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Conflict Contradiction and Contrarian Elements in Moral Development and Education PDF
Conflict Contradiction and Contrarian Elements in Moral Development and Education PDF
Larry Nucci
University of Illinois at Chicago
LC311.C49 2005
370.11’4—dc22 2004047106
CIP
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 interest in the
topic of moral development and character formation has not abated. A quick
search on Amazon.com, for example, turned up 1,026 resuits for “moral
education.” Nearly all of these books present a picture of moral growth and
education that conforms to the general notion that children 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 reasoning (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 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
vii
viii PREFACE
chapters in this volume take a purely sanguine view of moral and social conflict.
In fact some of the chapters pointedly address the risks entailed by social
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 socialization. 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 normative challenges. The
final part brings back the issue of societal structure and culture to illustrate how
negative features of society, such as racial discrimination and economic
disparity, can feed into the construction of negative moral identity in youth
posing challenges to moral education. The book concludes with a chapter
presenting an educational program designed to respond to such challenges
among African American youth in the United States.
The first section contains two chapters that explore the connections between
resistances at a sociocultural level and implications for moral education and
socialization.
In the first chapter, Elliot Turiel makes the case that resistance and
subversion 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
development, it is necessary that moral education incorporate the ideas of
resistance and subversion into their programs. It is also necessary that they be
integrated into theories of social and moral development. According to Turiel,
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 illustrate
his points. His position is that especially among adults, conflicts occur over
PREFACE ix
Five chapters explore the normative conflicts and contrarian actions of youth in
relation to peer relations, parenting, and moral education. Two of the chapters
deal primarily with schools and teaching, and three chapters focus primarily on
issues of youth.
In his chapter William Ayers presents an inspirational challenge to teachers
and schools to respond to the ethical dimensions of teaching. He employs
selections from media, poetry, and his own work with teachers to make the case
that all students bring a powerful, expansive question into their classrooms: Who
in the world am I? As Ayers makes clear, this question remains largely unstated
and implicit. It is, according to Ayers, nonetheless an essential question, opening
to the moral in surprising ways on several dimensions. It is a question on one
level of identity in formation, but it is also a question that can reveal issues of
social ethics as opposed to rule following, convention as opposed to moral
reflection, and misbehavior as a sometimes productive form of resistance. With
a captivating use of language and examples, Ayers concludes that educators who
are animated by this and related questions can find ways to resist the arid, half
language that dominates so much of the educational discourse, to activate the
intellectual and ethical aspects of classroom life more fully.
Ayers’s chapter, which could have been renamed “Talk With Teachers,” is
followed by Judith Smetana’s detailed, research-based account of the normal
process of adolescent-parent conflict that has its parallel in the classroom
resistances of students. Some theoretical viewpoints have stressed the
problematic nature of adolescent-parent relationships and have described
adolescents as normatively rebellious and as rejecting parental and societal
moral values. Smetana’s chapter presents an alternative view. She asserts that
adolescent-parent conflict (particularly moderate conflict in the context of warm,
accepting relationships with parents) is functional for adolescent development
because it promotes the development of adolescents’ greater agency and
autonomy. Conflict provides a context for the renegotiation of the boundaries of
parental and adult authority, transforming adolescent-parent relationships from
hierarchical to more mutual forms and allowing adolescents to construct a more
autonomous self. In support of her claims, Smetana presents a rich compendium
of research conducted with European American and African American families
demonstrating that adolescents’ resistance to adult authority is selective, limited,
and developmentally appropriate, and that although adolescents contest adult
authority in some domains, they continue to uphold parental and societal
authority moral values. This aspect of Smetana’s work is especially provocative
and important for moral education because it provides a clear analytic
PREFACE xi
framework for knowing when to exert authority, when to negotiate, and when to
say “yes” when dealing with adolescent students. Smetana’s chapter moves
Baumrind’s agenda forward by more clearly defining the realm of authoritative
teaching, and more clearly identifying the moral domain.
Cynthia Lightfoot’s chapter extends the issues raised by Smetana by
exploring the functional role of adolescent risk taking. Lightfoot’s chapter
broadens the scope of inquiry that has examined the developmental significance
of risk taking by outlining and illustrating an interdisciplinary, theoretical
perspective from which adolescent risk taking is viewed as a moral enterprise. In
particular, she employs insights from interpretive developmental approaches,
including narrative and cultural psychology and literary theory, that permit an
exploration of adolescent risk taking as a meaningmaking process through which
different moral discourses are brought into dialogical contact. Lightfoot employs
Bakhtin’s distinction between a prior, acknowledged, authoritative discourse and
an emerging, experimental, internally persuasive discourse, to argue that
adolescent risk taking contributes directly to the further development and
articulation of the young person’s future social identity, as well as the awareness
that one has a social identity of moral consequence. The chapter makes liberal
use of examples from interviews to bring these issues to life. A notable aspect of
the chapter is Lightfoot’s account of the development of “low-rider” art among
Mexican American youth as a way of working through issues of identity and
morality.
Whereas Smetana and Lightfoot focus largely on the development of
individuals, Stacey Horn’s chapter addresses the problem of interpersonal
relations as they play out in the moral drama of peer exclusion and harassment.
Perhaps no single issue is as prevalent and as vexing for schools and teachers.
Horn’s chapter provides a theoretical framework for beginning to capture the
moral and nonmoral aspects of peer exclusion in ways that allow for teachers to
begin to sort out what components of such conduct fall within the legitimate
desire of children to control their own personal relationships and friendships,
and when such conduct goes over the line into psychological and physical harm.
Horn’s work demonstrates that children by and large have a moral framework
from which they interpret situations of peer exclusion, and that effective
educational attempts to regulate such things as bullying should be seen as an
aspect of a more general approach to moral and character education. Adding
complexity to this issue, Horn describes her recent work exploring issues of peer
harassment based on sexual orientation and gender expression.
As noted earlier, this section begins with a chapter written by Ayers, an
American educator whose focus is on ways in which teachers and schools can
make use of the positive tendencies of youth. The section ends with Swiss
educator Fritz Oser’s chapter, in which he develops the position that it is only by
engaging in moral wrongs and experiencing the effects of such wrongs on others
and on one’s self that genuine moral growth is possible. Oser’s radical view is
xii PREFACE
The final three chapters of the book explore cases where the social inequities of
society converge with normative youth resistance to produce negative 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 explores these issues within
the context of German reunification. The remaining chapters by Watkins and
Jagers focus on racism in the United States.
This final section begins with German scholar Wolfgang Edelstein’s analysis
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 xenophobic, racist, and
anti-Semitic youth movement has become increasingly, and at times,
murderously active, especially, but not uniquely, in eastern Germany.
Edelstein’s thesis is the conjoining of the two Germanys brought together two
greatly disparate economies that engendered both financial and 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
PREFACE xiii
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-century “scientific
racists,” who argued that people of color were both intellectually and morally
inferior. As Watson argues, unable to conclusively “prove” genetic inferiority,
early 20th-century racist educators and eugenicists tenaciously clung to the
moral inferiority argument as a basis for subjugation of African Americans.
Watson develops the thesis that claims of moral deficiency have provided a
rationale for “deficit” theories and manufactured 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 discussed 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 discusses student-teacher
relationships, curriculum content, and learning contexts as they relate to the
potential contributions of low-and middle-income children to the collective well
being of the African American community. 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 reasoning 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 research that
moral life is not a straight forward journey, but rather a series of challenges,
setbacks, detours, and successes. What we also learn in chapters from Smetana
and Lightfoot, among others, is that the challenges posed by youth resistance,
including some of what amounts to risk taking, is a normative aspect of
development important to the establishment of autonomy and moral identity.
Finally, what we find, especially in the chapters by Turiel and Baumrind, is that
resistance to what is viewed by adults to be morally and socially right is often
morally justified. The task of moral education, as Ayers makes clear, is a
humbling endeavor. As we work to do what we think is best for the moral
xiv PREFACE
growth of our children and students, we must also keep one eye on ourselves
and an open mind to the prospect that their resistance to our values may indeed
be the more moral course.
—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
responsibility. New York: Bantam Books.
Nucci, L. (2001). Education in the moral domain. Cambridge, England: Cambridge
University Press.
Power, C., Higgins, A., & Kohlberg, L. (1989). Lawrence Kohlbergs approach to moral
education. New York: Columbia University Press.
Wynne, E., & Ryan, K. (1993). Reclaiming our schools: A handbook on teaching
character, academics, and discipline. New York: Macmillan.
Part I
Resistance and Conflict
at a Societal Level
in Relation to Socialization
and Educational Practice
1
Resistance and Subversion 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 social
3
4 TURIEL
Piaget’s proposition differs from my own. Young children begin to form moral
judgments that are not ready-made and that are not determined by authority,
rules, or the customs and conventions of society (Turiel, 1983, 1998, 2002).
Furthermore, the origins of opposition and resistance are in early childhood.
Young children do not accept authority as right when they contradict justice
(Laupa, 1991; Laupa & Turiel, 1986). As an illustrative example, consider the
judgments of a 5-year-old boy, as made in a study designed to examine
distinctions between the domains of morality (pertaining to welfare, justice, and
rights) and social convention (pertaining to uniformities coordinating
interactions within social systems). In that study (Weston & Turiel, 1980),
children from 5 to 11 years of age were presented with hypothetical stories of
preschools depicted as permitting certain actions. One example was that children
were allowed, in this school, to be without clothes on warm days (classified as a
conventional issues). A second example of an act permitted within a school
pertained to the moral issue of physical harm: Children were allowed to hit each
other. Whereas most of the children judged both types of acts as wrong prior to
the presentation of the hypothetical stories, the majority at all ages judged the
school rule regarding clothes acceptable and the one regarding hitting as
unacceptable. The findings of the study are consistent with findings from a large
body of research documenting that children’s moral judgments differ from their
judgments about conventions on a variety of dimensions (which I do not discuss
here). For the purposes here, it is judgments about authority in the context of the
study that are relevant. Consider the following excerpts of responses by the 5-
year-old boy. The first excerpt begins with his answer as to whether it is
acceptable for the school to allow children to remove their clothes; the second
excerpt begins with his answer as to whether it is all right to allow hitting.
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 AT GROVE SCHOOL. HE HAS BEEN RUNNING IN
THE PLAY AREA OUTSIDE AND HE IS HOT SO HE
DECIDES TO TAKE OFF HIS CLOTHES. IS IT OKAY FOR
BOB TO DO THAT?) Yes, if he wants to he can because it is the
rule.
***
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
stipulated, 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 authorities. His judgments
about the act of hitting reveal that he makes discriminations 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 standpoint (autonomy).
The responses of this boy indicate that the origins of opposition are in early
childhood. Although that study was not designed to examine opposition, other
research has shown that children do engage in oppositional activities 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 children, alongside positive,
prosocial actions and emotions.
Now consider two examples illustrative of opposition, resistance, and
subversion among adults—but 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
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 people
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 conducted
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’ generation,
1. ESISTANCE AND SUBVERSION IN EVERYDAY LIFE 7
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 subvert the
situation was to, when possible, put some money into places available 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 husbands. 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 often discussed
their concerns and activities with their children. The second illustrative example,
from Fatima Mernissi’s published childhood recollections, 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 identified 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 activities, 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 systematically restricted in unequal ways, the
inequality can turn the personal into moral issues. This can be seen in Mernissi’s
story—which 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 positions 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 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 music 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:
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 required 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 and free of makeup.
As was the case with the mother’s use of chewing gum, makeup is seen to serve
broader purposes in Irart As one woman put it, “Lipstick is not just lipstick in
Iran. It transmits political messages” (“Lipstick Politics in Iran”).
1. ESISTANCE AND SUBVERSION IN EVERYDAY LIFE 9
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 Afghanistan 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 televisions, VCRs, most music,
movies, kites, and much more. They banned depictions of living creatures, and
required men to have beards. The restrictions imposed on women were the most
severe. Women were confined to their homes unless accompanied by a male
relative. When venturing 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
physicians—but 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 previously
banned videos, audiocassettes, televisions, VCRs, musical instruments, birds,
and kites. People flocked to newly reopened cinemas and barber shops did a
10 TURIEL
brisk business with men shaving their beards. Women quickly mobilized to
reopen schools for girls. Women also began looking for work and sometimes
participated in organized demonstrations for their rights. Many women did shed
their burkas, although there was still fear of the reactions of men to their doing
so.
It certainly appeared, to use Martin Luther King’s words, that the urge for
freedom had come. It also appeared that the urge for freedom had been there, but
in a hidden, underground, subversive form. This becomes evident if we merely
ask where all the objects (televisions, VCRs, kites, etc.) brought out in such
quantities came from. The answer, of course, is that the people had resisted the
dictates of the Taliban by hiding many banned objects (e.g., difficult-to-hide
objects like televisions were buried in backyards). There were several other
examples of resistance and subversive activities that emerged at the time.
Artworks, for instance, were preserved by businessmen and museum directors
who hid them in basements of their homes and museums (sometimes having
secured paintings with bribes). One artist, at least, managed to save many
banned paintings of living creatures from destruction by covering them over
with watercolors. Women, too, resisted at great personal risks by running, in
their homes, secret schools for girls or beauty shops for women.
It is still not well publicized that resistance on the part of women from
Afghanistan took an organized form. As early as 1977, women organized to
fight for human rights and social justice by forming the Revolutionary
Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). Their objective was
explicitly to involve women in social and political activities pertaining to areas
like education, health, work, and politics. RAWA worked within Afghanistan
until the Taliban took over (even after the group’s founder and leader was
assassinated in 1987). After 1996, RAWA was forced to work in other countries
like Pakistan, where they held several demonstrations. Within Afghanistan,
members of RAWA documented the activities of the Taliban by surreptitiously
taking photographs and making videos to smuggle to members in other
countries. Those activities involved great risks, because taking such photographs
was illegal and punishable by death. The photographs and videos (which can be
found on the group’s Web site, http://www.rawa.org/) reveal the harsh
conditions of people’s lives, executions and amputations in sports stadiums,
beatings of women for showing a little hair from beneath the burka, and much
more.
If it were the only example, the reactions of the women and men of
Afghanistan could be interpreted as an uncommon reaction provoked by the
extreme restrictions imposed by the Taliban. However, all the other examples I
have presented (from Morocco, Iran, Greece, Turkey; see also 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. Resistance and subversion
1. ESISTANCE AND SUBVERSION IN EVERYDAY LIFE 11
are connected with the domains of moral and personal 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 authorities), and about matters portrayed by some as
moral virtues (especially honesty and dishonesty, truth and lies). The complex
and multifaceted nature of children’s social interactions was captured by Piaget
(1951 1/1995a) in his assertion that:
hold subordinate positions, and are restricted from exercising their freedoms and
rights. People in subordinate positions are not simply content to accept the
perspectives of those in positions of power. As put by Okin (1989), “Oppressors
and oppressed—when the voice of the latter can be heard at all—often disagree
fundamentally” (p. 67). With such fundamental disagreements and the
associated conflicts, it does not make sense to characterize cultures through any
kind of orientation meant to portray a general set of perspectives held by the
group. Philosophers and anthropologists have voiced objections to the prevalent
mode of attempting to characterize cultures or communities in these ways. As
one example, Nussbaum (1999) asserted that
Cultures are not monoliths, people are not stamped out like coins
by the power machine 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)
conducted with adults in the United States, we obtained judgments about several
situations involving deceptions between wives and husbands. In one version of
the situations presented it is only the husband who works outside the home and
the wife who engages in deception; in another version of each situation only the
wife works and it is the husband who engages in deception.
