Kim, J., McGlothlin, H., & Stangor, C. (2002). How children and ado
lescents evaluate gender and racial exclusion. Monographs of the Society for Research in
Child Development, 67(4, Serial No. 271).
Killen, M., McGlothlin, H., & Lee-Kim, J. (2002). Between individuals and culture: In
dividuals' evaluations of exclusion from social groups. In H. Keller, Y. Poortinga, &. A.
Schoelmerich (Eds.), Between biology and culture: Perspectives on ontogenetic develop
ment (pp. 159-190). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Killen, M., & Stangor, C. (2001). Social reasoning about inclusion and exclusion in gen
der and race peer group contexts. Child Development, 72, 174-186.
McLellan, J. A., & Youniss, J. (1999). A representational system for peer crowds. In I. E.
Sigel (Ed.), Development of mental representation: Theories and applications (pp.
437-449). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Newman, P R., & Newman, B. M. (1976). Early adolescence and its conflict: Group
identity versus alienation. Adolescence, 11, 261-274.
Nucci, L. (1996). Morality and the personal sphere of actions. In E. Reed, E. Turiel, &T.
Brown (Eds.), Values and knowledge (pp. 41-60). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates.
6. ADOLESCENTS' PEER INTERACTIONS 127
Nucci, L. (2001). Education in the moral domain. Cambridge, England: Cambridge Uni
versity Press.
Piaget, J. (1965). The moral judgment of the child. New York: The Free Press. (Original
work published 1939)
Pugh, M. J., & Hart, D. (1999). Identity development and peer group participation. In J.
McLellan & M. J. Pugh (Eds.), The role of peer groups in adolescent social identity:
Exploring the importance of stability and change. New Directions for Child and Ado
lescent Development (Vol. 84, pp. 55-70). San Francisco: Jossey Bass.
Selman, R. (1980). The growth of interpersonal understanding: Developmental and clinical
analyses. New York: Academic Press.
Smetana, J. G. (1995). Morality in context: Abstractions, ambiguities and applications.
Annak of Child Development, 10, 83-130.
Turiel, E. (1983). The development of social knowledge: Morality and convention. Cam
bridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Turiel, E. (1998). The development of morality. In W. Damon (Series Ed.) &. N.
Eisenberg (Vol. Ed.), Handbook of child psychology: Vol. 3. Social, emotional, and person
ality development (5th ed., pp. 863-932). New York: Wiley.
Turiel, E., Killen, M., &Helwig, C. (1987). Morality: Its structure, functions, and vaga
ries. In J. Kagan & S. Lamb (Eds.), The emergence of morality in young children (pp.
155-243). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
This page intentionally left blank
7
Fritz K. Oser
Institute of Pedagogy
University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland
When she had been "clean and sober" for 15 years, a 36-year-old alcoholic
in our study of how alcoholics and addicts recover integrity explained to us
how she had finally learned from her mistakes. She was a very clever child,
and had always been able to get away with things. Her parents, busy profes
sionals, encouraged her creativity and independence. "I thought I had them
fooled. I didn't understand how I hurt them," she said. "I just kept heading
down the wrong road until I finally hit a wall." The wall was named Officer
McMurray. "When he pulled me over and told me to step out of the car, I fi
nally understood where the line was. I'd been pulled over lots of times be
fore, but somehow, this time, even before I got out of the car, I had a flash ...
Everything before that was wrong. I knew he was right to lock me up. I was
too ashamed to call my parents to bail me out. I knew from then on where
the edge of the cliff was." She went on to describe her daily struggles with
"the edge of the cliff," but she felt sure, after her awareness of the difference
between right and wrong, that she now knew better, and that "the people in
the village below that cliff, my parents and allthey're safe now. I'm not a
disaster waiting to happen anymore. I'm not rolling down that cliff." On the
15th anniversary of her sobriety, now an art therapist and mother of two, she
honored Officer McMurray because, she said, he "showed me the line."
This story from the work of the Blakeneys (R. Blakeney, Blakeney, &
Reich, 2003) illustrates how negative moral experience may lead to a posi
129
13O OSER
tive insight, to the will not to violate the trust of others, and the commit
ment to do the right thing. It tells us also how complex and painful the moral
learning process is. It shows us that meaningful negative moral knowledge is
constructed in situations in which doing the right thing is contrasted with
doing the wrong thing, in which relationships and moral emotions of indig
nation are salient features, and in which we learn to accommodate to the
limits of being clever and successful. We claim that moral learning without
negative experience is not possible. In this chapter I develop this particular
thesis and its implications for a comprehensive model of moral education.
Our approach is based on the premise that negative information has a
fundamental role in the construction of knowledge more generally. In effect,
to know what is right, we must keep in our episodic memory both the nega
tive knowledge and the underlying generated insight. But what is the
epistemological basis of negative knowledge?
"Do not cross this street when the light is red, because you could be hit by a
car and killed," says a mother to her 4-year-old daughter. She holds her
daughter's hand firmly, and the fear in her eyes expresses her seriousness.
Such an act builds negative knowledge. Because the mother wants to protect
her daughter, she believes that if the situation is serious and she is serious
when she tells her how to behave, her daughter will be protected. To talk
about negative knowledge means to express an epistemological necessity
(Wittgenstein, 1990). To know what is, one must know what is not. To under
stand how something functions, one must know what this functioning inhib
its. To know what to do, we must know what not to do. To know what strategy
works, we must know which one does not work, and why. To understand the
notion of a "just community" we must also know why something like a "zero
tolerance" school can never be a just community school, and so on. Negative
knowledge is a necessary counterpart to positive knowledge, a mirroring, or
dering schema that frames any knowledge. Of course instead of using the term
negative knowledge we could also talk about knowledge of the negative side of
any given subject, topic, strategy, or process. However, this would only con
fuse the reader. We can more clearly describe the mentioned epistemological
basis of understanding when we consider negative knowledge as a force shap
ing positive knowledge. The distinction between negative experience and
negative knowledge is that the first describes the process of acquiring negative
knowledge, the second is the result thatpartly through metacognition
remains in long-term episodic moral memory.
would be precisely the contrary. If I am talking about life I also have in mind
death and its implications.
Schools in general inhibit learning from both the introduction of mean
ingful contrasts and the direct experience of negative actions. Teachers of
ten try to prevent students from building up negative knowledge in that they
try to prevent student mistakes, hide mistakes, scratch out mistakes, or
overlook mistakes, and thus hinder the construction of negative knowledge;
and hence all the narratives and episodes in popular culture related to it.
Schools often prevent youngsters from critical questioning as the movie
Dead Poets Society suggests. Instead of learning from contrary positions, mis
takes, and contrasting procedures and thus developing a culture of mistakes,
schools inhibit mistakes. In our recent work, we have developed an instru
ment for measuring the culture of mistakes in schools, classes, and learning
situations (Oser &Spychiger, 2004). What we have found is that schools fail
to achieve what we would consider to be a critical pedagogical goal, namely
learning from what is wrong to understand the right. Our work has been
done in Europe, but we doubt that the situation is much different in schools
in North America.
How do these ideas apply to the construction of morality? The saying that
children who never ever lie, deceive, misbehave, and so on, could not be
come moral persons has been attributed to Janusz Korczak, the great Polish
pedagogue and physician (Oser &. Veugelers, 2003). This saying can be in
terpreted as meaning that the experience of injustice enables it to be pre
vented, the experience of wickedness leads to an emotional consciousness of
such behavior, and the experience of inadequacies makes it possible for
them to be overcome. From a psychological point of view, it is necessary to be
able to hold up both the downside of a possible moral solution and the up
side, the positive and the negative, and to do this not merely as the aware
ness of a possibility but as the crystallized experience of this possibility (in
such cases the warning deriving from tradition, literature, and stories can
possess a status similar to the genuine episodic experience; see later).
