To Jean Piaget, education went beyond knowledge and skills, but also had an obligation to provide students with moral education as well.  Piaget’s ideas surrounding how children learn morality mirror his ideas on how they learn skills and knowledge.

According to Piaget, “The child is someone who constructs his own moral world view, who forms ideas about right and wrong, fair and unfair, that are not the direct product of adult teaching and that are often maintained in the face of adult wishes to the contrary.” (Gallagher, 1978, p. 26) As children move through the stages of development, how they experience the world also changes.  Based on their own observation of the world, children form their own perspectives of what is morally sound, what is fair.

This was a very radical development for the time. Most educators and adults had the view that their students and children only learned morals because they were taught these lessons. However, with the introduction of his developmental stages for acquisition of knowledge it was easy to see how this expanded beyond facts and figures and into the idea of a moral code.

Similar to education, Piaget emphasized that children alter their moral perceptions of the world as the transform from one developmental stage as the next. He has broken the moral development of a child into three broad stages as follows:

1.    Pre- Moral (0-3) :

• Little to no moral reasoning.

Connection: In the sensori- motor stages, children are focused on organizing the objects in their world and their own relationship to them.  They do not have enough awareness or understanding of their environment to consider morality.

2.    Heteronomous (Moral Realism): (4-10) 

• Rules are fixed and cannot be broken
• Outcomes are seen as being more important than intentions.  (For example John is seen asnaughtier because he breaks more cups)
• Consequences determine the severity of the crime (e.g. John is naughtier than Henry because he broke more cups.)
• Children believe in expiatory punishment (ie: the naughtier the behavior the greater the punishment should be and in immanent justice

Connection: The pre-operational and concrete operational stages transitions moves children into a higher level of reasoning. Children start to have understanding of the outside world and the different possibilities. However, they are not yet making accurate connections between cause and effects.

3.    Autonomous (Moral Relativism): 10+

• Rules are more flexible and can change so long as everyone agrees to the change.
• Intentions are now considered more than outcomes.  (Older children see Henry as being naughtier because he was misbehaving.)
• Intentions determine the severity of the crime. (Henry is naughtier than John because he was misbehaving at the time.)
• Reciprocal punishment: attempts to fit the punishment to the crime

Connection: When children enter into the formal operations stage they have a deeper understanding of the world they live in. They begin to have multiple experiences that show them different outcomes and perspectives. The moral compass begins to expand.

As children develop the ability to put themselves into someone else’s shoes, their appreciation of morality becomes more self directed and less black and white and absolutist. Piaget called this a “morality of cooperation”. Starting at about age 10 or 11 and continuing through adolescence, children will have generally begun to view moral rules as socially-agreed upon guidelines designed to benefit the group. As students move out of an ego centric state, it is easier to make decisions that consider others.

Applications to education

Piaget’s theories of knowledge and moral development have multiple points of overlap, and the more that teachers understand all levels of development that children go through, the better they will be able to teach to their immediate needs. Educators need to be aware of where students are both academically and emotionally in order to use effective teaching strategies.