Analyses of the results of this study are still underway. For now, consider
findings from two of the situations involving deception. In one, a spouse keeps a
bank account secret from the working spouse who controls all the finances. In
the other, a spouse with a drinking problem attends meetings of Alcoholics
Anonymous without telling the working spouse who disapproves of attending
such meetings. With regard to finances (i.e., maintaining a secret bank account),
it makes a difference if it is a wife or husband who engages in the deception.
The majority of participants (64%) thought that it is acceptable for a wife to
have a bank account secret from her working husband who controls the finances.
However, the majority (66%) also thought that it is not acceptable for a husband
to do so, even when the wife works and the husband does not. It appears,
therefore, the structure of power outside the family is taken into account in
making these judgments. In other words, a nonworking husband is viewed as
having more influence and power than a nonworking wife. The differences in
judgments about deception by wives and husbands do not extend to all
situations. The large majority (over 90%) judged that deception is acceptable by
both wives and husbands when dealing with a drinking problem by attending
meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. In that situation, like situations involving
physicians’ deception of insurance companies, judgments about welfare override
the value of maintaining honesty.
I should stress that people in the study were not sanguine about deception
between spouses—just as physicians are not content that they may sometimes be
compelled to deceive insurance companies. They view deception as undesirable
but sometimes necessary to deal with unfair restrictions, especially restrictions
imposed by those in greater power and control. The results of these studies
indicate that issues revolving around honesty and deception are far from
straightforward from a psychological standpoint. To be sure, deception
sometimes occurs for self-serving purposes. Nevertheless, the reasons people in
engage in deception are multidimensional and motivated by moral goals. The
complexities and moral reasons in people’s decisions regarding honesty and
dishonesty are often lost when people lament the decline of morality in our
youth because so many adolescents admit to dishonesties. This occurs when
survey takers, posing questions like, “Have you lied to your parents in the past
12 months?” find that most adolescents honestly admit to having done so. We
can ask, would the findings be different if physicians were posed with a similar
question: “Have you lied to an insurance company in the past 12 months?” A
more productive approach to honesty among youths would be to closely
16 TURIEL
CONCLUDING REMARKS
The data on judgments about honesty and deception point to flexibilities of mind
in applying moral considerations to social situations. The contextual variations
in judgments do not reflect situational determinism, but weighing, balancing,
and coordinating different social and moral goals. More generally, the types of
acts of resistance and subversion evident in several of the nonresearch examples
I have described, along with findings from studies with Druze and Bedouin
women, reflect flexibilities of mind in the ways people relate to the social world.
Social relationships involve a multiplicity of features. Moral and social
development, as Martin Luther King, Jr. implied in his address to the American
Psychological Association, does not involve a straightforward adjustment to
social conditions. Social development is not a process of increasing acceptance
of or identification with culture and its norms or practices.
This is not to say that people are always or completely at odds with each
other, with the culture, or with societal arrangements. It is to say that there is
heterogeneity of orientations. Adjustment and acceptance coexist with resistance
and opposition. Social harmony coexists with social conflict, discontents, and
efforts at changing norms and established practices. The multiplicity of people’s
judgments and approaches to the social world means that to adequately
understand social development it is necessary, as Piaget proposed, to understand
children’s constructions stemming from many types of social experiences.
I return, then, to the main idea that resistance and subversion are part of
everyday life. As part of everyday life, most people have moral convictions and
commitments that they act on in the face of possible social disapproval and
serious repercussions. As I have indicated, moral resistance is not the province
of a limited number of individuals to be characterized as moral elites. The
commitment and conviction of many people to the viewpoints they hold results
in some complexities in evaluating differing positions in ongoing debates. If we
could say that the few—our moral leaders—have the courage of their
convictions in opposition to the many, who simply go along with system, that
would constitute a basis for discriminating sides on particular issues. However,
conviction and commitment appear in many guises and most often can be seen
in people holding opposing views. I can draw from some of my examples: The
women of RAWA, as well as many people of Afghanistan, had the courage of
their convictions, but so did the Taliban. In the civil rights movements in the
United States, Martin Luther King, Jr. had the courage of his convictions, as did
many who were involved in demonstrations and protests at the time; however,
counterdemonstrators in southern states and elsewhere also maintained their
1. ESISTANCE AND SUBVERSION IN EVERYDAY LIFE 17
positions with conviction even in the face of opposition from the federal
government.
A clear example of conviction and commitment on opposing sides of civil
rights issues was evident in confrontations over the integration of the University
of Mississippi in the fall of 1962. Two individuals—James Meredith and
Governor Ross Barnett of Mississippi—are illustrative. James Meredith, a Black
man, had attended Jackson State University (a Black school) but held back from
obtaining sufficient credits to graduate so that he could apply to the University
of Mississippi, which has been referred to as the pinnacle of Mississippi’s
wealthy segregationist plantation society. Meredith pursued the matter all the
way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ordered his admission to the
university. Meredith’s commitment to equality and integration was paralleled by
Governor Barnett’s commitment to segregation. Barnett physically blocked
Meredith’s efforts to register at the university several times and publicly
proclaimed, “I am a Mississippi segregationist and proud of it.” Moreover,
Governor Barnett was unresponsive to President Kennedy’s directives, so
Kennedy had to mobilize a large number (more than 30,000) of federal troops
and National Guardsmen to be sure that Meredith was safely enrolled in the
university. Conviction, commitment, and courage are not features that
distinguish between James Meredith and Ross Barnett, nor between the many
supporters of each side. We must look elsewhere for the distinguishing
features—to the nature of moral argumentation, moral struggle, and most
important to the details of the moral evaluations and moral judgments involved.
One incident surrounding James Meredith’s efforts to enroll in the University
of Mississippi poignantly demonstrates that resistance, subversion, and
commitment come from large numbers of people whose involvement often goes
unnoticed. Meredith spoke about the incident when he was interviewed on the
Morning Edition news show of National Public Radio on the occasion of the
40th anniversary of his enrollment at the University of Mississippi. As
introduced by the interviewer, “in the first minutes after he registered Meredith
got a message that still brings him to tears.” As told by James Meredith,
So it is not only in the acts of famous figures like Socrates, Mahatma Ghandi,
and Martin Luther King, Jr. that we see moral defiance, resistance, and
subversion. We see it in many people, in people who were not well known as
moral leaders with outstanding personal characteristics, such as Oscar Schindler,
James Meredith, and an unnamed janitor working at the University of
Mississippi.
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2
Taking a Stand in a Morally Pluralistic
Society: Constructive Obedience and
Responsible Dissent in Moral/Character
Education
Diana Baumrind
Institute of Human Development
University of California, Berkeley
Dialectical Materialism
21
22 BAUMRIND
Deontic theories of moral justifications are objectivist in that they affirm that
there is an ahistorical permanent framework to which we can ultimately appeal
in determining the nature of goodness and rightness (see Vokey, 2001, for an
excellent treatment of the objectivism-relativism debate). Deontic moral theory
as instantiated by Rawls’s (1971) original position is intended to provide an
unassailable warrant for a progressive principle of justice that would oppose
oppression and favor the least advantaged, on the basis that one runs the risk of
being the least advantaged. The original position in which one chooses an option
ignorant of one’s status and personal attributes is intended to construct an
objective foundation for ethical judgments by means of universally valid criteria
for rational assessment that are manifestly acultural, ahistorical, ahedonic, and
impartial. However, the original position is an unacceptable cognitive device for
validating a substantive claim precisely because it can apply only to
counterfactual hypothetical situations and not to the proper province of ethics,
which is how one should conduct one’s affairs in the real world.
To provide an unassailable warrant for its justice claims deontic theories of
justification treat the formal criteria of universalizability and impartiality as
constitutive. However, the principle of universalizability fails to do justice to
real cultural differences in historically determined values, and the principle of
impartiality to the special obligations fiduciaries owe to their clients, and
individuals owe their intimates. Neither principle is false, but the truth of each is
limited in its application to praxis.
Universalist pronouncements cannot establish a social consensus on basic
moral premises that does not already exist, and there is no consensus in our
24 BAUMRIND
inorganic flesh, and the social environment our organic flesh. One takes a moral
point of view by being cognizant of where one stands and how one’s standpoint
may obscure one’s vision from the perspective of differently positioned
protagonists, as well as by an enlightened understanding of what truly
constitutes one’s own long-term interests.
A major objective of socialization agents is to sensitize children to issues of
justice and caring, as realized in their daily lives. The ethics of virtue require a
rational understanding of what constitutes true self-interest that transforms
desire into goodness so that the moral agent wants to do the right thing. How
educators construe true self-interest will influence how they resolve conflicts of
interest in the school milieu, and present their rationale to children. I argue on
empirical grounds that moral considerations of justice and compassion do not
exclude self-interest but, on the contrary, are implicit in true self-interest, for at
least the following four reasons: (a) reciprocity is a fact of social life and not
merely an abstract moral principle; injustice and cruelty as well as compassion
and altruism tend to be reciprocated; (b) whether as perpetrator or victim normal
individuals are empathic and therefore discomfited by injury and injustice; (c)
behaving unjustly or without compassion is internally corrosive, harming one’s
long-range development; and (d) the self-other boundary is permeable, so that in
poisoning one’s environment, one poisons oneself. For reasons such as these,
true self-interest transcends the polarization of prudential and moral concerns.
justified when the common good (of the social group to whom one pledges
allegiance) is thought to be harmed less by a rule endorsing such actions than by
a rule endorsing any alternative. By requiring not merely the greatest good, but
the greatest good for the greatest number, the principle of justice is included in a
rule utilitarian theory of normative ethics. Rule utilitarian theory treats what is
right as that which brings about the greatest good (in affording human
fulfillment) for the greatest number in the long run. By that criterion the
reduction of oppression is a superordinate sociomoral good.
By oppression I mean the imposition on some individuals or groups of
exploitive constraints on their freedom to choose the conditions of self-
formation by other individuals or groups whose purpose is to enhance their own
access to resources and their own options to pursue what they regard as a good
life. Individuals and societies that deprive some individuals or groups of
resources sufficient for normal development, or that produce grossly
disproportionate inequities in distribution of resources among individuals or
groups, are oppressive. The human capabilities approach (Nussbaum, 1995; Sen,
1985), claims that the goodness of a society can be judged by the extent to
which it promotes and expands the valued capabilities of the greatest number of
its citizens, depriving none of the basic material and social resources that would
enable them to develop their fundamental human capabilities. The standpoint
that represents the interests of the oppressed serves the greatest good of the
greatest number and is more valid than that of the oppressor by being fairer,
more progressive, and less biased (Baumrind, 1998).
The standpoint that represents the interests (not necessarily the views) of the
oppressed in any culture is fairer and more progressive because the eq-uitable
distribution of resources it demands comes closest to meeting the basic human
needs of all its members, rather than the whims of a privileged minority.
Movement toward more equitable distribution of resources, consistent with the
communist ideal “from each according to ability, to each according to need” is
progressive because it promotes the greatest good of the greatest number. The
standpoint of the oppressed is more comprehensive, and thus less biased in that
it requires an understanding of the position of the oppressor, as well as of the
oppressed. Whereas those in a subordinate position must heed the interests of
their oppressors so that they may adapt to or circumvent those interests,
members of the ruling class, gender, or ethnic group, by virtue of their power,
are not impelled by an equal necessity to take into account the interests of those
whose welfare they control, or to see them as individuated and unique persons.
The undesirable social consequences of practices that create relative poverty by
magnifying the gap between the rich and poor in access to physical and social
resources are to inflict unnecessary suffering and retard the development of the
many to advance the interests of the few.
In treating gross differential distribution of resources as oppressive and
therefore as evil I am making a substantive claim that I have just sought to
2. CONSTRUCTIVE OBEDIENCE AND RESPONSIBLE DISSENT 27
universally recognized truths. Those few ethical premises that are universally
recognized truths are grounded in universal socioemotional experiences. Even
ethical premises that in the abstract, because of their affective appeal, may have
the status of universally recognized truths such as “Don’t kill the innocent” are
not consensually validated in practice, as is clearly the case with judgments
concerning abortion.
Fundamental ethical premises, such as those that divide protagonists in the
culture wars, cannot be corroborated or disconfirmed and in that sense they are
not objective. However, they must be subject to coherent rational and public
criteria. Ethical premises that are not universally recognized as true (and I think
there are none) are arbitrary, in the sense of being subject to individual or group
discretion, but not in the sense of being inherently irrational. Although
substantive moral claims are not made incorrigible by formal criteria, the
alternative to deontic objectivity and universalism is not the radical relativism of
postmodern subjectivity. Moral agents are obliged to justify ethical judgments
with principles derived from within their standpoint precisely because in this
pluralistic world their truth is not self-evident. We are each both illuminated and
blinded by our historically—and personally—situated standpoint. Moral
judgments may, indeed must, be supported with reasons, especially in the
absence of consensus. Furthermore, moral agents are obliged to seriously
consider divergent standpoints, normative claims, and theories of justification.
A pluralist sensibility and regard for cultural diversity urges caution in judging
the esthetic preferences or the conventions of another culture or individual as
repugnant or reprehensible, or its epistemology as irrational (Powers &
Richardson, 1996), One may find distasteful a culture’s sleeping arrangements,
or which animals it chooses to sacrifice to its appetites or religious practices, or
whether it uses shaming or spanking to discipline its children, without finding
such practices morally reprehensible. Knowing that the limitations of one’s
standpoint obscure certain features of reality to bring certain other features into
sharp focus mandates tolerance of opposing ideas.
Culture and context can alter the meaning, and therefore within limits
moderate the effects, of certain aversive or painful practices. The moral force
behind multiculturalism is based on its claim to enhance the rights and respect
given to marginalized groups within each society, as well as between cultures,
and not on a claim that all cultural norms and imperatives should be treated as
equally valid. When in the name of tolerance the culture construct sanctions
oppressive and authoritarian power relationships, it diverts attention from the
dynamics of privilege and privation within a culture. Practices that are good for
some members of a given community may not be good for all its members; what
might have advanced the welfare of a culture at one time may not now.
2. CONSTRUCTIVE OBEDIENCE AND RESPONSIBLE DISSENT 29
that are realizable, and consistent with human nature. Primacy places a premium
on the moral dimension of praxis. A moral person experiences ethical directives
as internally coercive and consistent claims on the self to act virtuously. Moral
agents accept responsibility for the effects their actions have on others and on
their own long-range well-being. The moral relevance of intentions resides
primarily in the good or evil they lead agents to cause. In one of Bill
Watterson’s morally instructive cartoon strips, Calvin asked Hobbes, “Do you
think our morality is defined by our actions, or by what is in our hearts?”
Hobbes replied, “I think our actions show what is in our hearts.” When we
excuse evil actions on the basis of good intentions we condescend to do so on
the basis that the actor is immature and therefore not yet privy to the
responsibilities or rights of a developed moral agent.