Let us suppose that a person knows and has command of a set of moral rules
that state what is to be done and what is not to be done, including information
about that which is obligatory and that which is recommended. This set of
rules is only that, a set of rules. It does not show the person what noncompli
ance means for him or her and for others. As a result, the person requires
quasi-models of "terror" (i.e., models that allow him or her to experience the
effects of positive and negative actions, both within the deliberative process
and as an outcome). It is not a consequentialist form of ethics that is expressed
here, but an ethics that for purposes of justification considers the possibility of
134 OSER
The approach we propose involves three core elements, all of which work at
the same time; it is designated as triforial because the term suggests that the
core elements have something in common, namely their foundation, their
support, and their actualization of a moral structure. Based on three arched
windows, a triforium permits different things to occur at the same time each
to be supported in a different way.A triforium is a kind of gallery in the inte
rior of Romanesque and especially Gothic churches consisting usually of tri-
ple-arched windows running under the roof space of the transept and nave.
7. NEGATIVE MORALITY AND THE GOALS OF MORAL EDUCATION 139
In short, each one of these approaches falls short, either because we lack
empathy, fall victim to a false belief, or fall victim to blind action. We are
courting the danger of being quasi-moral, of thinking and interpreting in a
quasi-moral manner. A deeper analysis shows that each of the theories rep
resented through these three components sets its sights on one extreme, and
thus the central goals of a comprehensive moral education cannot be
achieved. We are therefore in need of an overall theory that will enable us to
combine different goals in the proper manner. Different methodical or
rather pedagogic modes of acting must be integrated within this theory in
different ways. Instead of pursuing just one of the goals previously indicated,
therefore, we need a triforial theory of moral education, which will permit at
least three central technological frameworks of conditions and their nega
tive counterparts. Figure 7.1 shows these three fields that intersect with
each other.
14O OSER
1. Much of this critical debate ignores the fact that Kohlberg con
ceived of his developmental theory as a theory of competence. In describing
competence theories, we are not so much concerned with asking how
people form judgments in concrete situations but rather with the ques
tion of how the highest and qualitatively best kind of judgment a person
can make is produced in a variety of general, mostly decontextualized, sit
uations. That is why our concept of negative moral knowledge is comple
mentary to Kohlberg's work; it is content based and not competence
oriented.
2. It is also frequently overlooked that Kohlberg constantly stressed
the limited scope of his scheme. Kohlberg's theory of moral development
is powerful because its area of applicability is clearly circumscribed and its
scope is both highly controllable and comprehensible. The structures are
abstract and therefore highly transferable creations. They indicate the
extent and nature of the reversible thinking that people can produce as
justifications for their deeds and intentions. The higher the stage, the
closer the judgment is to universal principles, the more adequate it is in
terms of philosophical theories, and the more the individuals are able to
think reversibly in the spirit of the Golden Rule.
3. Finally, a fact that is often ignored is that Kohlberg himself raised
numerous questions, such as these: What is the relationship between in
7. NEGATIVE MORALITY AND THE GOALS OF MORAL EDUCATION 143
telligence and morals? How does judgment relate to action? What role is
played by emotional elements under real conditions? Is principled think
ing also possible at the lower stages? Is moral judgment better described in
categories of a soft or hard stage concept (cf. Kohlberg, 1981,1984) ? Even
if Kohlberg was unable to provide answers to many of these questions (cf.
Kohlberg, 1995), he was striving for a solution. However, he, like many re
searchers rooted in the concept of enlightenment, was reluctant to en
gage the question of negativity. He never spoke about the canon of moral
scars someone must have to become a moral person, and he apparently
never saw the reconstruction of the bad as a necessary detour to the mor
ally right.
We can get some idea of how negative experience works to promote moral
growth by looking at events that we observed in efforts to implement the
Just Community School. Kohlberg's (1986) original idea in establishing
what has become known as the Just Community School was that schools
could be self-regulating communities in which the very regulations them
selves would provide opportunities for moral learning and the construc
tion of a value system. This is an approach to moral education, a concept
that relies on the participation of everyone. In Just Community meetings
144 OSER
1. First, there exists the ongoing possibility of putting oneself into the
shoes of the suffering other through the actual encounter of this suffering
other within a real-life situation. This in turn permits students to take on
different roles to engage in the defense of others, and to prepare for taking
positions against the negative. These processes of perspective taking
made salient through the engagement of an actual other raise the proba
7. NEGATIVE MORALITY AND THE GOALS OF MORAL EDUCATION 145
bility that students will generate the social flexibility required to arrive at
an impartial moral decision.
2. A second related aspect of the Just Community is that it puts into
practice a fundamental reconceptualization of the stated purpose of de
velopmentally based moral education, which is to increase students' lev
els of moral reasoning. From the perspective being advanced in this
chapter, the development of morality is more than the simple attainment
of a higher stage of moral reasoning through discourse generated through
discussion of dilemmas relating to particular fields of study and school
events in general. Such discourse does raise "moral stage" as assessed by
traditional methods. However, the moral knowledge that results from dis
cussions about abstract or hypothetical situations, even when situated
within curricular content such as discourse about historical events does
not provide for the deeper confrontation with the negative requisite for
genuine moral knowledge. For genuine moral growth to occur, it is neces
sary to deal with actual moral mistakes, with the morally negative. Only
in overcoming the morally negative does it truly make sense to be moral.
For, in the experiential context of the negative, we may speak of the stim
ulation of two modalities of cognitive imbalance. The first is the widely
recognized and researched cognitive disequilibrium that comes from the
serious attempt to reconcile contradictory information. The second is the
moral indignation that one feels because of directly or indirectly experi
enced immorality. This latter source of cognitive imbalance is generally
missing from typical classroom moral discourse.
3. A third element of the Just Community process is that student
identification through participation in wrongdoing is also transformed.
Through the engagement that transpires, students who are perpetrators
of moral transgressions are drawn into a recognition of the "bad" that en
tails emotional involvement. This emotional component reduces the
prospect that the moral discourse will remain at a surface level. Accepted
self-shame helps to overcome immoral thinking and acting. It works es
pecially to combat moral weakness with respect to the courage to act ac
cording to one's own conviction. Only those who jointly decide to refute
negative behavior can truly feel responsible for what is to be done. Unlike
the unilateral process of punishment and recantation that is the hallmark
of traditional character education, the Just Community discourse en
gages perpetrators, victims, and other members of the community in a
mutual process of responsibility, restitution, and reconciliation.
4. The fourth element of the Just Community consists in overcoming
the judgment-action dissociation (cf. Garz et al., 1999). In essence, the
actions to be decided on are ones that directly impact the actors in the
discourse. As such, the justifications and judgments are ones that cannot
be abstractly parsed from the effects of the actions. There is little room
146 OSER
that the injured parties and shy participants have their say. Third, it must be
accepted and assumed that everyone is capable of establishing a balance
among justice, regard for others' feelings, and truthfulness, and that at any
time the equilibrium among the three can be coordinated. Finally, the solu
tion that emerges from the discussion is to be regarded as the best solution at
the time, even though other possibilities, such as those deriving, for exam
ple, from philosophical ethics, could be found.
Investigations show (cf. Oser, 1998; Oser & Althof, 1992) that persons
who cultivate realistic discourse procedures are estimated to be more just,
more attuned to others, more successful professionally, and more committed
than persons who do not practice such procedures. They are perceived to be
persons commanding the respect of others and able to create a good social at
mosphere, commitment, didactic abilities, justice, truthfulness, and a feeling
of well-being.
In connection with negative morality, however, there is a further important
matter. The roundtable is the place where negative moral knowledge is com
municated. Suddenly a person can notice that his or her remark has deeply
hurt or insulted another person. The roundtable thus does not merely pro
duce a rationalizing of rules and standards; it also succeeds in bringing nega
tive moral knowledge itself to light. Although the relationship of realistic
discourse to Habermas's ethics of discourse (e.g., 1991) or the work of Appel
(e.g., 1988) has not been fully explored, some differences have already been
mapped out. The primary aim of realistic discourse is not to rationalize stan
dards but to find solutions through negativity. The constraint-free agreement
does not exist here. Establishing a balance demands antagonistic situations.
