Although it may be true that the notion of teaching virtues such as honesty or integrity arouses little controversy, it is also true that vague consensus on the goodness of these virtues conceals a great deal of actual disagreement over their definitions. Lawrence Kohlberg Read Quote
Essentially, social education is moral education, and moral education is preparation for citizenship… When Jefferson and others advocated public education, it was to prepare for citizenship in a new, constitutional, democratic society. Lawrence Kohlberg Read Quote
In our society, authority derives from justice, and in our society, learning to live with authority should derive from and aid learning to understand and to feel justice. Lawrence Kohlberg Read Quote
If I can see my own recollections, like many adolescents, I was a Platonic realist. I believed in the reality of ideas, of the big nouns, and believed that one’s life was determined by the ideas of the true, the good, and the beautiful which one held. Lawrence Kohlberg Read Quote
The crowds, the praise, and the power are neither just nor unjust in themselves. As they are typically used in the schools, they represent the values of social order and of individual competitive achievement. Lawrence Kohlberg Read Quote
All individuals in all cultures use the same thirty basic moral categories, concepts, or principles, and all individuals in all cultures go through the same order or sequence of gross stage development, though they vary in rate and terminal point of development. Lawrence Kohlberg Read Quote
The problem of moral change would appear to be one of presenting stimuli which are both sufficiently incongruous as to stimulate conflict in the child’s existing stage schemata and sufficiently congruous as to be assimilable with some accomodative effort. Lawrence Kohlberg Read Quote
The first meaning of ‘cognitive’ for us is that observations of others are made phenomenologically: i.e., by attempting to take the role of the other, to see things from his or her conscious viewpoint. Lawrence Kohlberg Read Quote
Insofar as each of us has been through the moral stages and has held the viewpoint of each stage, we should be able to put ourselves in the internal framework of a given stage. Lawrence Kohlberg Read Quote
The normative theoretical claim that a higher stage is philosophically a better stage is one necessary part of a psychological explanation of sequential stage movement. Lawrence Kohlberg Read Quote