Unlike the related constructs of temperament and personality, the construct of
character has moral connotations. When the moral connotation is explicit,
character may be thought of as personality evaluated, as the moral estimate of
an individual. Character is that aspect of personality that engenders
accountability, is responsible for persistence in the face of obstacles, and inhibits
impulses in the service of a more remote or other-oriented goal that the
individual values. Character provides the structure of internal law that governs
inner thoughts and volitions subject to the agent’s control under the jurisdiction
of conscience. A person’s character includes sentiments of righteous
indignation, and conscious pursuit of justice for oneself and oth-ers, as well as
of compassion and love, emotional reactions of remorse and shame,
disinterested loyalty and the conscious pursuit of order, solidarity, fitness, and
well-being. This inclusive perspective on character is consistent with
Durkheim’s (1925/1973) approach to character formation. Character formation
is concerned with development of virtues. A virtue is a habit one develops by
consistently choosing and acting on the good. Virtues are behavioral tendencies
and dispositions to act in certain ways across many, but not necessarily all,
contexts. Character educators seek to foster an environment conducive to the
development of virtuous habits in children. Habits, according to Hume
(1739/1960), are customs of the mind, acquired mental functions supported by
sentiments resulting in patterns of conduct that are reinforced by repetition.
Moral/Character Education
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 ideologies 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 perspective comprise
good character. The moral education movement is “progressive” 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 answers. In the Platonic
Kohlbergian tradition, the liberal moral education movement tends to be
constructivist in its emphasis on cognition and Socratic methods of teaching,
whereas the conservative character education movement, in the Aristotelian
tradition, tends to be behaviorist in its emphasis on behavioral control processes
by which virtuous habits of obedience, loyalty, and diligence are instilled
through extrinsic motivation, exhortation, and strict enforcement of rules of
conduct. The virtues valued most highly by the character education movement
promote order and stability of the status quo, whereas the virtues most prized by
the moral education movement promote critique and transformation.
The earliest character education movement of the first three decades of the
20th century embraced a clearly traditional perspective, favoring a top-down
structure and teaching methods. They used didactic indoctrination of “10 laws of
right living”—self-control, good health, kindness, sportsmanship, self-reliance,
duty, reliability, truth, good workmanship, and teamwork. Their conservative
ideology was evident in the virtues they omitted—critical thought, courage,
independence, and integrity. The results of the Character Education Inquiry
under the direction of Hartshorne and May (1928–1930) concluded, according to
Kohlberg (1970), that these heavily didactic programs that sought to indoctrinate
children against cheating and lying and to encourage helping behavior had no
positive long-range effects on conduct.
The virtues prized most highly by today’s traditional educators such as
Wynne (1997) and Bennet (1993) are similar to those of their progenitors. Self-
control, duty, diligence, cooperativeness, obedience, and loyalty are to be
inculcated by uncritical transmission and drilling of a fixed doctrine. Teachers in
for-character schools today (Wynne & Ryan, 1993) like earlier character
educators, rely heavily on extrinsic rewards and punishment to shape children’s
thoughts as well as their behavior and are highly directive, manipulative, and
psychologically controlling. Their traditionalist perspective appears intended to
32 BAUMRIND
promote a conservative social ideology in support of the status quo, with a focus
on “fixing the kids” rather than on social structural inequities that contribute to
bad behavior. Objective research on the effects of for-character schools has yet
to be done.
Wynne (1997) cited Jamie Escalante as “a striking instance of a successful
for-character teacher” (p. 67). However, I would call Escalante “authoritative” in
his educational approach, rather than a “for-character” teacher (see Matthews,
1988), in that he balanced high demands for achievement and self-control with
respect and responsiveness to the individual needs of each child. Escalante
served as a model of successful achievement without loss of cultural or personal
identity. Still within a traditional framework Lickona’s (1991) comprehensive
approach to character education, in my view, is also more authoritative than it is
authoritarian. Lickona construes character education as intentional proactive
efforts to develop virtuous qualities of character. He set forth a tripartite schema
of values—moral knowledge, moral feeling, and moral behavior—and then
proposed a comprehensive character education model consisting of 12 mutually
supportive strategies intended to encompass the total moral life of the school:
The teacher acts as a caregiver, moral model, and moral mentor; creates a caring
classroom community using discipline as a tool for developing self-regulation,
moral reasoning, and respect; provides many opportunities for student input;
promotes ethical reflection on values as issues arise in the classroom; and
teaches nonhostile conflict resolution. Parents and community leaders are
recruited as partners in extending students’ caring beyond the classroom,
Lickona (1996) offered evidence from within the program that this
comprehensive approach to fostering virtuous character has been successful in
achieving the goals he sets forth. However, evidence by objective critics is not
yet available.
From a liberal or “progressive” perspective, duty, obedience, and loyalty
unmitigated by constructive dissent are problematic attributes. Two early
“progressive” approaches to moral education rejected indoctrination of received
wisdom: values clarification (Raths, Harmin, & Simon, 1966), a values-neutral
approach that enjoyed popular favor in schools; and Kohlberg’s (1970)
cognitive-developmental approach, which won the acclaim of scholars. Both
were studied intensively and, according to Leming (1997), converged on the
following rather pessimistic conclusions: The values clarification approach had
a success rate in the 0 to 20% range on a wide array of dependent child
outcomes; Kohlberg’s moral discussion approach often found the hypothesized
changes in moral reasoning, but did not report significant changes in social or
moral character or conduct.
The Character Education Project (Schaps, Battistich, & Solomon, 1997)
exemplifies a modern program embracing a progressive perspective that has
been systematically evaluated by an integrated team of insiders and outsiders
(Benninga et al., 1991). It features the creation of a caring community that
2. CONSTRUCTIVE OBEDIENCE AND RESPONSIBLE DISSENT 33
From both Leming’s (1993, 1997) and Benninga’s (1997) accounts it would
appear that past moral/character education efforts have not been notably
successful, Leming (1993) cautioned against both the traditionalist approach of
Wynne’s for-character schools (Wynne & Ryan, 1993) and the progressive
approach of values clarification on the basis that neither was likely to change
values or character-related behaviors, Benninga’s account suggested that the
more effective programs share some of the characteristics found in optimally
competent parents—they are neither authoritarian nor permissive, but instead are
authoritative in their disciplinary methods and relationships with students.
Wentzel (2002) applied Baumrind’s (1991) parenting dimensions of control,
maturity demands, democratic communication, and nurturance to understanding
teachers’ influence on student adjustment in middle school. She found that these
dimensions—in particular adolescent-perceived high maturity demands and
nurturance—consistently predicted student motivation and prosocial behavior
for boys and girls, and for African Americans and European American children.
In describing the Montessori method, Rambusch (1962) illustrated the way in
which authoritative control can be used to resolve the antithesis between
pleasure and duty, and between freedom and responsibility in the classroom:
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)
Perceived self-efficacy in which people believe that they can bring about good
outcomes and impede bad outcomes by their actions is critical to moral agency.
Bandura (1999) and his colleagues (Bandura, Caprara, Barbaranelli, Pastorelli,
& Regalia, 2001) have examined the mechanisms people use to disavow a sense
of personal agency, and to disengage moral control by justifying inhumane
conduct, disregarding or minimizing the injurious effects of their actions, and
dehumanizing those who are victimized. Tsang (2002) recently proposed a
model of moral rationalization, the cognitive process by which individuals
convince themselves that their behavior does not violate their moral standards.
Her analysis helps explain why children in the Hartshorne and May (1928–
1930) studies would not necessarily have interpreted their actions as dishonest,
but rather as acceptably disobedient. Batson and colleagues (Batson,
Kobrynowicz, Dinnerstein, Kampf, & Wilson, 1997) examined moral hypocrisy,
which they defined as the pretense of being in accord with one’s own principles
of right and wrong conduct without actually acting accordingly. When faced
with completing a boring task or assigning it to the confederate, very few of the
2. CONSTRUCTIVE OBEDIENCE AND RESPONSIBLE DISSENT 37
Character is what it takes to will the good, and competence to do good well,
Competence broadly defined is effective human functioning in attainment of
personally desired and culturally valued goals. Within limits imposed by their
competencies, circumstances, and cultures, moral agents are able to plan their
actions and implement their plans; examine and choose among options; and
structure their lives by adopting congenial habits, attitudes, and rules of conduct.
Optimal competence and moral character require an integrated balance within
the individual of two fundamental interpenetrating modalities of human
existence—communion and agency. Communion refers to the drive to be of
service and connected that manifests itself in caring, cooperative behavior.
Agency is the drive for independence, individuality, and mastery that manifests
itself in assertive, dominant behavior (Bakan, 1966). Unmitigated by the other,
agency or communion is maladaptive: Agency unmitigated by communion
marks the egoistic individualist whose lack of concern for others eventually
elicits reciprocated harm to the self; communion unmitigated by agency is self-
abnegating at best, and at worst characterizes converts who are willing to
destroy or be destroyed to serve their in-group. Both compliance, as an aspect of
38 BAUMRIND
Autonomy
Socialization
In our day it has been said that children are “flowers of life.”
That is good. But rashminded, sentimental people have not taken
the trouble to think over the meaning of these beautiful words.
Once children are described as “flowers,” it means to such
people that we should do nothing but go into raptures over them,
make a fuss of them, smell them, sigh over them. Perhaps they
even think we should teach the flowers themselves that they are a
fragile and “luxury” bouquet… The “flowers of life” should not
be imagined as a “luxury” bouquet in a Chinese vase on your
tables… No, our children are not flowers of that kind at all. Our
children blossom on the living trunk of our life; they are not a
bouquet, they are a wonderful apple orchard…. Do not be afraid
of it, shake it around a bit, let even the flowers feel a little
uncomfortable, (pp. 19–20)
CONCLUDING COMMENTS
but by willingness to fully and publicly commit oneself to act on one’s reasoned
and deeply felt moral judgments. It is through purposive activity that we gain
profound knowledge of the material and social world, and reveal our own
nature. “The philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways; the point
however is to change it” (Marx, 1845/1941, p. 84).
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Part II
Resistance, Conflict, and
Contrarianism in Youth:
Implications for Education
and Parenting
3
Who in the World Am I? Reflecting on
the Heart 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 lingers on the
repulsive and horrifying Johnny—we see the frothy saliva forming 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’ about—hell, Leo, I ain’t
embarrassed to use the word—I’m talkin’ about ethics” (or, as pronounced 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?” Without
ethics, “we’re back into anarchy, right back in the jungle…at’s why 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 Reagan,
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
53
54 AYERS
right thinking is a bit like hearing Johnny Caspar discuss ethics—unreal 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 collection,
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. However,
an editor has to choose, leaving readers variously irritated and delighted.
Bennett undoubtedly felt himself stretching for inclusion—Rosa 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 Fitzgerald—a really appalling
model of fatherhood—to his daughter advises her, among much else, to make
her “body a useful instrument” (Bennett, 1993, p. 226).
The proclaimed virtues under consideration here—self-discipline,
compassion, responsibility, friendship, work, courage, perseverance, honesty,
loyalty, faith—take on a distinctly ideological cast in Bennett’s embrace.
Leaving aside what he chooses not to reflect on—say, humility (never!),
solidarity, thoughtfulness, integrity, passion, generosity, curiosity, humor, and
commitment (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 doing as you’re told,
the rewards of acquiescence and compliance, and the necessity of hierarchy and
staying at your post no matter what. Theodore Roosevelt writes “In Praise of the
Strenuous Life,” and Ralph Waldo Emer-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 work—and
work, and work—to earn an education” (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 complexities and
contradictions of work, the violence it can contain; who might have explored the
ways in which human effort can lead to the transformation of people and their
world, the ways in which labor can be sometimes liberating, sometimes
enslaving. Instead, we are instructed on the natural state of things: Kings rule,
3. WHO IN THE WORLD AM I? 55
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 family
of his imagination, a list of dos and don’ts served up in simple stories for simple
living—little virtues celebrated at the expense of great ones. There are “Table
Rules for Little Folks” and instruction on how to “retire for evening” and “how
to conduct our conversations.” Boys and girls, naturally, receive 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,/Always 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
activity, 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 uniculture, Bennett
has blinded himself to the vivid, dynamic, colliding, conflicting, 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 culture and
others is deep,” and explained that his collection “is drawn from the corpus of
Western Civilization,” material “that American school children, once upon a
time, knew by heart” (p. 15). If there is any doubt who “American 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
schools—that rosy period preceding the turbulent 1960s, when schools were
strictly segregated and education mainly the prerogative of the privileged—
permeates 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 him—the gate is swinging wildly—and 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 instincts, and to
56 AYERS
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 professor
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 thousand
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, postmodernism,
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 democracy—those thousand energetic voices—that 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 commitments.
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 conduct—
especially his own.
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 morality 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 acceptance—a 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 “undone,” I
believe the fundamental message of the good teacher, inherently a moral one,
3. WHO IN THE WORLD AM I? 57
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 way—thrusting for life, for learning, for valuing—and 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 caring,
unconditional acceptance.” She also pointed out that “the moral statement is not
a statement guaranteeing perfection. The moral statement that releases courage
is ‘I’ll try! I’ll try!’” (L.Weber, personal communication, Feb. 12, 1992).
When the moral or the ethical is invoked—whether in education, or a meeting
of mobsters—it 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 convenient hammer to beat their opponents into
submission. It is simply untrustworthy 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 morality
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 directions, outward and inward.
Unlike doing the right thing in specific instances, 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 hazards—it can be a move
toward self-deception:
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 nature—that
is, simply by virtue of being human—equal 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 promise 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 secular humanism. In “Reflections
on Gandhi,” Orwell (1949) pointed out the difference between loving God, or
humanity as a whole, and loving particular 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 defeated 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 beings” (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 this—staying in context, focusing on the specific, valuing each
human life as equal to all others—my 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 orthodoxy,
to embrace moral commitments and at the same time maintain a critical 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, dynamic,
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
celebrating her life and her work at the University of Chicago’s Rockefeller
Chapel, 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
3. WHO IN THE WORLD AM I? 59
had written for the occasion called simply “Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000)”1
(Walton, 2000):
Walton and Brooks set me to wondering about the less visible and yet
somehow central dimensions of our work—ethical dimensions embedded in the
enterprise of education—from several different angles of regard: from that of the
4-or 5-year-old boy, coatless and wandering; from the perspective of that 10-or
15-year-old on the corner; from the standpoint of the human cargo on a train
destined for the cage; and from the point of view of an adult world too often
caught up in other matters, indifferent in part, and in other places guided by its
theories and its standards, pursuing its well-intentioned but sometimes blinding
case studies—“condescension as self-pity.”
And suddenly that surprising and oh-so-hopeful denouement, “a young boy
she did not have to know to love.” With Miss Brooks on my mind, I turn to the
problem of moral education, and see it as a problem that operates and challenges
1
Copyright © 2001. Anthony Walton. Reprinted with permission. Anthony Walton is
the author of Mississippi; An American journey. He teaches at Bowdoin College
60 AYERS
The short answer is at the center, and in every fiber, branch, and limb. To
attempt to disentangle the moral—matters of right and wrong, normative
questions and concerns, aspirations—from education is to do violence to each.
Education, of course, is always a realm of hope and struggle. Its hope hovers
around notions of a future, and struggles over everything: what that future
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 classroom
by two powerful, propulsive, and expansive questions that all students, from
kindergarten through graduate school, bring with them to school. Although
largely unstated and implicit, and often unconscious, these questions 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 possibilities.
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 expanding 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-tion of meaning, the narrowing of
options—something he had thankfully missed, at least in this instance.
The fundamental message of the teacher—the graduate school lecturer, the high
school biology teacher, the preschool teacher, and everyone in between—is this:
You are a growing, changing being. As you learn, your way of regarding the
world will metamorphose, and things will never look quite the same. The good
teacher provides recognition and growth, and holds out the possibility of a
3. WHO IN THE WORLD AM I? 61
change in direction, the possibility of a new and different outcome: Take this
sonnet, this formula or equation, this way of seeing or figuring or imagining, and
you must change.