Reason and postconventional morality cannot be assumed. As I have shown,
realistic discourses take place with children, for example, who are capable
only of direct reciprocity in justifying their moral positionsa level of moral
development considerably below that of the assumptions generally main
tained for moral competence in a Habermas (1991) ethical discourse. Identi
cal presuppositions cannot be assumed to be held by all participants, but
rather the discussion leader of the roundtable will at an early stage introduce
conditions for accepting responsibility and for presenting arguments and will
precisely through doing so make possible their practice. In sum, realistic dis
course offers a practical step toward bringing the process of moral education
into contact with an individual's lived experiences. A critical element of such
discourse is that it make use of the morally negative as a starting point for con
structing what is morally meaningful and positive.
FINAL THOUGHTS
We hear much these days about moral decay and the problems of our youth.
Many of the writers in this volume have addressed how such pronounce
ISO OSER
REFERENCES
Appel, K. O. (1988). Diskurs und Verantwortung. Das Problem des Ubergangs zurpostkon
ventionellen Moral [Discourse and Responsibility. The problem of transition to post
conventional morality]. Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp.
Baier, A. (1995). Moral prejudices. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Blakeney, C., & Blakeney, R. (1991). Understanding and reforming moral misbehavior
among behaviorally disordered children. Journal of Behavioral Disorders, 16,135-143.
Blakeney, R. F. (2002). How to know this is a good thing: A developmental analysis of
inter-cultural, anti-racist education. Schweizerische Zeitschrift fur Bildungswissen
schaften, 24, 467-485.
Blakeney, R., Blakeney, C., & Reich, K. H. (2003, July). Leaps of faith: The role of reli
gious development in recovering integrity among Jewish alcoholics and drug addicts. Pa
per presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Moral Education,
Krakow, Poland.
Damon, W.( & Hart, D. (1982). The development of self-understanding from infancy
through Adolescence. Child Development, 53, 841-864.
Garz, D., Oser, F. K., & Althof, W. (1999). Zusammenhdnge: Zur Verbindung von
moralischem Urteil und Handeln. Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp.
152 OSER
Gilligan, C. (1982). Gibt es eine weibliche Moral? Das Psychologic heute-Gesprach mit
Carol Gilligan [Is there a female morality? The "Psychology today" discussion with
Carol Gilligan]. Psychokgie heute, 9(10), 21-27, 34.
Habermas, J. (1991). Erlduterungen zur Diskursethik [Contributions to the ethics of dis
course]. Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp.
Higgins, A. (1989). Das Erziehungsprogramm der Gerechten Gemeinschaft: Die Ent
wicklung moralischer Sensibilitat als Ausdruck von Gerechtigkeit und Fiirsorge. In
G. Lind & G. Pollitt-Gerlach (Eds.), Moral in ,,unmoralischer" Zeit. Zu einer partner
schaftlichen Ethikin Erziehungund Gesellschaft (pp. 101-127). Heidelberg, Germany:
Asanger.
Hoffe, O. (1986). Autonomie und Verallgemeinerung als Moralprinzipien. Eine Ausein
andersetzung mit Kohlberg, dem Utilitarismus und der Diskursethik [Autonomy and
generalization as principles of morality, a dispute with Kohlberg, utilitarianism and dis
course ethics]. In F. K. Oser, R. Fatke, & O. Hoffe (Eds.), Transformation und Entwick
lung: Grundlagen der Morakrziehung (pp. 56-88). Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp.
Hermann, H. (1982). Meinen und Verstehen: Grundziige einer psychologischen Semantik.
Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp.
Keller, M. (1996). Moralisc/ieSensibilitat: Entwicklung in Freundschaft und Familie [Moral
sensibility: Development in friendship and family]. Weinheim, Germany: Beltz.
Klafki, W. (1991). Neue Studien zur Bildungstheorie und Didaktik [New studies towards
the educational theory and didactics]. Weinheim, Germany: Beltz.
Koch, L. (2003). Ethische Didaktik Kants [The ethical didactic of I. Kant]. Wiirzburg,
Germany: Ergon Online Verlag.
Kohlberg, L. (1958). The development of modes of thinking and choices in years 10 to 16. Un
published doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago.
Kohlberg, L. (1981). Essays on moral development: Vol. I. The philosophy of moral develop
ment. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
Kohlberg, L. (1984). Essays on moral development: Vol. 2. The psychology of moral develop
ment: The nature and the validity of moral stages. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
Kohlberg, L. (1986). Der "Just Community"-Ansatz der Moralerziehung in Theorie und
Praxis [The "Just Community"approach of moral education in theory and prac
tice]. In F. K. Oser, R. Fatke, & O. Hoffe (Eds.), Transformation und Entwicklung:
Grundlagen der Morakrziehung (pp. 21-55). Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp.
Kohlberg, L. (1995). Moralstufen und Moralerwerb: Der kognitiv-entwicklungs-theor-
etische Ansatz [Moral levels and moral earnings: The cognitive-development-theo-
retical approach]. In L. Kohlberg (Ed.), Die Psychologic der Moralentwicklung (pp.
373493). Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp.
Leming, J. S. (1997). Research and practice in character education: A historical perspec
tive. In A. Molnar (Ed.), The construction of children character (pp. 31-44). Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Nucci, L. (1981). Conceptions of personal issues: A domain distinct from moral or soci
etal concepts. Child Development, 52, 114-121.
Nucci, L. (1996). Morality and the personal sphere of actions. In E. Reed, E. Turiel, &.T.
Brown (Eds.), Values and knowledge (pp. 41-60). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates.
Nucci, L. (2001). Education in the moral domain. Cambridge, England: Cambridge Uni
versity Press.
Oser, F. K. (1981). Moralisches LJrteil in Gruppen, soziales Handeln, Verteilungsgerechtigkeit:
Stufen der interaktiven Entwicklung und ihre erzieherische Stimulation [Moral judgment
7. NEGATIVE MORALITY AND THE GOALS OF MORAL EDUCATION 153
In the long decade that has passed since the unification of the two Germa
nics, a new extremism has emerged in German youth, specifically in eastern
Germany. The main components of this right'wing extremism are xenopho
bia and nationalism; anti-Semitism; and ideological commitment to author
itarianism, inequality, and racism. Xenophobia is the lead variable, which,
according to surveys, affects at least one third of the young population and
considerably more locally, especially in the lower social strata (Bromba &.
Edelstein, 2001). In the recent IEA Civics Study, German 15-year-olds held
the most xenophobic attitudes among the 28 participating countries
(Torney-Purta, Lehmann, Oswald, & Schutz, 2001). Anti-Semitism is on
the rise, but perhaps rather less so than in other European countries, and
perhaps less for the traditional reasons than as a consequence (at least
partly) of the IsraeliArab conflict and the Israeli military rollback in the
Palestinian territories, which in many young people arouses outrage rather
than sympathy.
Every study shows that in eastern Germany the incidence of extremism as
measured by various indicators is about twofold more frequent than in the
west. More than 50% of all racist, xenophobic, and neo-Nazi incidents, and
especially of all such violent incidents, have happened in the eastern prov
inces, with less than 20% of the German population living there (see
157
158 EDELSTEIN
Bromba & Edelstein, 2001; Sturzbecher, 2001). In this sense, East Germany
appears more similar to Eastern Europe than to West Germany. In Eastern
Europe (especially in Russia) a neo-Nazi youth movement is definitely a
threat.
In the following I do not pursue a discussion about the phenomenology
and the quantitative relevance of right-wing extremism. That is a topic of its
own, and I have written about it elsewhere (Bromba & Edelstein, 2001;
Edelstein, 2002). I propose to accept it here as fact. I start with these re
marks merely to situate the problem and to demonstrate its importance. Al
though this is and remains a German problem of great political and
psychological relevance, one might look at it more as a general youth prob
lem emerging in Germany under specific conditions in a specific form. In ef
fect, I argue that what is taken to represent the local problem of neo-Nazi
extremism may represent, in its own idiosyncratic way, a general condition
of adolescence in the modern world. The treatment of the local problem
thus is, in a way, vicarious, although the phenomenology, the forms of bru
tality and violence, the symbolic presentations of the self, the cultural mani
festations, and the historical associations are, of course, specific and vary
across cultures and territories. There are universal features that provide
meaning to the local experience in a generation that is involved in social,
economic, and sociocultural transition.
