Parenting for Moral Growth
| Autor: | Ralph L. Mosher |
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| Rok vydání: | 1981 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Journal of Education. 163:244-261 |
| ISSN: | 2515-5741 0022-0574 |
| DOI: | 10.1177/002205748116300306 |
| Popis: | This article presents a series of excerpts from the author's upcoming book entitled Parenting for Moral Growth. It is an attempt to provide parents with a practical overview of over a decade of research into how individuals develop their understanding of morality. As well as offering a popular translation of Kohlberg' s cognitive-developmental theory of moral development , the author provides a series of concrete examples of how these theoretical principles can be employed in everyday family interaction. The case is made that regardless of their intentions , parents are moral educators and must become active in this role by implementing moral development strategies in the home environment. I spent much of my professional time during the 1970's developing curriculum in moral and civic education for use in the public schools. The pilot work, in concert with many colleagues, was done principally in Brookline and Cambridge, Massachusetts. It drew considerable attention from educators and the press nationally and from abroad (for example, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Switzerland). In essence, we learned how to promote children's moral reasoning by classroom instruction and by increasing their participation in the governance of the school. The scholarly substance and measure of that effort are reported elsewhere (Mosher, 1980). In one of the central aims of the research, however, we experienced notable failure: in "giving away" to parents what we were learning about children's moral development and about how to promote it by education. There seemed several compelling reasons to educate parents about these matters: a) As a parent myself, I believed parents are, or should be, the "natural" moral educators of their children. Such research as we had suggested that they were. At least the mothers were. Fathers, by comparison, seemed to exert little influence on their children's moral reasoning, perhaps because they traditionally punish or discipline rather than reason with their children, or perhaps because mothers spend so much more time in child rearing. If both mothers and fathers knew what we, the "experts" knew, it seemed reasonable to think their children's moral growth might be enhanced. b) I was concerned to make moral education a common cause of parents and the church as well as the school, rather than to shift the balance of systematic moral construction further to public education. In my view there has been more than enough weakening of the family's ability to provide for itself by a translocation of its core functions, such as provision for children's character formation or mental health, to "profession |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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