There is a moral contract, then, between teacher and students, again largely
unstated and improvisational, often implied. Brought to light, made conscious
and articulated, it sounds something like this: I will do my best on your behalf; I
will work hard and take you seriously on every appropriate level. In turn, you
must, by your own lights and in your own way, capture your education for
yourself: Seize it, take hold of it, and grasp it in your own hands and in your
own time.
Committed and aware teachers, engaged in the struggle to understand this
contract, must endeavor to accomplish two crucial tasks. One is to convince
students there is no such thing as receiving an education as a passive receptor or
vessel; to argue that in that direction lies nothing but subservience, obedience,
indoctrination, and worse, and that all real education is self-education. The other
is to demonstrate to students, through daily effort and interaction, that they are
valued, that their humanity is honored, and that their growth, enlightenment, and
liberation are education’s core concerns.
Teachers, especially good ones, know how difficult such work is. Too many
schools are structured in ways that undermine this essential moral contract. Too
often our schools, certainly the ones I work in and know best, are organized
around the casual disregard of the humanity of their students, places where
formal authority supplants moral authority, and rule following is substituted for
ethical reflection—reminiscent, in fact, of Bennett’s moral universe. In such
places, the toxic habit of labeling students by their deficits and misbehaviors
bullies the intellectual and ethical heart of teaching off the stage.
The language of such places is revealing: Zero tolerance as an educational
policy replaces the teachable moments that present themselves wherever people
try to live purposefully together. Likewise, the whole alphabet soup of
labeling—EMH, LD, TAG—substitutes for a sense of students as three-
dimensional creatures. Like ourselves, children are made of dreams, aspirations,
interests, and capabilities. Focusing on these qualities expands our
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
YTD—Youthful 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 Reveals,” 2000).
62 AYERS
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, always
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 environment. It is
essential to reflect on our values, our expectations, and our standards, 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 Metropolitan
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 moving, 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 instructions—stick
together, hold hands, don’t run—were consistently overruled by the dominant
voice of the environment: Run!
What does the environment say? How could it be improved?
A fifth-grade teacher I know begins each year explaining to his students that
he has only three important rules in his classroom: One, you can chew gum—the
students are amazed; two, you can wear your hats—the boys in particular look a
little ecstatic at this contravening of the official in their tiny, unique, apparently
outlaw space; and three, that “This is a community of learners, and you must
treat everyone here with respect and compassion—especially when it’s hard to
do.”
3. WHO IN THE WORLD AM I? 63
What this teacher has done in his corner of this school is to create an
environment for moral reflection and ethical action. Mistakes will be made, bad
behavior and thoughtless actions will occur, but undergirding all of it is a
framework for learning, for embracing the teachable moment. This classroom
environment is a place, in the words of the great Joe Cocker tune, of “learning to
live together” (Cocker, 1970). Such a process goes on for a lifetime. It is a
process begun in the family and potentially continued and expanded in school,
and ignored at our collective peril.
Contrast this attitude to a sign I saw in a Chicago high school cafeteria:
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 himself—the endless no, no, no; the so-called
terrible twos—so a 12-year-old must find herself, in part, by pushing away,
broadening her base of affiliation, and finding values, meaning, 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 thinking we share an
entirely common meaning, so, too, can adults be confused 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 adolescents 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
64 AYERS
and care about some aspect of our shared life—our calling after all, is to
shepherd and enable the callings of others. Teachers, then, invite students to
become somehow more capable, more thoughtful and powerful in their choices,
more engaged in a culture and civilization. More free. More ethical. How do we
warrant this invitation? How do we understand this culture and civilization?
Our principles and ponderings may be philosophical, but moral education is
grounded in particulars, which are most exquisitely illuminated by poets and
writers. Brooks reminds us again and again that it matters who and what we
choose to see. Teachers choose: They choose how to see the world, what to
embrace and what to reject, and whether to support or resist this or that
directive. As teachers choose, the ethical emerges.
James Baldwin (1963) wrote:
2
From “Fully Empowered,” by P.Neruda, 1975, appearing in Journal of Moral
Education. Copyright © 2004 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Reprinted with ermission.
3. WHO IN THE WORLD AM I? 67
REFERENCES
Allison, A.W. et al. (Eds.). (1983). The Norton anthology of poetry (3rd ed.). New York:
Norton.
Baldwin, J. (1963, December 21). A talk with teachers. Saturday Review.
Bennett, W.J. (1993). The book of virtues: A treasury of great moral stories. New York:
Simon & Schuster.
Bennett, W.J. (2002). Why we fight: Moral clarity and the war on terrorism. New York:
Doubleday.
Brooks, G. (1960). The bean players. New York: Harpers Press.
68 AYERS
Cocker, J. (1970). Space captain [Recorded by Mushroom]. On Mad dogs and San
Franciscans [CD]. Oakland, CA: Black Beauty. (2003).
Cohen, E., & Cohen, J. (1990). Millers crossing [Motion picture]. United States: 20th
Century Fox.
de Zengotita, T. (2003, January). Common ground: Finding our way back to the
enlightenment. Harpers Magazine, 306(1832), 35–44.
Didion, J. (1961). Slouching towards Bethlehem. New York: Random House.
Dolan, F.E. (1971). The Pelican Shakespeare: The winter’s tale. New York: Penguin.
Maalouf, A. (1994). Samarkand (R.Harris, Trans.). London: Abacus.
Morrison, T. (1987). Beloved. London: Vintage/Random House.
Neruda, P. (1975). “The poet’s obligation.” Fully empowered (A.Reid, Trans.). New
York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.
Orwell, G. (1949, Winter). Reflections on Ghandi. Partisan Review, 6, 85–92.
Orwell, G. (1984). The Orwell reader: Fiction, essays, and reports. New York: Harcourt.
Walton, A. (2000, December 18). “Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000).” The New Yorker,
76(39), 48.
4
Adolescent-Parent Conflict: Resistance
and Subversion as Developmental
Process
Judith G.Smetana
University of Rochester
This chapter is based on an invited talk given at the Annual Meetings of the
Association for Moral Education, Chicago, October 2002.
69
70 SMETANA
use, and teenage pregnancy and childbearing and that this reflects a breakdown
in the moral fabric of society. In Bennett’s view, as well as that of other
prominent moral educators (Lickona, 1991, 1997), adolescents 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 subversion
may be developmentally appropriate, and that, under certain conditions, they
may be functional for adolescent development.
relationships with their parents today are not very different from their parents’
relationships with their grandparents, when they were young. Moreover,
confirming earlier findings, current findings suggest that parent-adolescent
conflict is relatively frequent, but moderate in intensity. A recent meta-analysis
(Laursen, Coy, & Collins, 1998) indicated that the rate of adolescent-parent
conflict (both the number and frequency of conflicts) appears to peak in early
adolescence and then to decline, although conflict tends to increase in intensity
from early to middle adolescence. Moderate levels of conflict between
adolescents and parents appear to be a normative aspect of relationships between
American adolescents and their parents.
The notion that children’s resistance to adult authority is selective and occurs
over the boundaries of adolescents’ personal jurisdiction has been tested directly
in a series of studies examining adolescents’ and adults’ conceptions of the
legitimacy of adult authority. In the research on adolescentparent conflict,
participants generated or rated the disagreements or conflicts that arose in their
families, and thus families rated different (but highly salient) issues. In the
research on adult authority, participants rated a standard set of issues. They
made judgments about hypothetical acts that were seen as exemplifying different
domains, including morality, social convention, and personal issues. This
research also included a category of more complex issues, which we have
termed multifaceted, that typically involved overlapping concerns in different
conceptual domains (usually conventional and personal). For instance, in the
aforementioned studies, how adolescents keep their bedrooms was a frequent
source of conflict in American adolescent-parent relationships; adolescents
typically viewed their bedroom as private space, and thus its condition was
viewed as an issue of personal choice and personal expression. Parents
disagreed. They typically viewed the adolescent’s bedroom as part of the house
and its condition as a violation of parental norms. Thus, in the studies of
authority concepts, multifaceted issues were issues that adolescents treated as
personal but parents viewed as conventional (and potentially, prudential). In
some of the studies we included a separate category of multifaceted issues
pertaining to friendships, because many friendship issues (like when to start
dating or whether to hang out with friends who parents do not like) entail
overlapping personal, prudential, psychological, and conventional concerns.
In general, the results of cross-sectional studies, including a wide age range
of children (from 10–18 years of age; Smetana, 1988; Smetana & Asquith,
1994) and research with African American families with early adolescents,
followed longitudinally (Smetana, 2000; Smetana, Crean, & Campione-Barr,
2003), have shown that adolescents and their parents overwhelmingly affirm
parents’ legitimate authority to regulate moral and conventional issues and that
these judgments do not change significantly with age. Moreover, adolescents
and parents also judged that adolescents have an obligation to obey parents’
4. RESISTANCE AND SUBVERSION AS DEVELOPMENTAL PROCESS 77
moral and conventional rules, even if they disagree with them. These findings
indicate clearly that adolescents are oriented toward acceptance of parents’
moral and conventional authority. Similar findings have been obtained among
adolescents from other ethnic groups, including American adolescents of
Chinese, Filipino, and Latino backgrounds (Fuligni, 1998).
However, as expected, the findings from these studies indicated that
acceptance of parental authority is not absolute; rather, it is domain-specific. In
these studies, the same adolescents who endorsed parents as having legitimate
authority to regulate moral and conventional issues overwhelmingly rejected
parents’ legitimate authority to regulate prototypical personal issues (like how
late to sleep on weekends, how to spend allowance money, and how to wear
one’s hair). Furthermore, they also judged that adolescents are not obligated to
follow rules limiting adolescents’ freedom over personal issues. Thus, resistance
to rules regulating personal issues was seen as legitimate, whereas resistance to
moral and conventional rules was not. Moreover, the pattern of judgments was
toward greater resistance to parents’ legitimate authority over personal issues
with increasing age. Whereas parents were less likely to view parents as
legitimate authorities over personal than moral or conventional issues, at each
age, parents lagged behind adolescents in their willingness to grant adolescents
autonomy over personal issues. Thus, although parent-adolescent discrepancies
in judgments of multifaceted issues were found consistently from early to late
adolescence, the overall trend was toward granting adolescents more autonomy
over these issues—which did not occur for moral or conventional issues.
A consistent finding in these studies is that although adolescents and parents
generally agree in their judgments regarding parents’ legitimate authority to
regulate moral and conventional issues, there are substantial dis-crepancies
between parents’ and adolescents’ judgments of legitimate parental authority
over multifaceted friendship issues. At each age, adolescents consistently
asserted more desires for personal jurisdiction over these issues than parents
were willing to grant. However, the studies revealed significant decreases with
age in parents’ and adolescents’ beliefs that parents have the legitimate authority
to regulate these issues, which are at the boundary of conventional regulation
and personal jurisdiction. Thus, as adolescents got older, they were accorded
more personal jurisdiction over these issues.
These findings are generalizable beyond the immediate context of the family.
Using similar methods, we have also examined adolescents’ conceptions of the
legitimacy of school and teacher authority (Smetana & Bitz, 1996). A sample of
lower middle-class, primarily (80%) European American 5th, 7th, 9th, and 11th
graders in elementary, junior, and high schools were asked to make judgments
about the legitimacy of teachers’ and principals’ authority to regulate different
types of issues in school. As in the studies of parental authority, students made
judgments about hypothetical items that were seen as exemplars of different
social knowledge domains. In this study, the stimulus items were generated from
78 SMETANA
whereas defiance was not. Furthermore, self-assertion was more likely when
mothers used low-power assertion, guidance, and directives, whereas defiance
was more likely when mothers used high-power assertive control strategies,
such as threats, criticism, physical intervention, and anger. These latter findings
accord well with the observational studies of young children’s social interactions
in the context of personal issues, which have found that personal concepts
emerge from parents’ and adults’ provision of choices and negotiations over
personal issues.
Crockenberg and Litman’s (1990) findings are also useful in understanding
adolescent-parent relationships. As with toddlers, it important to distinguish
between healthy forms of adolescent self-assertion that lead to greater
adolescent competence and autonomy, and destructive or dysfunctional forms of
adolescent self-assertion that entail defiance and rebellion. In their
epidemiological study of adolescents on the Isle of Wight, Rutter et al. (1976)
found that the adolescents who experienced intense conflicts with parents during
adolescence tended to have psychological problems prior to adolescence. More
recent studies have confirmed that although high levels of adolescent-parent
conflict are associated with a range of behavioral problems, including
externalizing problems such as drug and alcohol use, delinquency, truancy, and
running away, as well as internalizing problems, such as depression and
attempted suicide (see Laursen & Collins, 1994; Silverberg et al., 1992;
Smetana, 1996, for reviews), most adolescents who experience problem
behavior during adolescence were found to have psychological problems and
poor relationships with parents prior to adolescence. Indeed, studies are very
consistent in demonstrating that in community (e.g., non-clinic-referred)
samples of families, only a small proportion of adolescents (ranging from about
5%–20% in different studies) experience emotional turmoil and highly
conflictive relations with parents (see Laursen & Collins, 1994; Smetana, 1996,
for reviews).
Thus, this research indicates that there is significant continuity in parent-child
relationships from childhood to adolescence. Children who have warm and
supportive relationships with parents prior to adolescence generally have
emotionally close relationships with parents during adolescence, although, as
Laursen et al.'s (1998) meta-analysis indicates, there are normative increases in
the rate and intensity of disagreements. Research has also demonstrated
normative declines from middle to late adolescence or young adulthood in
closeness and cohesion with parents (Fuligni, 1998; Furman & Buhrmester,
1992; Youniss & Smollar, 1985). Moreover, moderate conflict in the context of
warm, supportive relationships has been shown to be functional for adolescent
autonomy development (Hill, 1987; Holmbeck, 1996; Smetana, 1988, 1995a;
Steinberg, 1990, 2001). Thus, paralleling Crockenberg and Litmaris (1990)
findings from early childhood, the research on adolescence suggests that
defiance can be distinguished conceptually and empirically from more
82 SMETANA
In a similar vein, research has shown that adolescents who view parents as
intruding too deeply into their personal domains view their parents as
psychologically controlling (Smetana & Daddis, 2002), and in turn, greater
perceived psychological control has been related to a variety of psychological
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 authoritative 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 conventional issues, while
being responsive in granting adolescents authority over personal issues. They
are also relatively restrictive and do not view adolescents as having personal
jurisdiction over issues that entail overlaps between 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-cents a limited sphere of personal freedom.
In contrast, authoritarian parents overextend the boundaries of the domains in
several ways. They moralize conventions in their judgments and also grant
adolescents very little personal jurisdiction over personal issues. Conversely,
permissive parents are too permissive in defining the boundaries of the personal
domain and give adolescents developmentally inappropriate freedoms.
These findings have implications for best practices for parenting and schools.
First, although conflicts may be hotly contested and deeply felt by both
adolescents and parents, it is important to keep in mind that in most cases,
adolescents are not rejecting basic social and moral values. Thus, parents and
teachers must stay attuned to the developmental nature of these conflicts. Many
parenting advice books advise parents to “pick their battles” and “don’t sweat
the small stuff.” This is wise counsel; our research indicates that it is vital for
parents to allow adolescents some discretion over personal issues and to be
responsive to adolescents’ desires for autonomy and independent decision
making over personal issues, while having firm and clear expectations for
adolescents’ moral, conventional, and prudential behavior. The more difficult
issue is to decide how much autonomy is appropriate, particularly as research
has shown that too much freedom to make decisions alone, without any input
from parents, has negative implications for adolescents’ adjustment and well-
being (Dornbusch, Ritter, Mont-Reynaud, & Chen, 1990; Lamborn, Dornbusch,
& Steinberg, 1996). In allowing adolescents greater independence, parents need
to carefully weigh the relative risks to adolescents’ safety and well-being, along
with their understanding of adolescents’ maturity and competence. Furthermore,
allowing adolescents increasing autonomy over personal issues does not mean
that parents should not monitor choices and scaffold healthy decisions.