Normatively, right-wing extremists are morally wayward in thinking and
in action. The concept of moral deprivation or waywardness points to the
psychosocial and moral implications of a syndrome that combines eco
nomic, familial, educational, and cultural factors in variable ways. The
causal relationship of the elements remains moot. It is possible, however, to
describe the anomic correlates of social dispossession, individualization, and
the dissolution of institutional bonds. Adolescents may respond to these
with either hedonism or rebellion, and often with moral indifference. Ado
lescents who wind up unsuccessful in jobs and who end failure prone in ap
prenticeships following unsuccessful school careers may respond to the
humiliation involved with a violent ideological or socially rebellious reac
tion that protects the person's self-esteem. In Germany, these responses
have often been viciously extremist, xenophobic, racist, and anti-Semitic.
This means a refusal to abide by the moral conventions that until very re
cently have been the more or less unanimously accepted basis of social ac
tion in the Federal Republic, where a historical process of social learning
after World War II has brought about political consensus concerning univer
sal human rights and the equality of all human races.
It is the refusal to heed this covenant, generally accepted as politically
correct since the downfall of the Hitler state in 1945, that turns the youthful
rebels into racists and neo-Nazis. Needless to say, trying to comprehend the
motives for this development does not imply acceptance of the rebels' Nazi
8. EXTREMIST YOUTH CULTURE IN POSTUNIFICATION GERMANY 159
MACROLEVEL PROCESSES:
ANOMIC DISORDER AND WEAK INSTITUTIONS
reacted with violence, most of all against foreigners, but also against handi
capped or homeless persons. This reaction has been taken to represent pro
test against a "system" that was believed to redistribute their entitlements to
"parasites." Deep down they were presumably reacting to their own humilia
tion, and exacting a loser's revenge on who they believed were undeserving
winners. Turning their backs on the unsatisfactory present they look for the
preservation of pride to an imaginary better past that, due to the observed
failure of socialism, could only be a past preceding socialism. Adopting the
insignia of racial superiority and using their bullying power, they redeemed
themselves from the status of victims of an uncomprehended development.
Vindicating empowerment, they turned to a past that seems to compensate
for the shameful experience of dispossession.
The development of anomie in the unification cohort is not the only pro
cess affecting the development of youth in the 1990s. It is accompanied and
strengthened by the collateral effects of the long process of institutional
transformation. Using a concept that has gained wide currency, Beck (1992)
spoke about the emergence of a "risk society," because the new type of social
order is characterized by weak social organizations coinciding with forceful
individualization. Heitmeyer et al. (1995) analyzed this process in terms of
the diminishing power of institutions that channel and support the course of
individual lives, first and foremost the family, whose ability to regulate indi
vidual behavior and individual goals and intentions in life is weakened by
the continuous rise of individualism. Weak institutions mark a danger zone
through which the rising generations must travel, confronting an increasing
"risk" of loss of moral purpose, whereas the traditional agents of socialization
lose power of direction and guidance. Thus traditions progressively lose
their function as syntactic rules for the collective conduct of individual
lives. Increasing competition between lifestyles, standards, and styles of
conduct bring increasing pressure to bear on the integrity of the normative
order, the disintegration of which appears to those who experience it as an
achievement of liberation.
Increasing competition has multiplied the pressure on the modernization
losers. This process is salient in the economy and the labor market. Recipro
cal bonds weaken under the strain of market-driven interests. The stress
emanating from these tensions must be borne by the individuals alone, as
the weak institutions are unable to provide the normative support that is
needed psychologically. Economic modernization (the neoliberal dissolu
tion of protective institutions) and intensified competition subject individu
als to pressure from the forces of individualism. For victims and losers in this
process, the nostalgia of strong institutions and the flight into the security
and relief of groups represent strong temptations, often accompanied by the
disaffection of individual moral standards. This process is sometimes criti
cally identified as "the lure of fun society." The alternative lure is the temp
164 EDELSTEIN
MICROLEVEL PROCESSES:
VICISSITUDES OF IDENTITY FORMATION
AND SITUATIONAL CONTINGENCIES
Situational Contingencies
After long processes at the macro level, cohort effects and family influences
at the intermediate level, and identity formation at the individual level situ
ational contingencies determine the lifestyles, living conditions, consump
tion patterns, and social experience of the cohort. Such contingencies, in
fact, require a systematic description, because the choice of rebellious and
sometimes even violent lifestyles is supported by mechanisms and forms of
life that need to be known and appraised. A thick description of the back
ground of neo-Nazi group culture is obviously needed, but this would ex
ceed the scope of this chapter. Minimally, however, the set of factors
characterizing the life world of the extremist groups and contributing to
their attitudes and motivations needs to be mentioned, because any pro
gram of prevention and moral education for these groups must respond to
166 EDELSTEIN
the experience they are exposed to. The following three situational factors
appear influential:
view violent videos five times more frequently than other adolescents
(Weiss, 2000). Cell phones and the Internet have produced a qualitative
change in communication among groups locally as well as internationally,
enabling groups to sustain ideological exchange, but also quick strategic
planning and tactical deploymentthe very same advantages that terrorist
groups draw from the availability of the electronic media.
REFERENCES
173
174 WATKINS
Puritan Ideology
1. Masters should suitably provide for the bodily support and comfort of their ser
vants. Servants are of their household, and if they provide not for such, they're worse
than infidels and have denied the faith. 1 Timothy 5:8 ...
2. Masters should keep their servants diligently employed. Indeed they should allow
them sufficient time to eat, drink, sleep, and on proper occasions some short space for
relaxation and diversion may doubtless be very advisable.
3. Masters should defend and protect their servants. Since their servants are under
their care, and employed in their business, if any would wrong or injure them, they
should endeavor to protect and defend them.
4. Masters should govern their servants well. They should charge them to obey God's
commands, to live soberly, righteously, and godly. They should use their authority in
furthering their servants in a blameless behavior and in restraining them from sin.
9. RACE AND MORALITY 177
5. Masters should teach and instruct their servants well. When masters take ap
prentices, to teach them some particular trade or occupation, they ought in duty and
conscience to give them all the skill and insight they can in such their occupation,
(pp. 186-187)
3. Servants should obey their masters, diligent and faithful to their service and to
their interest. Colossians 3:22
4. When a servant disobeys his master, he disobeys God.
5. Obey your master willingly, heartily, cheerfully, and with good will. Ephesians 6:6
6. Servants are wicked if they are lazy and idle while in their master's service.
Matthew 25:26
7. Servants should not cheat their masters financially nor steal from them. Titus 2:10
8. Servants should not run away as it was God who established their arrangement of
servitude.
9. Servants should bear any chastisements directed toward them with patience. 1
Peter 2:19, 20
10. Servants should pray for God's blessing upon their masters. Genesis 24:12 (pp.
188-192)
Convinced that some people of color (e.g., certain Pacific islanders) were
moribund, Armstrong put America on alert that the Black race was here to
stay. He concluded that because they are here they should continue to be
put to work. He wrote:
There is no source whatever of a suitable supply in lieu of Negro labor. The large, low,
swampy, malarial, but highly productive area of the South would become almost a
desert without it.
The successful Southern farmer knows that he has the best labor in the world. The
Negro is important to the country's prosperity.
9. RACE AND MORALITY 179
The decrease of the race would be a serious matter in many ways; it would destroy their
morale. Young colored men, seeing no future, without hope, enthusiasm or esprit de
corps, would gradually degenerate; there would be an appalling number of worthless
blacks, mere driftwood, creatures who would care only for the passing day. (cited in
Southern Workman, January, 1875, p. 4)
Armstrong, the educational leader, recognized the need for a more realis
tic vision on the role and place for Blacks. Foreshadowing his views on race,
he insisted Blacks could learn but were immoral. He recognized the need for
new formulas that would build on accepted traditions. Embracing segrega
tion and Negro inferiority, he understood if North and South were to be rec
onciled and the industrial economy made viable, a new politics had to be
established. Armstrong was instrumental in shaping the politics of share
cropping and accomodationism that offered "semicitizenship" to Black
Americans.
