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Lawrence Kohlberg F. CLARK POWER LAWRENCE KOHLBERG The Vocation of a Moral Educator INTRODUCTION Shortly after Lawrence Kohlberg’s death, I (Power, 1991) noted that perhaps the most revealing statement about Kohlberg’s life was the epilogue to his first book, “Education for Justice: The Vocation of Janusz Korczak” (Kohlberg, 1984). In that Epilogue, which I helped him to compose, he re-told the story of Janusz Korczak, who gave up a lucrative medical practice to work as a moral educator in orphanages for Jewish and Christian children in Warsaw. That work led him to the Warsaw ghetto and finally to Treblinka, where he died with the orphans whom he refused to abandon. Throughout his life, Korczak had a remarkable sense of being called to care for poor and neglected children. In his early career as an author and a medical doctor, he dedicated himself to serving the poor. A champion of children’s rights, he left medicine for education in orphanages because he wanted to treat children’s souls. In establishing “Little Republics” in which children engaged in democratic governance, his orphanage schools resembled the just community programs that Kohlberg himself established. To claim that Kohlberg had a vocation to be a moral educator may strike many as puzzling or even preposterous. Kohlberg is best known for his pioneering contributions to developmental psychology, especially for his stages of moral development. Yet, as one who worked closely with Kohlberg during the latter part of his career, I believe that we cannot understand his life as a whole without considering his vision of moral education and the significance his work in the just community programs had for him. We can see Kohlberg’s sense of his life as a calling as early as when he joined the merchant marine to transport survivors of the holocaust from Europe. After college, he chose clinical psychology, a helping profession, as a career. A concern for justice led him to leave clinical psychology for the study of moral development. Kohlberg’s stage theory of moral development and his description of a stage 6 “post-conventional” theory of justice gave post- World War II psychologists a way to not only explain the “banality of the evil” of the holocaust, but also prevent such a systemic atrocity from happening again. Of the three major psychological responses to the holocaust, Adorno’s study of the authoritarian personality, Milgram’s obedience to authority experiments, and Kohlberg’s cognitive moral development approach, only Kohlberg’s gave impetus to a new and enduring way of undertaking education for justice ion schools that remains unmatched twenty-five years after his death. B. Zizek, D. Garz, E. Nowak (Eds.), Kohlberg Revisited, 187–198. © 2015 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. F. CLARK POWER The fact that Kohlberg’s psychological approach was so well suited to his educational one was no accident. Kohlberg’s intellectual attraction to John Dewey’s interactionist, pragmatic philosophy, led him to reject the Freudian and behaviorist paradigms of his day and adopt a developmental view of psychology and education. Dewey also gave Kohlberg a vision of how education could serve as a means of social transformation, a vision that allowed Kohlberg to associate the work that he did in the schools (and Korczak in the orphanages) with Martin Luther King’s non-violent protest marches. A survey of Kohlberg’s long list of publications reveals how long and deeply he thought about moral education. What that survey does not reveal, however, was the level of Kohlberg’s commitment to working in schools with teachers and students. Kohlberg was fond of Kurt Lewin’s well-known dictum: “If you want to truly understand something, try to change it” (Tolman, 1996, p. 31). During the entire time I knew Kohlberg, he immersed himself in the just community programs that he established in Cambridge, Scarsdale, and in the Bronx. This entailed educating the teachers and counselors in these programs with moral development theory and the just community approach and engaging them in planning meetings. These planning meetings helped Kohlberg and the staff to set goals for each democratic community meeting in which staff and students would deliberate about the life and discipline of their school-within-a-school programs. Kohlberg also participated in the community meetings themselves as a voting member and crafted after reflection on his participation the “advocacy” role that he envisioned a moral educator should take in such meetings (Power, Higgins, & Kohlberg, 1989). Unlike many scholars who study education as a dispassionate observer, Kohlberg realized that he had to immerse himself in process of educating if the just community approach was to be successful and the research on it genuinely illuminating. Kohlberg was fond of reminding us that “there is no cookbook for moral education.” The just community approach itself provided only a loose framework for dealing with the challenges of discipline and student development. It is one thing to give faculty and students a vote and another thing altogether to lead a community meeting in which students and teachers seriously discuss moral issues and focus on building a moral culture focused on fairness and shared responsibility. Kohlberg’s vocation as a moral educator led him into the corridors and classrooms of schools to involve students and teachers together in the project of building community democratically. STAGE 7 The term “vocation” carries with it the religious notion of being called by God to do God’s work. Kohlberg used the word “vocation” to describe the way which Korczak committed himself to the cause of children in Warsaw with at least a tacit appreciation of the religious connotations of the term. Although Kohlberg wrote several essays on the relationship between faith and justice, very few of those familiar with his theory are aware of the significance that he gave to religion in the moral life. In describing his metaphorical Stage 7, Kohlberg proposed not only a stage of love beyond justice but a way of anchoring the “ought” in a cosmic “is” 188 .
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