It is also crucial to recognize that from adolescents’ perspectives, these issues
are not small at all. Rather, conflicts serve a developmentally vital function in
84 SMETANA
Schools are not immune to these issues. Schools routinely deal with
violations like vandalism, minor theft, harassment, using illegal substances on
school property, and status offenses, such as cigarette smoking and underage
drinking. Schools also frequently confront violations of contextually
conventional rules, such as violations of dress codes, which may be more
stringent than in other contexts. The perspective presented here on the
multifaceted nature of adolescents’ social knowledge development, along with
Moffitt’s (1993) evidence that these youthful transgressions may constitute a
developmental phase on the route to a generally rule-abiding adulthood, suggest
that one does not need to invoke a homogeneous notion of character to
understand these (mis)behaviors (Nucci, 2001).
Adolescents’ attempts to construct a unique identity may involve
experimentation with rule-breaking behavior. For instance, Brown (1990)
mapped the social world of adolescent crowds by placing them along two
dimensions: 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 especially 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 institutions, 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 conventions. Perhaps it is this contrarian feature—the apparent
rejection of adult tastes and conventions—that provokes the persistent concern
of the adult generation.
CONCLUSIONS
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5
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 abetted 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 imagine. By the
first account, they have never been more poorly educated, prematurely pregnant,
reckless, drugged, depressed, apathetic, suicidal, and violent. Responding to this
apparent moral crisis is a legion of studies marshaled to rout out the
blameworthy, pointing fingers in turn at broken families, 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:
if youth could simply sleep out the years between “ten and three-and-
twenty…for there is nothing in between but getting wenches with child,
wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting” (Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale,
1996, p. 15).
On the other side of the mountain of opinion regarding adolescence are those
who have challenged as extremist, if not baseless illusion, the prior view that
teenagers, for one reason or another, are essentially depraved and subversive
(Acland, 1995; Dohrn, 2000; Fornas & Bolin, 1995; Hancock, 2000; Males,
1999). Both the popular media and the scholarly community, they argue, have
unfairly maligned and criminalized youth. The crisis of youth is not a real crisis,
but a felt crisis. This second more humanistic view smoothes the rough edge of
whatever else may characterize adolescent social life and behavior and suggests
that youth, by and large, are doing just fine. As consummate consumers of
culture and media, and active deliberators of their personal identities, lifestyles
and futures, they are guilty only of falling victim to insidious social stereotype.
Youth have been framed.
There is much to recommend both points of view. Our interviews with
adolescents about their own and others’ risk-taking show ample evidence that
their behavior is often undertaken in a spirit of defiance, with an attitude that is
explicitly clannish, irreverently clownish, and aims for a loss of self in the
moment and in the other in ways that efface personal responsibility (Lightfoot,
1997):
• (The thrill of risk-taking) is almost, but not quite getting caught.
• (Getting drunk) is a good excuse to fall all over that cute guy you really
like.
• (Skipping school) makes you feel closer because you’ve beat the
establishment together.
• (Stealing a case of beer from a delivery truck) shows what lengths you’ll go
to be in the group.
• (Taking LSD) is a way to relate—a different way of being close.
• It wouldn’t hurt anyone e.lse. It might hurt me, but I probably wouldn’t take
a risk that is going to affect someone else—my 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 other—that’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 doesnt 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.
I present these out-takes from semistructured interviews with 15 to 17year-
olds as a way of introducing the argument that the shape of adolescent risk-
taking reveals the contours and complexities of an emerging moral landscape.
My plan for this chapter is to draw principally from Bakhtinian theory to
consider adolescent risk-taking as but an example of a broader realm of activity
inherent to the project of becoming a person. According to the argument I mean
to unfold, Bakhtin’s (1981) theory of aesthetics, to which he pinned a
developmental conception of self as an ethically grounded agent, presents an
integrative prospect for illuminating the functional significance of adolescent
social life and experience. Viewed through the lens of Bakhtin’s theory,
particularly his conceptions of carnival and the novelistic self, risk-taking
becomes an aesthetic form that objectifies and comments on who adolescents
are and wish to become within a specific so-cial-ideological world. To further
the broader aim of my argument—that in addition to providing insight into
adolescent risk-taking, Bakhtin provided a potentially powerful theory for
understanding the development of self in general—I apply his analytic method
to a second aesthetic form both produced by and having special significance for
adolescents of Latin American descent: lowrider art.
1995, p. 239). Such consciousness is, for Piaget, the mainstay of individual and
cultural liberation:
Thanks to these two instruments, i.e. the formal operations and a
“personal” hierarchy 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 (1895–1975), 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 discourse—one that is primarily authoritative, 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 represented—it is only transmitted:
familiar, the monologic versus the dialogic—that sets a stage for the
development of individual consciousness.
Bakhtin’s special interest was the emergence of consciousness, an ideological
consciousness in particular, which he understood to follow directly from the
struggle between authoritative and internally persuasive discourses: “The
struggle and dialogic interrelationship of these categories of ideological
discourse are what usually determine the history of an individual ideological
consciousness” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 342). The struggle—and it is an ongoing,
lifelong struggle—is waged against the line of authority and the alienated
distance that defines it. However, the struggle itself has the effect of drawing the
authoritative into a zone of contact; there is a weakening of its hold, a
degradation of its authority. It is not the case, therefore, that the maturity of
consciousness hangs on hostility to authority. Mere hostility is not enough, nor
is it even necessary. It is dialogue that matters. It follows that a shucking of
authority is not an inevitable outcome of the developmental process. Authority,
tradition, the “done thing,” can be agreed to and embraced as one’s own once it
has been challenged, tested, and deprived of its unconditional allegiance. It can,
in other words, become internally persuasive, and vulnerable to new struggles
with other internally persuasive discourses.
The development of an ideological consciousness is premised in an iron clad
way on the ongoing struggle for hegemony among discourses—those various
ideological points of view—that move and persuade us. So long as discourse
remains authoritative, however, it precludes dialogic relations. If the psyche
were composed of it entirely, then people would fully “coincide with
themselves.” It is the noncoincidence of internally persuasive discourses and the
intentional hybridization of distinct, individualized, concrete discourses that
carry the weight and significance of the project of becoming.
Bakhtin suggested that the ideological consciousness evolves rather late in
development. I suspect he had adolescence in mind—that time of preoccupation
with authenticity: the true and false self, duplicity, mask and masquerade
(Lightfoot, 2003). When thought begins to work in what Bakhtin (1981)
described as “an independent, experimenting and discriminating way,” (p. 345)
ideological points of view of self and other are objectified through a process of
aesthetic construction. For Bakhtin, an aesthetically constructed event or object
is known as such by the form-bestowing presence of an outside consciousness—
the interpretive eye of a spectator or reader, the creative hand of an author—
striving to achieve a sense of the “whole” (Emerson, 1997, p. 136), Thus, as he
envisioned it, the aesthetic process need not construct an object of beauty (this
being the focal concern of much aesthetic theorizing, past and present). Its
constitutive feature is rather to construct an object of purpose and understanding.
In other words, the “aesthetic” in Bakhtin’s world does not aspire to
perfection—that sacred whole of statues and virgins offered in compliant
supplication to pre-Homeric gods who sat in cold and distant judgment of
5. RISK TAKING, CARNIVAL, AND THE NOVELISTIC SELF 99
human moral affairs. Instead, it is inspired by the call of the Muse—of Clio and
Calliope. As Calasso (1993) described, the Homeric god, intemperate to the core
on earth as in Olympus, imposed no commandments and required of the human
world neither good behavior nor devotion. Rather, the Homeric god wanted
above all
Of particular moment in Bakhtin’s theory were his efforts to relate the ethical
and aesthetic aspects of human action. He drew extensive parallels between the
self and the novel, arguing that both involve a highly complex combination and
dialogue of noncoincident discourses and ways of speaking, each expressing a
particular worldview or stance, Bakhtin considered dialogue to be essential to
self-development; he described selfhood as “essentially novelistic, that is, in
terms of inner dialogues and the processes that shape them over time into a
personality” (Morson & Emerson, 1990, p. 216). Both self and novel constitute
artistically organized systems for bringing different languages in contact with
one another; both have the goal of illuminating one language by means of
another—of carving out an image of one language in the light of another.
Artistically organized systems vary in the way that languages are represented
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 destructive 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
100 LIGHTFOOT
internal logic, however profaned and despised it becomes 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 ideological
consciousness is the artistic rendering, the intentional giving of form, and the
dramatization and objectification of coherent languages or socioideological
points of view:
Bakhtin argued that the product of such engaged language play is profoundly
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 themselves 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 human beings” (Bakhtin,
1981, p. 370). Thus, a deeply involved participation with alien languages and
cultures gives rise to a verbal-ideological decentering—a dissociation of
language from the intentions, meanings, and truths that it embodies and,
therefore, an undoing of mythological and magical thought. According to
Bakhtin, a healthy self strives for exposure to multiple perspectives, strives
toward a novelized state, to increase its own choices and responsibility and
reduce its impotence in the world. Individuals, 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 transparent
humanism that biographers and critics see as responsive to the Russian political
and intellectual movements of his time. Within this broader context, the concept
that we consider next—that of carnival—assumes a particularly 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 because of its ambiguity, carnival has special
relevance for understanding adolescents’ risk-taking as a medium for self-
development.
5. RISK TAKING, CARNIVAL, AND THE NOVELISTIC SELF 101
seen by Russian scholars and critics as the common ground of his ethics and
aesthetics. At every turn, Bakhtin insisted on the necessary singularity and
separateness of each individual in relation to another as an enabling condition
for constructing the forms of things, be they aesthetic works or persuasive
ideological discourses. This holds as much for the forming 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 if he were
an omnipresent witness to them. Even had he created an
autobiography or a confession of the most astonishing truth-
fulness, all the same he, as its creator, remains outside the world
he has represented in his work. If I relate (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 occurred. 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)
LOWRIDER ART
Over time, the magazine editors began to receive artwork in such quantity
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 distinctly
Mexican cultural motifs. There are now repeated themes in lowrider art that
include Aztec and other pre-Columbian images, including the Virgin 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 picture its own
namesake (the lowrider car) in the process of constructing works of cultural and
political, as welll as aesthetic significance.
According to his biographers and translators, Bakhtin was the first to formulate
a comprehensive philosophy of the ordinary—of the disorganized, unsystematic,
moment-to-moment prosaics of experience, as distinct from the ordered,
abstract, and idealized poetics. The distinction plays out in one of Batesoris
“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 muddle 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 muddling, 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,
5. RISK TAKING, CARNIVAL, AND THE NOVELISTIC SELF 109
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6
Adolescents’ Peer Interactions: Conflict
and Coordination Among Personal
Expression, Social Norms, and Moral
Reasoning
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 because of
a moral decline in our society and that adolescents are out of control. 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 negotiating 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.
Peers and peer relationships (or lack of them) are a critical part of adolescents’
social worlds. During the transition into adolescence, the peer social world
moves from being comprised of small groups of predominantly samesex friends
or playmates to a much larger and more complex system that has multiple levels
(Brown, Mory, & Kinney, 1994). Adolescents, like younger children, continue
to have best friendships and friendship groups (cliques) that are organized
around common interests and reciprocal affections. In addition, however, they
also become part of a larger peer group structure in which individuals are
categorized into groups based on their interests, activities, values, and modes of
personal expression (e.g., dress; Brown, 1989; Brown et al., 1994). These groups
emerge in adolescence due to both sociostructural and developmental factors.
In most U.S. school systems, as children get older the structure of the school
becomes larger and more complex. This increase in size and complexity makes
it difficult for adolescents to know each of their classmates on an individual
113
114 HORN
level. Thus, the larger peer group structure that emerges in adolescence provides
adolescents with a way to make sense of this expanding social world by giving
them categories or prototypes on which to base their evaluations of their peers.
Additionally, as adolescents move into high school they are confronted with a
much larger and more diverse array of classes, activities, and interests that they
can pursue. Coupled with the increased autonomy granted to adolescents by
parents and other adults, adolescents’ social worlds become much more diverse,
more peer driven, and allow for more time spent with peers in the absence of
adults.
On the developmental side, adolescents gain cognitive skills that allow them
to see beyond interpersonal relationships (e.g., best friendships) and to construct
broader representations of the peer group and the peer group system that involve
multiple levels, networks, and groups (Brown, 1990; Selman, 1980).
Additionally, during adolescence the development of one’s personal identity
becomes much more salient to individuals (Erikson, 1959, 1968). As a part of
this process, adolescents use their peer groups as venues through which to try on
and test out their various identities (Newman & Newman, 1976; Pugh & Hart,
1999). Further, with the onset of puberty, adolescents’ peer groups become a
way for them to learn about and experiment with their emerging sexuality and
sexual identity (Dunphy, 1963). This also leads to an expansion in the peer
group. Prior to puberty, children’s peer groups are comprised predominantly of
members of the same gender. With the onset of puberty, however, most
adolescents begin to develop an interest in opposite-gender peers and start to
form mixed-gender groups. These groups serve as a way for adolescents to
engage in heterosocial behavior and to learn about social practices and norms
regarding dating and intimacy (Dunphy, 1963).
These three developmental factors (cognition, identity, and sexuality)
combined with the sociostructural factors of increased size and complexity of
school, as well as the diversity of opportunities available to adolescents, 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 prototypes available to and venues through which
adolescents test out their identities, 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
6. ADOLESCENTS’ PEER INTERACTIONS 115
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 reasoning—
moral, societal, and psychological—that individuals use when understanding
and making decisions about their social worlds (Turiel, 1983, 1998). The moral
domain pertains to issues of others’ welfare (harm), justice (comparative
treatment and distribution), and rights. The societal domain pertains to issues
involving the rules, norms, and conventions that coordinate the social
interactions of individuals within social systems. In the psychological domain,
knowledge pertains to interpersonal relationships, the understanding of
individuals as psychological systems, and those issues over which individuals
have personal jurisdiction (Smetana, 1995; Turiel, 1983).
Recent research on peer relationships utilizing this theoretical framework 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 adolescents’ reasoning about
retribution (Horn, Killen, & Stangor, 1999); the impact of ambiguity on
adolescents’ reasoning about exclusion based on adolescent 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 predominantly 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-eated a number of factors that are related to adolescents’
reasoning regarding these issues.
For example, Killen and her colleagues (Killen, Lee-Kim, et aL, 2002) found
that context is related to the type of reasoning individuals will bring to bear on
their decisions about peer relationships. In more intimate or close relationships,
such as who you are going to be friends with, children and adolescents used
more personal reasoning in justifying why exclusion is acceptable. For example,
it is okay to not play with John because he is Black because you should be able
to choose who your friends are. Conversely, in contexts in which the peer group
was more institutionally sanctioned (e.g., a school-based group) children and
adolescents were more likely to evaluate exclusion as wrong and used moral
reasoning in justifying why. For example, it is not okay for the other students to
exclude John from the math club (because he is Black) because all students
should have the right to participate in school activities and that would be unfair.