Having lived and worked among the enslaved Africans in Virginia,
Armstrong developed keen and uncommon insights into Black life. He mar
veled at the indefatigable quest of the slaves to educate themselves. Having
seen the intellectual development of the slaves thwarted, he understood
their potential and hence could not accept the popular biological or genetic
explanations of inferiority.
How then would he justify and defend segregation and Black subservi
ence? The answer for him resided in long-standing moral arguments of the
earlier colonial period. In his words:
Lack of brains is not the greatest difficulty with tropical or oriental races. The Hindoos
and the Zulus have poets and orators.
A people in the ruts of barbarism, as were some of the ancients, may have a literature
and science that will not in the least relax their bondage to vice.
He asserted that morals were the dividing characteristic between White and
Black people:
Moral force is the heavy artillery that Providence takes sides with. This and not his
machinery and manufactures is the success of the Anglo Saxon. (Southern Workman,
July, 1876, p. 50)
18Q WATKINS
The Negro question of the day is the Negro himself... For generations to come it will
be his deplorable condition, his deficiencies, and how to make the most of him ... In
his mental, moral, and material destitution, he has as much power as anybody to make
the next President, or to decide on questions of tariff, currency, or war. Hence the Ne
gro question is and will be, as it has been for the past forty years, a foremost one.
The difficulty with him is, mainly a subjective not an objective one; himself, not his re
lations. His low ideas of life and duty, his weak conscience, his want of energy and
thrift, his indolent, sensuous, tropical blood are, rather than mere ignorance, the im
portant and unfortunate facts about him. (Southern Workman, December, 1877, p. 94)
Pastors and deacons can sell whisky and lead loose lives without scandal; and ex-jail-
bird returns to his former social position; in politics and in society character goes for
little or nothing.
The power of Christian education and of right public sentiment has never reached the
Negro race; it has been made impossible. (Southern Workman, December, 1877, p. 94)
Further:
His worst master is still over himhis passions. This he does not realize. He does not
see "the point" of life clearly, he lacks foresight, judgment, and hard sense. His main
trouble is not ignorance, but deficiency of character; his grievances occupy him more
than his deepest needs. There is no lack of those who have mental capacity. The ques
tion with him is not one of brains, but of right instincts, of morals and of hard work.
The differential of the races seem to be in moral strength. (Southern Workman, Decem
ber, 1877, p. 94)
They need a system of training which aims at the formation of character, and of self-re-
spect; these rest upon a foundation of morals and good habits. We can best aid them by
Christian example and teaching ...When his whole routine of life is controlled, the
Negro pupil is like clay in the potter's hands.
Drill, training, toning up, is the important feature ... it is, I believe, a well balanced,
thorough-going system of culture, aiming directly at the mark, mingling mental with
moral and physical training.
The natural indolence of the Negro is as much in his way as his ignorance. In salvation
by hard work is his hope. (Southern Workman, December, 1877, p. 94)
SCIENTIFIC RACISM*
The brutal exploitation of people of color provided context for "color cod
ing" and classifying. Scientifically rendering dark people as inferior helped
justify and rationalize colonial plunder. If proof could demonstrate that na
ture rendered Whites superior, a ready-made explanation for social hierar
chy could be established.
As world hegemony and power shifted from Europe across the Atlantic
during the 19th century, America became the main locus of White suprem
acy. Its virulent brand of slavery outlasted most others. Long after most Eu
ropean countries abandoned slavery and the slave trade, the United States
continued building both its economy and social order on the foundations of
slave labor, exploited labor, and subservience. This economic base could not
help but shape social ideology. By Reconstruction, a modern sociology of
race was firmly embedded. Race influenced every aspect of America's social
order. Moreover, it made its presence felt in both culture making and among
the culture makers (Takaki, 1990,1994).
The human race in all its branches has a secret repulsion from the crossing of blood, a
repulsion which in many branches is invincible, and in others is only conquered to a
slight extent. Even those who most completely shake off the yoke of this idea cannot
get rid of the few last traces of it; yet such peoples are the only members of our species
who can be civilised at all. Mankind lives in obedience to two laws, one of repulsion,
the other of attraction; these act with different force on different peoples. The first is
fully respected only by those races which can never raise themselves above the ele
mentary completeness of the tribal life, while the power of the second, on the contrary,
is the more absolute, as the racial units on which it is exercised are more capable of de
velopment, (cited in Biddiss, 1970, p. 116)
He further argued that all civilizations derive from the White race, espe
cially the superior Aryan stock. Mankind is thus divided into races of un
equal worth. Superior races are in a fight to maintain their position. Racial
relationships then become the driving force in history.
He offered a hierarchy of race that influenced the next century and a half.
At the top were the Caucasian, Semitic, or Japhetic peoples. The second or
yellow group consisted of the Altaic, Mongol, Finnish, and Tartar peoples.
The lowest group was composed of the Hamites or Blacks. He set out de
scriptions of each group.
184 WATKINS
Scientific racism was reinforced and expanded when the established medi
cal profession entered the field. Notions of anatomical, physiological, and
psychological difference framed their inquiry.
Benjamin Rush, founding father, signer of the Declaration of Independ
ence, and medical doctor, contributed to views of race and racial inferiority
in the early period of the nation. As Surgeon General in the Revolutionary
Army and professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Rush had
a national podium. Concerned with the survival of the young republic, he
spoke out on questions of politics, morality, education, and race.
Rush examined the "savage" American Indian, claiming they were given
to "uncleanness," "nastiness," "idleness," intemperance, stupidity, and inde
cency. By the early 1770s he was writing about Black Americans, slavery,
186 WATKINS
Thus the scientific racists established a body of views that served as a foun
dation to explain race for the next 150 years. Conservatives, reactionaries,
and apartheidists would draw on these themes for their partisan outlooks.
That the Mediterranean peoples are morally below the races of northern Europe is as
certain as any social fact. Even when they were dirty, ferocious barbarians, these blonds
were truth-tellers. Be it pride or awkwardness or lack of imagination or fair-play sense,
something has held them back from the nimble lying of the southern races. Immigration
officials find that the different peoples are as day and night in point of veracity, and re
port vast trouble in extracting the truth from certain brunet nationalities, (p. 293)
In southern Europe, teamwork along all lines is limited by selfishness and bad faith ...
One of the maxims of Greek business life, translated into the American vernacular, is
'Put out the other fellow's eye.' "These people seemed incapable of carrying on a large
cooperative business with harmony and success."
Nothing less than venimous is the readiness of the southern Europeans to prey upon
their fellow. Never were British or Scandinavian immigrants so bled by fellow-coun-
trymen as are South Italian, Greek and Semitic immigrants ... The Greek is full of
tricks to skin the greenhorn ... The Greek ... exploits his help as mercilessly as ever he
was exploited, (pp. 294-295)
Ross was a staunch nationalist. For him, if America was to take its place as
leader in commerce and military might, it would require sturdy men who
could be relied on for the daunting task ahead. The darker peoples lacked
both the sturdiness and ethical foundation necessary. He argued:
The Northerners seem to surpass the southern Europeans in innate ethical endow
ment ... The southern Europeans, on the other hand, are apt, in their terror, to forget
discipline, duty, women, children, everything but the saving of their own lives. In ship
wreck it is the exceptional Northerner who forgets his duty, and the exceptional
Southerner who is bound by it. (p. 295)
19O WATKINS
Ross concluded his book by insisting that Europe was keeping its solid citi
zens and allowing only the deficient to immigrate to America. He wrote:
There is little sign of an intellectual element among the Magyars, Russians, South
Slavs, Italians, Greeks or Portuguese ...
The fewer brains they have to contribute, the lower the place immigrants take among
us, and the lower the place they take, the faster they multiply, (p. 299)
His final insult was that the southern immigrants were as repulsive as the
Negroes, in some cases more so:
In their homes you find no sheets on the bed, no slips on the pillows, no cloth on the ta
ble, and no towels save old rags. Even in the mud-floor cabins of the poorest Negroes of
the South you find sheets, pillow-slips, and towels, for by serving and associating with
the whites, the blacks have gained standards, (p. 300)
Grants's (1918) widely read The Passing of the Great Race continued the
attack on southern European groupings, which was ultimately, aimed at all
dark peoples. Like Ross he pointed to both the physical and moral qualities
of his targets:
Such are the three races, the Alpine, the Mediterranean and the Nordic, which enter
into the composition of European populations of to-day and in various combinations
comprise the great bulk of white men all over the world. These races vary intellectually
and spiritual attributes are as persistent as physical characters and are transmitted sub
stantially unchanged from generation to generation. The moral and physical charac
ter are not limited to one race but given traits do occur with more frequency in one
race than in another. Each race differs
Mental, spiritual and moral traits are closely associated with the physical distinctions
among the different. European races, although like somatological characters, these
spiritual attributes have in many cases gone astray, (pp. 226227)
FINAL THOUGHTS
REFERENCES
Biddiss, M. D. (1970). Father of racist ideology: The social and political thought of Count
Gobineau. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Bookman, J. (2002, September 29). The president's real goal in Iraq. Atlanta-Journal
Constitution, Fl.
Brigham, C. C. (1923). A study of American intelligence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni
versity Press.
Brinton, D. G. (1890). Race and peoples. New York: Hodges.
Cartwright, S. A. (1851, May). Report on the diseases and physical peculiarities of the
Negro race. New Orleans and Medical and Surgical journal, 691-715.
Ehrlich, R R., & Feldman, S. S. (1977). The race bomb: Skin, color, prejudice and intelli
gence. New York: Quadrangle.
Gobineau, A. de. (1967).Essai sur I'inegalite des races humaines [Essay on the inequality of
human races]. New York: Fertig. (Original work published 1854)
Gould, S. J. (1981). The mismeasure of man. New York: Norton.
Grant, M. (1918). The passing of the great race or the racial basis of European history. New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
Haeckel, E. (1874). Anthropogenic. Leipzig, Germany: W. Engelmann.
Jarvis, E. (1844). Insanity among the coloured population of the free states. American
Journal of the Medical Sciences, 7, 80-83.
Middlekauff, R. (1971). The Mathers: Three generations of puritan intellectuals, 1596-1728.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Pilger, J. (2002, December 16). America's bid for global dominance. The New Statesman.
Retrieved from www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles/Pilger_USDominance.htm
The Project for the New American Century. (2000). Rebuilding America's defenses: Strategy,
forces and resources for a new century. Retrieved from www.newamericancentury.org/
publiccationsreports.htm
Ross, E. A. (1914). The old world in the new. New York: The Century Co.
Rush, B. (1799). Observations intended to favor a supposition that the black color of the
Negroes is derived from leprosy. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 4,
289-297.
Rush, B. (1812). Diseases of the mind. Philadelphia: Kimber &. Richardson.
Stampp,K. M. (1956). The peculiar institution: Slavery in the ante-bellum south. New York:
Vintage.
Takaki, R. (1990). Iron cages: Race and culture in 19th century America. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Takaki, R. (1994). From different shores: Perspectives on race and ethnicity in America. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Tucker, W. H. (1994). The science and politics of racial research. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press,
van Evrie, J. H. (1853). Negroes and Negro "slavery": The first and inferior race; the latter, its
normal condition. New York: V L. Dill.
Vaughan, A. T. (1972). The puritan tradition in America 16201730. New York: Harper
&Row.
Watkins, W. H. (1994). Multicultural education: Toward a historical and political in
quiry. Educational Theory, 44, 99-117.
Watkins, W H. (2001). The White architects of Black education: Ideology and power in
America, 1865-1954. New York: Teachers College Press.
White, C. (1799). An account of the regular gradation in man and in different animals and
vegetables and from the former to the latter. London: C. Dilly.
1O
Moral Competence
American Children:
Conceptual Underpinnings
Robert J. Jagers
Howard University CRESPAR
Morgan State University Public Health Program
Over the past few years, my project team and I have been working to de
velop, implement, research, and evaluate a multi- component social and
emotional competence enhancement program for urban African American
school-aged children. We have pursued this work with an eye toward reduc
ing risk for problem outcomes, but perhaps more important, with an interest
in promoting desirable developmental competencies (Catalano, Berglund,
Ryan, Lonczak, &. Hawkins, 1999; Weissberg &Greenberg, 1997). It is fairly
well known that African American children are placed at elevated risk for
academic underachievement, substance abuse, aggression, and delin
quency. Although eliminating risk for such problems is essential, what con
stitutes a well-functioning African American child has not been clearly
articulated.
Portions of this chapter were presented at the meeting of Association of Moral Educators, Chicago,
November 8, 2002.
193
194 JAGERS
the only mechanism by which oppressors can be forced into "reciprocal rec
ognition" or full acknowledgment of the humanity and integrity of the op
pressed (Fanon, 1963).
TOWARD AN ACTION RESEARCH AGENDA
Rather than being seen as rigid, static categories into which African Ameri
cans can be pigeonholed, the four racialized cultural identities just offered
are construed as rough anchor points for our applied research on compe
tence development. Specifically, we were interested in cultivating a commu
nal orientation as it holds the potential to reduce risk and to promote moral
competence development. This includes the type of critical consciousness
needed to identify and correct asymmetric social relations (Watts & Ab-
dul-Adil, 1998).
For example, a communal orientation has been associated with prosocial
interpersonal values such as helpfulness and forgiveness, a sense of closeness
to in-group and perceived similarity to family and same-race others among
college students (Jagers &Mock, 1995). In a study of community activists,
Mock (1994) found a positive association between a communal orientation
and both agentic hope and a sense of vision for collective well-being. Finally,
a communal orientation was consistent with greater levels of community
volunteering among African American men (Mattis et al., 2000).
Among children and preadolescents such an orientation corresponds
with greater empathy and perspective taking (e.g., Jagers, 1997) and higher
levels of sociomoral reasoning (Humphries, Parker, & Jagers, 2000). It is also
predictive of reduced violent behaviors (Mock, Jagers, &. Smith, 2003).
We certainly recognize the limits of a communal orientation. However,
we do not think that a priority on communalism erodes an appreciation for
autonomy, self-expression, or personal achievement associated with indi
vidualism. Rather, it provides the necessary grounding for such pursuits,
hopefully reducing the unfortunate tendency in American consumer cul
ture to place things over people. In addition, we are not partial to either the
humanist or nationalist position. It seems more prudent and adaptive to cul
tivate entrepreneurial sensibilities couched in an awareness of past struggles
and a commitment to collective well-being in a complex present and uncer
tain future.
CHILD COMPETENCIES
The dearth of available cultural theory required us to generate a preliminary
model to guide our basic and applied research efforts. This model is shown in
Fig. 10.1.
It seems reasonable to assume that cultural orientations, like commu
nalism, evolve out of children's understanding and expression of moral emo
10. MORAL COMPETENCE PROMOTION 199
and nationalist ideological attitudes. On the other hand, centrality was neg
atively related with assimilationist and humanistic ideological attitudes.
COMPETENCE PROMOTION EFFORTS
We have approached our competence promotion efforts assuming coher
ence and purpose to the African American experience. This implies a need
to fully collaborate with stakeholders, who possess or must acquire the
knowledge, preferences, skills, and abilities necessary to enhance and sus
tain social and emotional learning processes and outcomes for children.
Such an approach requires us to be cognizant of power dynamics as we at
tempt to craft a shared vision of viable, realistic program goals and pursue ef
fective implementation processes. The underlying aim is to provide children
with a narrow socialization pathway (Arnett, 1995) that offers consistent,
morally relevant messages and experiences across family, school, and com
munity contexts.
Family Programming
In our view, largely tacit family socialization processes contribute to young
children gravitating toward a given cultural orientation. For example, cul
turally grounded factors such as the affective quality of early adult-child re
lationships, the allocation of family responsibilities, parental discipline
strategies, and race-related socialization are all thought to guide the emer
gence of children's moral sensibilities. These types of family experiences pro
vide children with a rudimentary understanding of moral issues such as
fairness, compassion, reciprocity, need, accountability, envy, anger, empa
thy, guilt, forgiveness, legitimate authority, and the like.