6. ADOLESCENTS’ PEER INTERACTIONS 117
Thus, this research suggests that children and adolescents prioritize different
domains of reasoning in justifying or not justifying peer group exclusion in
intimate versus nonintimate contexts. That is to say, in friendship contexts the
fact that excluding a particular person may be hurtful to that person is
subordinated to the individuals’ prerogative to be friends with whom they
choose. In other contexts, however, individuals’ prerogative to hang out with
whom they choose is subordinated to the larger issue of equal access and
fairness. Social cognitive domain theory provides a meaningful framework to
investigate the ways in which adolescents coordinate personal, social, and moral
dimensions of their relationships with one another.
Further, although research suggests that individuals at all ages draw on these
three domains of social knowledge in reasoning about exclusion, how these
domains of knowledge get coordinated and applied to issues of peer group
inclusion or exclusion changes as children move into adolescence (Horn, 2003;
Killen, Lee-Kim, et al, 2002; Killen, McGlothlin, & Lee-Kim, 2002). This
research suggests that like younger children, many adolescents view exclusion
that is based solely on one’s social group membership (in a particular race,
gender, or peer group) as wrong from a moral viewpoint (it is unfair or hurtful;
Horn, 2003; Killen, Lee-Kim, et al., 2002), but also provides evidence that
adolescents are more likely than children to evaluate excluding someone from a
peer group or friendship group as acceptable (Killen, Lee-Kim, et al., 2002;
Killen, McGlothlin, & Lee-Kim, 2002). Additionally, adolescents are also more
likely to justify peer group exclusion as acceptable by making appeals to such
things as the identity of the group, group functioning, group norms, or personal
choice (Horn, 2003; Killen, Lee-Kim, et al., 2002). These results suggest that as
children get older they have an increased knowledge of the conventional
features of groups (group norms, group identity, group functioning) that are
legitimately necessary to the organization and maintenance of groups (Bukowski
& Sippolla, 2001; Turiel, 1983), as well as an expanded understanding of issues
that are inherently personal and legitimately up to the individual to decide
(Nucci, 1996, 2001). In my research I have found that adolescents’ developing
understanding of social systems as well as their expanded sense of the personal
domain are related to how they understand and make decisions about their peer
relationships. Specifically, three primary issues emerge when investigating how
adolescents negotiate and reason about issues of personal expression, social
norms, and the treatment of others: adolescents’ beliefs and assumptions about
normativity or acceptability of others, adolescents’ own social identity (the peer
group they belong to), and age. To discuss the ways in which these factors
impact adolescents’ reasoning, I draw on data from two different studies that
investigated how adolescents reason about peer group exclusion based on peer
group membership (Horn, 2003) and gender expression and sexual orientation
(Horn & Nucci, 2002, 2003).
118 HORN
Group Description
Cheerleaders Involved in cheerleading and danceline, part of the peer culture, accepted
by teachers, participate in a moderate amount of delinquent activity
(drinking). Female
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.
Druggies Engage in heavy amounts of delinquent activity (drinking, heavy drug use,
trouble at school), disengaged from school and teachers, as well as peers,
tough. Mixed gender but more male.
6. ADOLESCENTS’ PEER INTERACTIONS 119
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.
Preppies Extremely involved in school activities such as sports and student council,
part of the popular peer culture, liked by teachers, do well in school,
wealthy, participate in moderate amounts of delinquent behavior
(drinking). Male and female.
These results suggest that adolescents’ normative beliefs about their peers are
influenced by individuals’ personal expressions or identities regarding social
reference group, gender expression, and sexual orientation. Further, adolescents
who were the most visibly nonconforming in their identity expressions (those
labeled as dirties or gothics or those with nonconforming gender appearance)
were seen as least acceptable overall, suggesting that personal expression in
terms of appearance is a salient normative dimension along which adolescents
evaluate each other. Although this evidence suggests that adolescents do judge
their peers based on their identity expressions, is it the case that these judgments
impact adolescents’ evaluations and reasoning regarding the treatment of others?
Male, straight, activity Todd is a straight male high school student. He is a member of
nonconforming the local ballet company. He is a B student. He dresses and acts
like most of the other guys at school.
Male, gay, activity Matt is a gay male high school student. He is a member of the
nonconforming local 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
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, straight, Talia is a straight female high school student. She is a running
activity back on the high school football team. She is a B student. She
nonconforming dresses 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
activity the school football team. She is a B student. She dresses and acts
nonconforming like most of the other girls at school.
virtually all of them provided moral reasons (fairness to others, human welfare,
human equality) for why this was wrong.
For scenarios in which physical harm to the other was not an issue
(exclusion) , however, adolescents were more likely to endorse the exclusion of
those that were nonnormative (rated as less acceptable) as acceptable. That is,
adolescents evaluated exclusion as less wrong if the target was gay or lesbian or
gender nonconforming in appearance. Additionally, for the exclusion scenarios,
adolescents utilized personal choice reasoning (they can do whatever they want)
in justifying their judgments much more than in the stories regarding teasing,
harassing, or assault. Further, for the exclusion stories, adolescents were more
likely to utilize social norms reasoning (adhering to or negating norms) in
relation to gender expression related to appearance. That is to say, adolescents
were sensitive to social norms regarding gender appearance in justifying their
judgments regarding issues of exclusion. For those adolescents who were
nonconforming in their gender expression, participants were more likely to
endorse exclusion as acceptable because the individual did not adhere to social
norms regarding gender. Interestingly, this was not the case for activity,
suggesting that gender norms regarding appearance may be more rigid in
adolescence than social norms regarding the types of activities in which one can
participate. Thus, based on these results, it seems that adolescents do use moral
reasoning when evaluating issues of how others are treated. It also seems to be
the case, however, that when it comes to peer interaction (who one hangs around
with), adolescents’ reasoning about what is right or wrong is related to how they
coordinate their understanding of social norms regarding gender with their
understanding of identity issues related to gender expression.
SOCIAL IDENTITY
From our study on adolescents’ reasoning about exclusion based on peer group
membership, we also have evidence that those adolescents who identify with
groups that hold a privileged or accepted position within the peer group structure
are more likely to view their own identity expressions as normative and less
likely to view the identity expressions of adolescents in less accepted groups as
normative. These beliefs about normativity, then, seem to impact their
evaluations and reasoning about peer interactions within school. When one’s
identity expression conflicts with the social norms of the group, exclusion is
more likely to be seen as legitimate (based on conventional reasons) than when
one’s identity expression conforms to the social norms of the group. Further,
adolescents who adopt “normative” identity expressions are more likely to view
peer group exclusion as a legitimate form of social regulation rather than as a
moral issue. That is, as adolescents negotiate their identities within the peer
social milieu, exclusion serves a regulatory function in which those with power
122 HORN
and status based on their own identity expressions maintain their privileged
position by denying those with alternative identity expressions access to their
group.
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 negotiating
and coordinating personal, conventional, and moral considerations in their peer
interactions. As adolescents are trying on and testing out different identity
6. ADOLESCENTS’ PEER INTERACTIONS 123
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
investment in the peer social system will be more likely to view exclusion as
legitimate. For example, adolescents who identify with a peer group that
benefits from the system (through status) are more likely to view the exclusion
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 system 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 negative 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. At the extremes, either of these
options can lead to violence and harm directed toward the self or others. For
some adolescents, the only way to resolve 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.
them to begin to understand who they are, what they want to be, and how they
fit within the larger social world (Pugh & Hart, 1999). Thus, there is a
component to adolescent peer conflict that is developmentally necessary and
appropriate when this conflict occurs between individuals of equal status and
within an environment that is generally supportive. It is often the case, however,
that adolescents’ peer interactions are also fraught with power imbalances in that
certain types of identity expressions afford individuals more power and privilege
within the peer system than others. In some cases, then, peer conflict, rather than
being developmentally appropriate or healthy, serves to perpetuate a system that
is unfair and often harmful.
Thus, one of the goals of moral education should be to help adolescents
coordinate their understanding of the social system (and the norms and values
associated with it) with their understanding of moral principles such as fairness,
individual rights, and human welfare. One way to do this is by asking
adolescents to analyze social systems and social practices that unfairly
advantage one group or type of person over another. For example, having
students systematically investigate issues such as segregation and affirmative
action will push adolescents to think about and try to coordinate issues of access,
privilege, and individual merit. Another way to do this would be to have
adolescents analyze the norms and values inherent in popular culture and how
these norms and values support or constrain the types of identity expressions
available to individuals.
A second goal of moral education should be to ensure that schools are places
in which healthy conflict, resistance, and opposition are fostered and in which
adolescents are supported in negotiating the personal, social, and moral
dimensions of their interactions with their peers. This can be done at the
classroom or school level by creating an atmosphere in which multiple identity
expressions and a diversity of views and opinions are encouraged, valued, and
supported. For example, schools that value excellence in multiple domains (arts,
sciences, athletics, leadership) create an environment in 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. Additionally, 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 adolescents to
interact with a diversity of people within their school and community
environment. Simple exposure to diverse groups, however, is not enough
(Allport, 1954). These interactions should involve diverse adolescents working
6. ADOLESCENTS’ PEER INTERACTIONS 125
CONCLUSION
Adolescents’ peer groups are complex and negotiating relationships within the
peer system involves personal, social, and moral dimensions. During
adolescence, individuals are not only developing a broader understanding of
social systems, including the peer system; they are also constructing a sense of
who they are and who they want to be within this system. This can lead to
conflict for some adolescents or between some groups of adolescents. Although
some of this conflict may be helpful and developmentally appropriate, in
negotiating these conflicts adolescents will often make decisions about how to
treat others that are unfair or harmful. The goal of moral education, then, should
be to help adolescents better negotiate conflicts between issues of personal
expression and social norms so that they understand the impact that these factors
have on the decisions they make about others.
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6. ADOLESCENTS’ PEER INTERACTIONS 127
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 professionals,
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 finally understood
where the line was. I’d been pulled over lots of times before, 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
all—they’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-tive insight,
to the will not to violate the trust of others, and the commitment 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 indignation 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.
129
130 OSER
Negative knowledge is functional in the sense that without it one cannot have a
firm grasp of any subject. Negative knowledge, knowledge of what a thing is
not, is inherent in understanding its parameters (i.e., what it is). Moreover,
negative knowledge also protects, supports, or preshapes positive knowledge.
The function of negative knowledge as a protective force can best be illustrated
in a nonmoral setting. An example that I like to refer to is that of the airplane
pilot (see Oser & Veugelers, 2003). A pilot knows many rules about how to fly
correctly, because he or she must be able to make the airplane take off, fly, and
land in complete safety. This system of rules that describes what the pilot must
do is supplemented by a whole range of rules about what he or she must not do.
7. NEGATIVE MORALITY AND THE GOALS OF MORAL EDUCATION 131
However, these latter rules do not actually form part of the pilot’s competence;
rather they are simply rules about what not to do. Negative knowledge arises
through the mistakes the pilot makes in the simulator and the things he or she
does that he or she should not do. The simulator reacts quickly, the plane goes
into a spin, the pilot loses control, and the plane crashes. This experience
prevents the pilot from doing things, or failing to do things, that he or she must
not do, or must not fail to do. It is therefore a knowledge of errors that prevents
the pilot from failing to do the right thing or from doing the wrong thing. This
knowledge of errors is the pilot’s most important “knowledge.” It is episodic
and unstructured, but enormously effective. The knowledge of errors prevents
the pilot from doing things, or failing to do things, that lead to spinning out of
control, losing height too quickly, or indeed, to crashing.
Another function of negative knowledge is concerned with the process of
limiting something. To say that something is steep we must know when the flat
stops being flat and begins to ascend. This identifying marker is especially
important for concepts and strategies. We must, for instance, know when a
democracy can no longer be called a democracy because it becomes a
dictatorship. We must know, for instance, that interactive mental strategies are
not effective in a final exam because in an exam, individual competence—not
interactive competence—is assessed. One criticism that might be raised is that
the term knowledge is cold, external, objective, and trivial. However, from a
constructivist point of view, the term knowledge refers to more than formally
acquired information. In the cognitive psychological sense, what is meant by
knowledge is a processed, declarative, or strategically empirical knowledge. It is
knowledge that has become comprehension. Comprehension means that
knowledge is use-oriented. Comprehension is also an ordering schema within an
experienced context (Hörmann, 1982). Individual components are inserted into
the ready-made overall structure. “Comprehension is therefore a one-way street
which follows a natural gradient, from the individual to the all-embracing, from
the specific to the general, from the dread of the new to the brilliance of order”
(Hörmann, 1982, p. 22). Negative knowledge can be developed the same way,
whether it is declarative, procedural, strategic, or conceptual. With respect to
declarative negative knowledge, a person must experience cold to understand
hot, that which is bad to understand good; and that which is immoral to
understand what is moral. Declarative negative knowledge presupposes
knowledge about the opposite state of any object. With respect to procedural
knowledge, we must know what not to do. For instance, in working with a
computerized production engine, we must know which buttons not to press to
avoid stopping production. These examples illustrate the role of negative
knowledge in understanding and competently communicating negative
knowledge in a complex professional, social, and moral world.
The best way—but not the only way—to construct negative knowledge is by
making mistakes: by making one’s own mistakes or by being aware of the
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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 become
moral persons has been attributed to Janusz Korczak, the great Polish pedagogue
and physician (Oser & Veugelers, 2003). This saying can be interpreted as
meaning that the experience of injustice enables it to be prevented, 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 upside, the positive and the
negative, and to do this not merely as the awareness 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 noncompliance
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 the misery
created by failure. In other words, it is important that a person knows what he or
she has to do (positively and negatively) and what noncompliance means in the
extreme case. The rule “Thou shall not kill,” to be understood, requires that
there is knowledge of the kind of suffering, fears, and flagrant injustice that
murder and manslaughter involve. Being aware of the situation in which the rule
is broken, the negative knowledge, is what makes the rule valid in the first place
because it fills an empty abstract rule with rich, real, concrete content that can be
connected with one’s real life. This is what we describe as negative moral
knowledge. Why do children love books like Shock-Headed Peter, Pinocchio,
and Where the Wild Things Are, which are scandalous from a pedagogical
viewpoint? Presumably because negative moral knowledge is clearly and
134 OSER
unambiguously depicted as such. The rule is always shown in its opposite form,
in its violation. Every child therefore learns instinctively that the world operates
more smoothly when rules are obeyed, but what is actually exciting exists in the
incredibly painful consequences of not obeying the rules. Negative moral
knowledge is not, as the negative theology of Maimonides calculated, that man
can only say what God is not. It is rather the other side of a necessary or
nonnecessary obligation, a phenomenon that has until now scarcely been
investigated. It is the secret content with which people give substance to their
standards from the reverse side.
This was precisely what Kohlberg (1981, 1984) did not demand from his
experimental participants, or he only obtained it indirectly through his
interviews. It is true that he asked why Heinz should or should not commit
burglary to get the medicine that would save his wife’s life. However, persons
from a specific stage (e.g., stage 4) could have quite varied existential
background knowledge of what will cause the extent and intensity of the always
anticipated harm caused by noncompliance with any of these rules.