Our attempts at a culturally grounded family strengthening component
reflect best practices in the area (e.g., Kumpfer &. Alvarado, 1998), but are
designed to meet the specific concerns of low-income African American
families. For example, the stress, anger, and frustration associated with per
sonal financial strain and living in an under-resourced community can un
dermine effective parenting (e.g., Elder, Eccles, Ardelt, &Lord, 1995). As
such, social and emotional health and well-being of caregivers, to include
outlets and supports for coping, is addressed prior to entering into discus
sions of caregiver roles and responsibilities. We explore ways in which mate
rial and emotional concerns might be addressed, with an emphasis on
mobilizing family and neighborhood resources (Bowman, 1990; Sampson,
2001; Taylor, Casten, &Flickinger, 1993).
Although this strategy has been shown to moderate the stress-parenting
linkage in both African American mothers and fathers (Bowman, 1990;
Taylor et al., 1993), we are increasingly interested in a more nuanced under
standing of resource pools available to individual families (Jarrett & Burton,
10. MORAL COMPETENCE PROMOTION 2O3
School-Based Efforts
School-based programs offer an effective way to promote and refine moral
competencies, as they are natural gathering places for students and their so
cializing agents within their community. There has been a groundswell of
support for the infusion of social and emotional learning into the core class
room curriculum (Payton et al., 2000).
It makes sense to use classroom teachers as implementers of school-based
programs if there is a desire for sustained infusion of the program into the
normal school day. However, many teachers are exposed to and subse
quently internalize negative assumptions about the intellectual and social
competencies of low-income African American children (e.g., Pigott &
Cowen, 2000). Their diminished expectations, pity, frustration, anger, or
cynicism can lead to excessive permissiveness or harsh, punitive treatment
of children. Such interactions reflect the exercise of paternalistic and coer
cive power authority, respectively, and often precipitate children's poor
2Q6 JAGERS
CONCLUSIONS
lar youth culture and among middle'income people warrant close and in-
depth attention. In a similar way, we need to explore the intersection of class
and racialized cultural identity. We are concerned, for example, with the
draw of the oppressed minority identity for middle-income children and
youth as well as with middle-income activism in the context of conservative
attacks on civil rights.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The work reported herein was supported by a grant from the Institute for Ed
ucational Science (formerly the Office of Educational Research and Im
provement), U.S. Department of Education. The findings and opinions
expressed in this report do not reflect the position or policies of the Institute
for Educational Science or the U.S. Department of Education.
REFERENCES
Anderson, E. (1999). Code of the street: Decency, violence, and the moral life of the inner city.
New York: Norton.
Arnett, J. J. (1995). Broad and narrow socialization: The family in the context of a cul
tural theory. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 57, 617-628.
Arsenic, W. F. (1988). Children's conceptions of the affective consequences ofsocio
moral events. Child Development, 59, 1611-1622.
Arsenio, W., & Lover, A. (1999). Children's conceptions of sociomoral affect: Happy
victimizers, mixed emotions and other expectancies. In M. Killen & D. Hart (Eds.),
Morality in everyday life: Developmental perspectives (pp. 87-128). Cambridge, Eng
land: Cambridge University Press.
Astor, R. A. (1994). Children's moral reasoning about family and peer violence: The role
of provocation and retribution. Child Development, 65, 10541067.
Bandura, A. (1991). Social cognitive theory of moral thought and action. In W. M.
Kurtines &.J. L. Gewirtz (Eds.), Handbook of moral behavior and development: Vol. I.
Theory (pp. 45-103). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Bandura, A. (2002, September). Selective exercise of moral agency. Paper presented at the
National Invitational Conference on Nurturing Morality, Racine, WI.
Betancourt, H., &. Lopez, S. R. (1993). The study of culture, ethnicity, and race in
American psychology. American Psychologist, 28, 629-637.
Bowman, R J. (1990). Coping with provider role strain: Adaptive cultural resources
among Black husband-fathers, journal of Black Psychology, 16, 1-21.
Boykin, A. W. (1983). The academic performance of Afro-American children. In J. T.
Spence (Ed.), Achievement and achievement motives (pp. 321371). San Francisco:
Freeman.
Boykin, A. W., Jagers, R. J., Ellison, C., & Albury, A. (1997). The Communalism Scale:
Conceptualization and measurement of an Afrocultural social ethos. Journal of Black
Studies, 27, 409-418.
10. MORAL COMPETENCE PROMOTION 2O9
Brody, G. H., & Flor, D. L. (1998). Maternal resources, parenting practices, and child
competence in rural single-parent African American families. Child Development, 69,
803-816.
Bulhan, H. A. (1985). Frantz Fanon and the psychology of oppression. New York: Plenum.
Catalano, R. F., Bergtund, M., Ryan, J. A. M, Lonczak, H. S., &Hawkins, D. (1999). Pos
itive youth development in the United States: Research findings on evaluations of positive
youth development programs. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Hu
man Services.
Coll, G. C., Lamberty, G., Jenkins, R., McAdoo, H. R, Crnic, K., Wasik, B. H., et al.
(1996). An integrative model for the study of developmental competencies in minor
ity children. Child Development, 67, 1891-1914.
Cooper, C. R., &Denner, J. (1998). Theories linking culture and psychology: Universal
and community-specific processes. Annual Review of Psychology, 49, 559584.
Deater-Deckard, K., Dodge, K. A., Bates, J. E., & Petit, G. S. (1996). Physical discipline
among African American and European American mothers: Links to children's ex
ternalizing behaviors. Developmental Psychology, 32, 1065-1072.
Denham, S. A. (1998). Emotionaldevelopment of young children. New York: Guilford.
Developmental Studies Center. (1996). The ways we want our class to be: Class meetings
that build commitment to kindness and learning. Oakland, CA: Author.
Eisenberg, N. (2000). Emotion, regulation, and moral development. Annual Review of
Psychology, 51, 665-691.
Elder, G. H., Eccles, J. S., Ardelt, M., & Lord, S. (1995). Inner-city parents under eco
nomic pressure: Perspectives on the strategies of parenting. Journal of Marriage and
the Family, 57, 771-784.
Emmer, E. T., & Stough, L. M. (2001). Classroom management: A critical part of educa
tional psychology, with implications for teacher education. Educational Psychologist,
36, 103-112.
Enright, R. D., & the Human Development Study Group. (1991). The moral develop
ment of forgiveness. In W. M. Kurtines &J. L. Gewirtz. (Eds.), Handbook of moral
behavior and development: Vol. I. Theory (pp. 123-152). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates.
Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth. New York: Grove Press.
Ferguson, T. J., & Stegge, H. (1995). Emotional states and traits in children: The case of
guilt and shame. In J. R Tangney & K. W. Fischer (Eds.), Self-conscious emotions: The
psychology of shame, guilt, embarrassment and pride (pp. 174197). New York: Guilford.
Fitzpatrick, K. M., & Boldizar, J. R (1993). The prevalence and consequences of expo
sure to violence among African American youth. Journal of the American Academy of
Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 32, 424-430.
Freiberg, H. J., Stein, T. A., & Huang, S. (1995). Effects of a classroom management in
tervention on student achievement in inner-city schools. Education**/ Research and
Evalaution, I, 36-66.
Garner, R W., Jones, D. C., & Miner, J. L. (1994). Social competence among low-in-
come preschoolers: Emotions socialization practices and social cognitive corre
lates. Child Development, 65, 622-637.
Greenfield, R M., & Cocking, R. R. (Eds.). (1994). Cross-cultural roots of minority child
development. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Grusec, J. E., Goodnow, J. J., & Cohen, L. (1996). Household work and the development
of concern for others. Developmental Psychology, 32, 999-1007.
21O JAGERS
McLoyd, V C. (1990). The impact of economic hardship on Black families and children:
Psychological distress, parenting, and socioemotional development. Child Develop
ment, 61, 311-346.
Mock, L. O. (1994). Validation of an instrument to assess the personal visions of African
American community leaders. An unpublished master's thesis, University of Illinois at
Chicago, Chicago.
Mock, L. O., Jagers, R. J., & Smith, P (2003). Cultural and race-related factors associated
with youth violence. Manuscript submitted for publication.