Noncompliance with a rule, however, is a necessary form for moral
epistemology. Morality grows through the experience of moral negativity and
through the emotions related to it. People who experience or suffer the utter
horror of violating a positive or negative rule are prevented from violating this
rule. People who are aware of the horror of the consequences of the absence of a
rule forbidding a particular action fight for creating such a law. (The military
saw no difficulty with laying land and sea mines only as long as the civilian
population knew nothing about it and was not directly affected. People who
have seen and experienced the misery of children who have stepped on such
mines have the protective knowledge that gives them the impetus to call for
these mines to be banned.) Negative knowledge thus “protects” compliance with
rules, even under conditions of conflict, stress, and situational pressure, whereas
the absence of such knowledge weakens rules, rendering them meaningless in
terms of understanding the rules’ functions. In this case the center does not hold;
public and private injustice increases; and the forces of overweening ambition,
lust for power and possessions, and so on, are let loose.
The individual acquires a set of negative knowledge components through his
or her experiences and these support his or her positive knowledge. Individuality
is characterized by episodic moral knowledge that has been gained through
making mistakes or having negative experiences. This becomes the prima facie
justification for compliance with a moral rule, namely the misery and sense of
revulsion that are imagined when one considers its violation. Episodic negative
knowledge is the hidden content of our moral reactions. For Freud, for whom
the superego is the wall that rejects or restrains certain desires, this negative
knowledge is not subject to nearly enough control by the ego, the person. It is
quasi-uncontrollable by the person himself or herself because it is processed
externally through the fear of loss of love. Freud did not see that empathy is just
7. NEGATIVE MORALITY AND THE GOALS OF MORAL EDUCATION 135
lead to rules and moral regulations. If we apply this idea to the educational and
developmental field in general, it could mean that progress in moral education
develops through the growth of negative moral feelings, through storytelling
with negative moral content followed by a positive outcome and possibilities to
put oneself in the shoes of others in the sense that they feel miserable and
negatively treated by life. In simple terms, reading Les Misérables from Victor
Hugo or Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart would be more effective in
facilitating perspective taking than rationally solving positive moral problems
(cf. Selman, 2003). Moral progress thus is not primarily more moral knowledge
or not simply a higher moral stage or not only a better judgment-action
relatedness. It is also a better protection from one’s own moral mistakes through
the concept of negative morality and its situatedness. Situatedness means that
with the created moral norm, the situation in which the negative experience
occurred is also remembered and produces a kind of moral warning, an immune
system against immoral behavior.
It is also crucially important to understand that we cannot stimulate pupils to
achieve a higher level of moral judgment (one form of rational progress) simply
by imparting knowledge, or by using teaching methods based on practical
experience and problem solving, or by treating personal experiences in a
creative and artistic manner, or by the teaching of strategies designed to improve
memory, and so forth. All these methods are important for general teaching, but
they will not lead to any accommodative transformation of cognitive moral
patterns, nor is it possible to succeed in achieving a higher level in a short space
of time. It is imperative, moreover, to be aware that transformations such as
these can be brought about only against the background of a development theory
and a transformational grammar appropriate to it, involving a constant process
of critical arguments and nega-tive events. Some knowledge about the
transformation of cognitive moral judgment is therefore required if others are to
be successfully stimulated to achieve a higher level, and it must also be
recognized that human beings are perennially disinclined to take steps to
transform and improve their patterns of behavior (to make progress). Negative
knowledge of equal complexity but different in nature is required for the task of
creating shared norms, or when a competency to act is aimed for. I return to
these points later.
The foregoing also suggests that moral education in situated contexts is a
complex and multidirectional phenomenon, that it can provoke a network of
suggestions for action, that norms play a role, that justifications are required,
and that negative moral acts from others are a basic raw material from which to
construct moral meaning. If however, as is often pronounced, a single method is
promoted as the only correct one, or if teachers subscribe to a single method
(e.g., the character education approach, or development-oriented education), this
will inevitably lead to false causal assumptions concerning the antecedents and
consequences of that moral education in question. When Leming (1997) asserted
138 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 interior of Romanesque
and especially Gothic churches consisting usually of triple-arched windows
running under the roof space of the transept and nave.
Despite all the problems of borrowing analogies, the concept of a triforial
structure can readily be transferred to the realm of moral education, where the
tripartite arched positions signify the three core elements, the structure they
support, and the general formation to which the three core elements lead (cf.
Klafki, 1991). Why do we speak of this threefold or triforial moral education
and its accompanying threefold pedagogic practice (in which the figure of three
is used to describe the mere minimum of the many links that are always present
in educational modes of action)? I should like to formulate the problem in a
negative triforial manner as well:
1. Moral education is more than training to weigh and balance
adversarial positions. Although such experiences in critical reasoning
stimulate moral judgment, they do nothing more. The moral judgment is
merely a precondition for moral action.
2. On the other hand, one can also say that education designed to foster
character and inculcate values simply represents an attempt to influence
pupils through persuasion, and as such it often remains blind and
7. NEGATIVE MORALITY AND THE GOALS OF MORAL EDUCATION 139
A core feature of our triforial theory is its connection to the work of Kohlberg
and subsequent cognitive-developmental theory. Before discussing work in
which we have applied our theory, I need to take a moment to discuss how our
approach builds from and differs from the classical Kohlberg model. When
Kohlberg (1958) introduced his theory he was responding to views of moral
growth based on nonrational processes of internalization and socialization. In
place of these earlier accounts, Kohlberg built from Piaget (1932) in an attempt
to develop a detailed genetic epistemological structure of morality. His work
resulted in the now widely known six-stage approach to moral development, a
theory that he himself improved at least three times. Kohlberg’s approach,
together with its assumed ideals of optimal conditions for potential decision
making and moral action, has a well-known attraction. His theory, however,
misses the negative counterpart to the forms of justification described by each of
his stages, and fails to describe the importance of negative experience in
understanding morality as a human necessity. This is especially relevant for
efforts to put into play Kohlberg’s catch-phrase “development as the aim of
education,” Kohlberg’s promotion of this interpretation of progressive education
has played a considerable role both in educational research and in the specifics
of practical intervention (Kohlberg, 1981,1984). In this view, education means
stimulation of development toward the next higher moral stage.
There have been numerous criticisms aimed at Kohlberg’s theory. These
include the criticisms that the theory overemphasizes on justice (see Gilligan,
1982), that the lower stages are less egocentric than Kohlberg had assumed
(Keller, 1996), and that Kohlberg’s stage descriptions include as a single
structure aspects of social cognition that comprise distinct domains of social
convention, morality, and personal discretion (Nucci, 1981, 1996, 2001;
Shweder, Mahapatra, & Millet; 1987; Turiel, 1983, 1998). Finally, the nature of
the higher stages as described by Kohlberg has been called into question
(Reichenbach, 1998; for earlier criticism, e.g., on measurement problems, see
Oser, 1981). The most important shortcomings of the Kohlberg theory, however,
from our point of view are concerns regarding (a) the lack of an integration
between abstract structures of judgment and the specifics of content and
knowledge to be applied in specific contexts, and (b) the lack of an adequate
account of the relations between judgment and action, and (c) the lack of
integration between moral structures and specific moral experiences and
emotions. These are all central concerns of our triforial model. In Kohlberg’s
defense, I must add the following points.
1. Much of this critical debate ignores the fact that Kohlberg conceived
of his developmental theory as a theory of competence. In describing
142 OSER
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 themselves would provide
opportunities for moral learning and the construction of a value system. This is
an approach to moral education, a concept that relies on the participation of
everyone. In Just Community meetings (a central feature of Just Community
Schools) all students and teachers of the school come together to discuss
controversial issues and to decide what to do (Higgins, 1989; Oser & Althof,
2001; Power, 1979). In one such meeting, I observed the creation of a
foundation to be sponsored by all members of the school community for
students who became victims of thefts. The most important part of this event
was the reconstruction before the entire community of the theft situations that
prompted the subsequent collective moral response. In this case, one student
related that he had returned from a break and discovered that his expensive pen
was gone. Another student told how he had gone to the bathroom and had his
jacket disappear. As students reconstructed their cases, they told of their shock,
outrage, and indignation; expressed their disappointments; and proposed
suggestions about what to do and how to punish the violators if someone were to
be caught. They also expressed sympathy for others who had been harmed. In
my view, this process was a rebirth of the evil these students had experienced in
that it released all of the contained moral emotions attached to experience of the
violation. The negative was brought to light, step by step, and everyone agreed
that one could only overcome and transform moral indignation if we first
reconstruct it. In this case, we see an instance where evil became the means for
the good. The negative urged the movement toward the positive. Moral mistakes
thus served at least three functions: (a) It demonstrated the font of moral rules;
(b) it helped confront the necessity to treat moral issues; and (c) it developed—
especially because of emotional and empathic reactions that were reconstructed
and remembered—a protective fence against recidivism.
This whole process illustrated in this example can be produced only through
a comprehensive transformation of the school as a place for discovering the bad
to overcome it. The core of this process is the forum, in which contentious
144 OSER
questions are clarified and proposals for change put to vote, and where every act
of voting always implies an important setting of standards within the system of a
particular school. The structural features of the Just Community allow for the
incorporation of the “bad” as an aspect of the formation of social and moral
sensitivity in the individual and the group in a fashion that is considerably
superior to most school-based methods of generating moral growth. This is
because the context of the Just Community supports the following.
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-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
developmentally based moral education, which is to increase students’
levels 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
discussions 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 necessary 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 stimulation
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
experienced 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 entails
emotional involvement. This emotional component reduces the prospect
that the moral discourse will remain at a surface level. Accepted self-
7. NEGATIVE MORALITY AND THE GOALS OF MORAL EDUCATION 145
I have abstracted these aspects of the Just Community process into what I refer
to as realistic discourse. I constructed this approach (Oser, 1999) in the spirit of
the situated learning movement. My goal was to build from that aspect of the
Just Community that employs lived student conflicts to construct a process of
social decision making that would stem from the everyday occurrences of school
life. This more generalized approach does not require the commitment of an
entire school. It can hold for any social subset, such as a classroom, in which the
decisions of members are binding on the participants in the discourse. The
process employs selection of an actual conflict as the focus of discourse. The
teacher serves to ensure that everyone involved in the discourse has the
opportunity to speak and to participate in the process of problem solving and
146 OSER
and restore what had been lost to the community—and to the relationship
between the individual students who had been involved in the incident. The
point here is that the negative was not taken as an abstract case. Instead, students
and staff were all able to experience and share times when they themselves were
“dissed” (disrespected), how it felt, and what they would have wanted in terms
of a just resolution. They could also talk about the impact of racial disrespect,
and its contrary—respect, tolerance, fairness, and caring—in a multicultural
community.
In the cases we have discussed thus far, we have focused on situations in which
power relationships within the community are made relatively equal. Knowledge
of morally negative experiences, in interactive relationships that are not
symmetrical, educational, or productive, represents a special problem in
antagonistic situations. Children who are inwardly bruised and remain silent and
people who suffer injustice and say nothing too often become the subject of
decisions by superiors that are made without the suffering being properly treated
and worked through. On the other hand, superiors (e.g., teachers or section
heads) sometimes confront situations that they themselves cannot resolve
without producing further harm or more examples of injustice. An example is
the case of an employee who has been granted flexible working hours but who
shamelessly exploits the arrangement.
We have questioned professional people about such situations, and have
ascertained that in cases such as these three moral dimensions are in opposition
to each other, namely justice, respect for others’ feelings, and truthfulness. A
pupil who is making every effort but whose attainments are still poor can be
treated kindly; but perhaps an unjust decision is made, or we are less than
truthful and give the pupil the idea that his or her work is good, and vice versa.
Antagonistic situations arise primarily in professions with a high degree of
independence. A lawyer must decide whether he or she will act for someone
about whom he or she has negative information. A dentist is in a position to
reveal the shoddy work done by a colleague, but perhaps refrains from doing so.
We raised a number of such situations, standardized them, and presented
them to professionals. In the process, we discovered a range of decision types,
namely (a) evasion, which refused to take issue with the situation at all; (b)
delegation, which involved passing the problem up the line to higher authority;
(c) unilateral snap decisions, which could bring about greater harm or injustice
for people; and (d) incomplete and complete realistic discourse. As discussed in
greater detail next, the realistic discourses resulted in the most effective and
ethically defensible resolutions. These discourses amounted to roundtable
procedures in which negative knowledge is revealed and thus properly
experienced. Roundtable discussions in professional contexts are not ideal
148 OSER
places of negotiation, any more than they are in children’s classrooms. In both
settings they are partly irrational, emotionfraught processes seeking the right
way to respond to the situation.
The realistic roundtable, however, requires that certain important
preconditions be observed. First, there is the element of gentle constraint that
must be exercised to bring all those affected, even against their will, to the table;
a constraint-free search for a solution is rarely possible. Further, there must be
some guarantee that controversy will prevail; this is brought about by the
chairperson himself or herself playing an active part in making sure 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 solution 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 example, 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 atmosphere,
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
communicated. Suddenly a person can notice that his or her remark has deeply
hurt or insulted another person. The roundtable thus does not merely produce a
rationalizing of rules and standards; it also succeeds in bringing negative 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 standards 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 positions—a level of moral development
considerably below that of the assumptions generally maintained for moral
competence in a Habermas (1991) ethical discourse. Identical 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 discourse offers a practical step
toward bringing the process of moral education into contact with an individual’s
7. NEGATIVE MORALITY AND THE GOALS OF MORAL EDUCATION 149
lived experiences. A critical element of such discourse is that it make use of the
morally negative as a starting point for constructing 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-ments
may be either exaggerated, politically motivated, or reflect a lack of awareness
of the degree to which youthful rebellion might signal moral shortcomings in the
positions of adult society. In my view, an overlooked aspect of these issues is to
understand the role of the morally negative in allowing for positive moral
growth. It would come as no surprise to hear math educators speak of the
importance of error in the development of mathematical competence. Why then
should it come as a surprise that an essential component of moral growth is
direct experience with moral error? In saying this, I am not dismissing the very
real problem of youth who engage in criminal or self-destructive conduct. In
such cases, we would need to explore what it is in the history of such youth that
has resulted in their willingness to engage in such a morally negative way of
being. (My colleague, Wolfgang Edelstein, has provided an analysis of such a
youth crisis in his chapter in this volume.) My focus instead is on the role of the
negative in allowing for the construction of morality among youth in general.
We can see the beginning of an empirical approach to the role of negative
moral experience for the construction of moral understanding in Turiel’s (1983)
quasi-naturalistic work, Turiel assumed that insight into the wrongness of a
moral violation is not provided through the emergence of logic or through
socialization, but that it arises from the perception of the consequences of one’s
own or other persons’ right or wrong actions (cf. Keller, 1996). “The experience
of physical harm or harm to someone’s interests is, according to his view,
directly apprehended by the child and is understood within a process of
observation via the proxy of empathetic reconstruction” (Keller, 1996, p 74).
This then, is how knowledge of how to act morally and do the right thing
originates. It is derived from these experiences. It is not an act of pedagogical
intervention or a socialized system of rules that creates this possibility, but
negative knowledge (a term not used by Turiel), The knowledge is thus gained
from experience as a process of abstraction that creates a moral perspective. A
kind of empathetic reconstruction is at work generalizing judgments along the
lines of “one shouldn’t do that…one must not do that… I wouldn’t do that.”