Narvaez, D. (2001). Moral text comprehension: Implications for education and re
search. Journal of Moral Education, 30, 43-54.
Nelsen, J., Lott, L., & Glenn, H. S. (2000). Positive discipline in the classroom: developing
mutual respect, cooperation, and responsibility in your classroom (3rd ed.). Roseville,
CA: Prima.
Nobles, W. W. (1991). African philosophy: Foundations of African psychology. In R. L
Jones (Ed.), Black psychology (3rd ed., pp. 47-64). Berkeley, CA: Cobb & Henry.
Nucci, L. P (2001). Education in the moral domain. New York: Cambridge University.
Ogbu, J. (1985). A cultural ecology of competence among inner city Blacks. In M.
Spencer, G. Brookins, &. W. Allen (Eds.), Beginnings: The social and affective develop
ment of Black children (pp. 45-66) Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Osofsky, J. D. (1995). The effects of exposure to violence on young children. American
Psychologist, 50, 782-788.
Payton, J. W., Wardlaw, D. M., Graczyk, P A., Bloodworth, M. R., Tompsett, C. J., &
Weissberg, R. P. (2000). Social and emotional learning: A framework for promoting
mental health and reducing risk behaviors in children and youth, Journal of School
Health, 70, 179-185.
Pigott, R. L., & Cowen, E. L. (2000). Teacher race, child race, racial congruence, and
teacher ratings of children s school adjustment. Journal of School Psychology, 38,177195.
Reed, A., Jr. (2000). Class notes: Posing as politics and other thoughts on the American scene.
New York: New Press.
Roberts, L. J., Salem, D., Rappaport, J., Toro, P A., Luke, D. A., & Seidman, E. (1999).
Giving and receiving help: Interpersonal transactions in mutual help meetings and
psychological adjustment of members. AmericanJournal of Community Psychology, 27,
841-868.
Sampson, R. J. (2001). How do communities undergird or undermine development?
Relevant contexts and social mechanisms. In A. Booth & A. C. Crouter (Eds.), Does
it take a village? Community effects on children, adolescents, and families (pp. 330).
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Santucho, M. R. (1982). Notes on revolutionary morals. San Juan, Puerto Rico:
Movimiento de Liberacion Nacional.
Scheler, M. (1994). Ressentiment. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press.
Sellers, R. M., Smith, M., Shelton, J. N., Rowley, S. A. J., & Chavous, T. M. (1998).
Multidimensional model of racial identity: A conceptualization of African Ameri
can racial identity. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2, 18-39.
Shweder, R. A. (1991). Thinking through cultures: Expeditions in cultural psychology. Cam
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Shweder, R. A. (1996). True ethnography: The lore, the law, and the lure. In R. Jessor, A.
Colby, & R. A. Shweder (Eds.), Ethnography and human development: Context and
meaning in social inquiry (pp. 15-52). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
212 JAGERS
171
Grossman, D., 166, 171
Foster, S. L, 72, 90
Hatcher, C, 198,210
Powers, B. ]., 29,48 Hauser, S. T., 84,87,88
Frankena, W. K., 26, 48
Hawkins, D., 193, 194, 209
Fuligni, A. J., 77, 82,88 Higgins, A., vii, xiv, 144, 152
I
Laursen, B., 72, 82, 89
Litman.C.,39,47,81,82,87
Jenkins, R., 204,209 Loeber, R., 39, 40, 49
K
Lord, S., 202,209
Lott,L.,206,211
Kampf, H. C., 37,47
Lover, A., 136,151,199,208
Kandel.D.B., 71,73,88
Luke, D. A., 205,211
Kellam.S., 206,210 Lynch, J.H., 41,50
Kelley.M. L.,203,210
Lytton, H., 40,49
Keller, M., 142, 150,152
Kemmelmeier, M., 75, 90
M
Killen, M., 73, 80, 87,88, 89, 116, 117,
126, 127
Maalouf, A., 66, 68
King,M.L.,4, 18
Maguire, M., 6, 18
Kohlberg, L., vii, xw, 21, 25, 32, 33, 37, 42,
Massey, D. S., 197,210
48, 134,141,152, 170, 172
Matas, L., 38,49
Krawls.D, 163, 171
Mattis.J.S., 194, 197, 198,210
McLoyd.VC., 203,211
L Mechling, J., 94,110
Mernissi, E, 6, 7, 8, 13,14,19
Ladson-Billings, G., 206,210 Midgley, C., 83,89
Lakoff, G., 22,49 Middlekauff, R., 174, 192
Laupa, M., 5, 19
Mock.L.O., 198, 200,210,211
AUTHOR INDEX 217
Naipal, V S., 9, 19 R
Narvaez, D., 207,211
Neff,K., 12, 19 Radke-Yarrow, M., 39, 49
NelsenJ., 206,211 Rambusch, N., 35, 50
Neruda, E, 66, 68 Rappaport, J., 205,211
Newman, B. M., 114, 115, 126 Rathore, S. S., 14, 18
Newman, ER., 114, 115,126 Raths, L. E.. 33,50
Noam, G. G., 84,88 Rawls, J. A., 23, 24,50
Nobles, W.W., 195,211 Reed, A., Jr., 197,211
Nucci, L. E, vii, xiv, 7,19, 73, 75, 76, 80, Regalia, C., 37, 46, 50
85,89,97,110, 116,118,126, Reich, K. H., 129, 151
127,142,152,206,211 Reichenbach, R., 142, 153
Nussbaum, M., 11,12, 13,19, 26,49 Reid, J. B., 40, 50
Restrepo, A., 72, 91
O Reuman, D., 83, 88
Rez, H., 165,171
O'Connor, X, 84, 87 Richardson, E C., 29, 48
Offer, D., 84, 90 Ritter, E L., 84,88
Ogbu.J., 197,211 Roberts, L.J., 205, 211
Okin, S. M., 12, 19 Robin, A. L., 72, 90
Olsen, J. E., 83, 87 Rorty, R., 137, 153
Orwell, G., 58,68 Ross, E. A., 189,192
Oser, E K., 131,133, 141, 142, 143, 144, Rowley, S. A., 196,201,211
145, 146, 149, 150,152, 153 Rush, B., 186,192
Osofsky, J. D., 199,211 Rutter, M., 71, 73, 81, 90
Oswald, H., 157,172 Ryan, J. A., 193, 194,209
Oyserman, D., 75, 90 Ryan, K., vii, xiv, 32, 34, 50
Ryan, R. M., 41, 50
P Rychen.D. 169,172
A B
81^82 188-190
and defiance, 40
and moral education, 181, 191, 207
82
Character education, vii, 29, 31-34, 45,
Agency, 38
as dispositional, 3839
Aggression, 40
Conflict
Assimilationist ideology, 196
in childhood, 63-64
Authority, 5, 12, 38
Conventional domain, see also social con
and authoritative classroom, 34, 45-46
vention, 73, 77, 116, 142
Autonomy, 41, 80
and adolescent-parent conflict, 73-74,
and morality, 5, 42
77
221
222 SUBJECT INDEX
D Moral development
as entailing resistance, 3, 11, 6365
Domain theory, 73, 116
Moral discourse ethics, 27
169-170
and religion, 58
Honesty, 13
disengagement from, 37
and deception, 14
I
Negative knowledge, 129-132
Identity
and peer exclusion, 123-124
o
and adolescent neo-Nazism, 161166
racialized identity and morality, Oppression, 26
197-198
and freedom, 9, 16
Liberalism, 23
Personal (psychological) domain, 7, 80,
LowriderArt, 105-108
116,142
and social exclusion, 117
M in adolescence, 74-75, 78
Punishment, 43
Montessori classroom, 35
Puritan ideology, 175-176
R Social convention, 5, 64
Social hierarchy, 12
Relativism, 28
Socialization, 42-43
and morality, 29
Standpoint theory, 13, 26-28
and tolerance, 29
as developmental process, 3, 11
Triforial system of moral education,
in adolescence, 76, 81-82
138-141
in social relationships, 3, 7, 16
U
Rule utilitarianism, 22
Utilitarianism, 23, 25
S
V
as carnival, 101-102
Violence prevention, 198-200