It would be incorrect to conclude that these experiences of young children
account for the entire phenomenon of moral cognition, moral sensitivity, and
moral action. However, one can see in these early experiences a set of parallels
to the range of phenomena that form the basis of our individual and collective
150 OSER
encounters with moral outrage that philosophers have speculated as the basis for
our universal efforts to generate shared moral positions. Here we begin to see
not only an account of the origins of moral knowledge, but also of moral action
(cf. Garz et al., 1999, Oser & Althof, 1992, 1993), Without the experience of
suffering, suffering cannot be imagined. Without having the negative experience
of victimization, as well as the consequences of being a victimizer, morality
exists as an abstraction. Through develop-ment, as we coordinate our own
suffering with that of others, we establish mutual constraints on our social
conduct. This constraint is not that of prisoners constrained by fear, but of
cooperative members of a mutual community of trust. The predictability of
moral action is connected with the sense of trust, which people show to one
another. Trust implies the assumption deriving from experience that the other
person will behave in a rationally predictable and fair manner. The prediction of
this trust, however, is not just a hypothetical option; in the daily course of
events, for example, when two people pass each other in the street without doing
anything to each other, causing any harm or performing an act of exploitation,
we are witnessing security and control. This control stems from the rational
rejection of such actions guaranteed through negative knowledge.
As we look at the indiscretions of youth, a part of what we see is an effort to
experiment anew with the limitations of negative morality. How far can one go
in a negative direction before the consequences are beyond what is acceptable to
the self and others? As we look at our efforts at education, we need to ask how
we make use of the negative. If we simply endeavor to suppress, repress, or
otherwise cover up the negative, then how can we hope to contribute to the
construction of deep-seated moral convictions that can only arise from genuine
encounters with the emotions and meanings that are requisite for the
construction of morality? How do we go beyond the superficial analysis of
moral issues raised in the curriculum to get at the real problems being addressed
in the lives of our students? This is a large and difficult question, but one that
education and developmental research needs to address.
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Hö]rmann, H. (1982). Meinen und Verstehen: Grundzüge einer psychologischen
Semantik. Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp.
Keller, M. (1996). Moralische Sensibilität: 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]. Würzburg,
Germany: Ergon Online Verlag.
Kohlberg, L. (1958). The development of modes of thinking and choices in years 10 to 16.
Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago.
Kohlberg, L. (1981). Essays on moral development: Vol. 1. The philosophy of moral
development. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
Kohlberg, L. (1984). Essays on moral development: Vol. 2. The psychology of moral
development: 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 practice].
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Grundlagen der Moralerziehung (pp. 21–55). Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp.
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(pp. 373–493). Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp.
152 OSER
Rorty, R. (2003). Wahrheit und Fortschritt [Truth and progress]. Frankfurt, Germany:
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Selman, R.L. (2003). The promotion of social awareness: Powerful lessons from the
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Philipp Reclam.
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Part III
Moral Education When
Social Injustice and Youth
Resistance Converge to
Produce Negative
Outcomes
8
The Rise of Right-Wing Extremist
Youth Culture in Postunification
Germany
Wolfgang Edelstein
Max Planck Institute for Human Development
In the long decade that has passed since the unification of the two Germanics, a
new extremism has emerged in German youth, specifically in eastern Germany.
The main components of this right-wing extremism are xenophobia and
nationalism; anti-Semitism; and ideological commitment to authoritarianism,
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 IE A 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 Israeli-Arab 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 provinces, with less
than 20% of the German population living there (see 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 remarks merely to
situate the problem and to demonstrate its importance. Although this is and
remains a German problem of great political and psychological relevance, one
might look at it more as a general youth problem emerging in Germany under
specific conditions in a specific form. In effect, I argue that what is taken to
157
158 EDELSTEIN
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 brutality and violence, the symbolic presentations
of the self, the cultural manifestations, 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 economic,
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. Adolescents who wind
up unsuccessful in jobs and who end failure prone in apprenticeships following
unsuccessful school careers may respond to the humiliation involved with a
violent ideological or socially rebellious reaction 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 recently have been the more or less unanimously
accepted basis of social action in the Federal Republic, where a historical
process of social learning after World War II has brought about political
consensus concerning universal 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 convictions or
justify their stance. Compassion with the underdog or a position of solidarity
with an emerging underclass does not justify their behaviors or their ideologies.
(Similarly, understanding the Palestinian intifada does neither justify terroristic
acts nor the anti-Semitism of Palestinian fighters.) However, we need to ask
questions about the origins of these developments, and, while opposing the
actors, we need to view them as victims of their economic, social, and
psychological condition. Paraphrasing the title of one of Anna Seghers’s stories,
the question is this: How does a man become a Nazi (Seghers, 1977)? Who
becomes a Nazi? What kind of person is receptive to Nazi values? What are the
conditions and contexts that turn people into Nazis? Finally, are there ways and
means to counteract such developments? These concrete historical questions
then must be translated into the corresponding general code to understand the
general predicament of youth that is involved in the process.
8. EXTREMIST YOUTH CULTURE IN POSTUNIFICATION GERMANY 159
At first I propose to outline the model guiding the following description. On the
macro level, social structural changes produce contexts of psychological
experience that interact with developmental vulnerabilities of adolescents in
quest of identity. Given specific contingencies of the actual social context,
vulnerable adolescents will tend to develop dispositions toward extremist
orientations. Of the elements in the macro system that occupy the position of
“independent factors” in the analysis, the two important ones are anomie and
individualistic modernization, Anomie and individualistic modernization
represent psychosocial consequences of “long processes” of social
transformation. Mediating between the effects of long processes at the macro
level and the micro level of individual development are meso or family
processes that play a decisive role in the socialization of the children.
Researchers have shown that in Germany dismissive attachment patterns in
families with authoritarian rearing styles have played a distinctive role in the
socialization of right-wing extremists (Hopf, Silzer, & Wernich, 1999). When
these effects emerged in a cohort that for contingent reasons happened to harbor
special vulnerabilities, dismissive attachment patterns added to the saliency of
other developmental vulnerabilities. Cohort effects eventually trigger the
emergence of new orientations in youth, and therefore call for a detailed analysis
of their effects on individual and social development. Elder’s (1974) description
of the Children of the Great Depression is one model of this type of analysis. In
Germany an analogous study, Children of the Unification Process, would be
needed. We can assume that functionally equivalent analogs of the German
unification cohort exist in other regions of the world, from Palestine to Pakistan,
that experience corresponding forms of trouble.
Let us now turn to the systemic factors on the macro level. At the end of the
19th century, Durkheim introduced the notion of anomie to describe the
sociomoral consequences of the breakdown of traditional society with its stable
social formations, rules, and value systems (Durkheim, 1968). The breakdown
marks the transition to modern society, characterized by the industrial division
of labor. Whereas traditional society had been organized through
intergenerationally stable rules of “mechanical solidarity” with littie room for
individual variation and individual influence on the social order, and whereas
traditional loyalties and duties persisted against the onslaught of individual
needs, goals, and desires, the latter became the regulatory forces in the system of
competitive market capitalism that succeeded the traditional world of personal
bonds, inherited skills, and natural exchange. In the wake of that transition,
individual performance and the rational individual’s judgment had to provide a
substitute for tradition to guide action. Durkheim named organic solidarity the
principled, discursive, and universalist cognitive morality that replaced tradition
162 EDELSTEIN
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
individual 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. Reciprocal
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 dissolution of
protective institutions) and intensified competition subject individuals 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 critically identified as
“the lure of fun society.” The alternative lure is the temp-tation of simplistic,
sometimes violent worldviews that are corroborated in alliances of the like-
minded.
To sum up the macro part of the analysis, the detraditionalization of society
generates anomie and its individual correlates—loss of orientation,
hopelessness, and depression. The correlative processes of the modernization of
institutions and the individualization of goals and motives impose the loss of
institutional supports on the losers of the long processes of social and
psychological transformation. In the West, these processes have typically been
viewed as representing the social dynamic of industrial capitalism. There are,
however, strong cues for similar processes of detraditionalization and
individualization worldwide, which, in conjunction with demographic change,
urbanization, migration, and neoliberal globalization, produce strong effects on
the growing masses of young people affected, sometimes activated and
sometimes demoralized, by the relative deprivation unfolding in the wake of
these processes.
164 EDELSTEIN
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 situational
contingencies determine the lifestyles, living conditions, consumption 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 background of neo-Nazi group
culture is obviously needed, but this would exceed 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 program of prevention and moral education for these
groups must respond to the experience they are exposed to. The following three
situational factors appear influential:
Group Life and Group Cohesion. The lives of right-wing extremists,
skinheads, and their fellow travelers are organized in highly cohesive groups
that cultivate a common lifestyle, mostly attached to local gathering places such
as specific pubs. Right-wing music—a very important force—beer drinking, and
expressive aggression are important beyond the occasional but forever latent
violence directed at outsiders and the defined objects of their instinctive and
ideological hostility. Life in groups (as well as the drinking) makes it more easy
to defuse the moral responsibility of the individual and serves to enforce and
maintain the ideological belief system of inequality, racism, and xenophobia,
and a system of authoritarian group leadership. The addictive rock music of the
right-wing scene, combining brutal text and beat, appears to serve an
emotionally effective function of arousing the group to violent action—an
effective strategy for moral desensibilization,
School Experience. As mentioned before, a common element of rightwing
adolescents’ careers is a negative and disappointing school experience. Right-
wingers most often come from the lower tracks of the selective German school
166 EDELSTEIN
The intention pursued with this chapter was the presentation and
classification of a rather specific German phenomenon: the rise, among young
people between, say, 14 and 24 years old, of a right-wing, extremist,
xenophobic, and often racist youth movement in mostly eastern and less
frequently western Germany. The topic was a mostly local challenge—how to
understand the local conditions and find locally valid answers. Gradually,
however, the rise of the local neo-Nazi youth movement came to fit within a
wider and less local perspective, as part of a larger issue—the global issue of an
emergent crisis of youth. Although the local issue of neo-Nazi youth continues
to be interesting, relevant, and challenging politically, morally, and
educationally, and although it remains necessary to deploy locally effective
strategies to counter its onslaught, there appears something can be gained from
placing it in the wider frame of the global process described by Larson and his
coauthors.
The gain from the wider perspective may be twofold: The analysis of the
local, regional, or national phenomena will benefit from the broader ranging
theories needed to account for the worldwide process, including a more critical
attitude to the Western or American bias in research on adolescence.
Conversely, it may be helpful to ask what light the local data and findings can
shed on the larger processes. It is impossible, of course, to do empirical research
directly on the world scene, but it is possible to enrich our percep-tions of the
more local phenomena by using encompassing concepts derived from the global
analysis of worldwide processes. The new global data present a challenge to our
traditional cultural relativism.
So the question is the following: Can anything be learned from the German
case? Can the emergence of a neo-Nazi youth culture be understood as an
instance of a larger process? The tension produced by this double approach may
defy quick resolution, because it is complex and needs extensive treatment. Our
aim here is to open a window on the huge problem of disempowerment of youth
around the globe who have precious little to lose by rejecting enlightened
standards and adopting violence instead.
REFERENCES
Rychen, D.S., & Salganik, L.H. (Eds). (2001). Defining and selecting key competences.
Seattle, WA: Hogrefe & Huber.
Schine, J. (Ed.). (1997). Service learning: Yearbook of the National Society for the Study
of Education. Chicago: National Society for the Study of Education.
Seghers, A. (1977). Ein Mensch wird Nazi [A man becomes Nazi]. In Gesammelte Werke
in Einzelausgaben, Band IX Erzählungen 1926–1944 (pp. 285–298). Berlin: Aufbau
Verlag.
Seligman, M.E.P. (1975). Helplessness: On depression, development, and death. San
Francisco: Freeman.
Selman, R.L., & Adalbjarnardóttir, S. (2003). Teachers’ reflections on promoting social
competence. In R.L.Selman (Ed.), The promotion of social awareness: Powerful
lessons from the partnership of developmental theory and classroom practice (pp.
128–146). New York: Russell Sage.
Skinner, E.A. (1996). A guide to constructs of control. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, 71, 549–570.
Sturzbecher, D. (2001). Jugend in Ostdeutschland: Lebenssituation und edlinquenz
[Youth in eastern Germany: Life conditions and delinquency]. Opladen, Germany:
Leske + Budrich.
Torney-Purta, J., Lehmann, R., Oswald, H., & Schulz, W. (2001). Citizenship and
education in twenty-eight countries: Civic knowledge and engagement at age
fourteen. Amsterdam: IEA.
Weiss, R.H. (2000). Gewalt, Medien und Aggressivität bei Schülem [Violence, the media,
and aggressiveness among pupils in secondary schools]. Göttingen: Hogrefe.
9
Race and Morality: Shaping the Myth
William H.Watkins
University of Illinois at Chicago
173
174 WATKINS
Puritan Ideology
Europe, adherents found asylum in frontier New England. The Puritans called
for moral regeneration in a world they found overrun with sin and corruption.
Their definition of morality became an important building block in American
culture.
The Puritans rejected modern explanations of man, society, and duty. For
them, such matters were defined and ordained in the scriptures. God’s will was
clearly written for all to embrace. No aspect of human conduct could be left to
chance as the scriptures were seen to address every aspect of life. Whereas the
“word” was clear, the fate of individuals was not, for all would not live up to
expectations. God predestined some men for salvation and others for damnation.
Puritanism was ambiguous and filled with contradictory issues that had to be
interpreted. How could helpless men, mired in sin, save themselves to secure
God’s grace?
Middlekauff (1971) untangled some tenets of Puritan theology as it was
practiced in colonial New England. Predestination, he observed, was drawn
from the relationship of God and man. God is omnipotent, whereas man is weak
and dependent. Vaughan (1972) described fundamental covenants of God in
puritan doctrine. The first covenant was that God created Adam and gave him
free will. Adam’s fall spelled the end of man’s free will. God accommodated to
a second covenant, the “covenant of grace,” wherein a sinner could by faith and
deeds attain salvation. Bearing a sinful makeup, man must seek to be Christ-like.
The entire self must be devoted to God’s cause and lived in conformity with
strict injunctions.
Whether man lived eternally or condemned to hell was not determined by
himself but instead by God’s judgment of his deeds. Thus salvation was
attainable but not easy. A strict code of moral conduct had to be followed to be
considered for redemption.
Puritan views on morality became an integral part of the call for
independence and eventually the Revolutionary War. Luxury and extravagance
were viewed as immoral and decadent. The King of England and by association
his people were thus not only oppressive in their economic and political actions;
they were also intemperate, immodest, licentious, and extravagant. Their
immoral qualities more than justified breaking with them. Summarizing the
views of colonial insurrectionists, cultural historian Takaki (1990) wrote:
morality and race. Founding Hampton Institute (in Virginia), a teacher training
and vocational skills institute for African and Native Americans in 1868,
Armstrong was enmeshed in the ideological shaping of attitudes about race,
morality, politics, and culture in the post-Civil War period. For the next several
years he utilized the pages of the widely circulated Southern Workman, a
Hampton Institute paper, to present his views to the nation.
As a nation builder, pragmatist, and patriot Armstrong rejected regionalism in
favor of a broad political agenda. He wanted the country to move forward in
unity and prosperity. Although committed to segregation and White supremacy,
Armstrong broke with the primitive racialism of the slaveocracy. One example
of his views surfaced in opposition to the popular racist notion that people of
African descent were genetically moribund and would die off. The respected
Boston Journal wrote:
Nearly all the statistics relating to the subject, now accessible, are
those coming from the larger Southern cities, and those would
seem to leave no doubt that in such centers of population the
mortality of the colored greatly exceeds that of the white race,
(cited in Southern Workman, January, 1878, p. 4)
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:
Armstrong, the educational leader, recognized the need for a more realistic
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 segregation and
9. RACE AND MORALITY 179
He asserted that morals were the dividing characteristic between White and
Black people:
As a patriot Armstrong committed his life first and foremost to the well-be ing
of the nation. Settling citizenship, educational, and vocational issues was
important in stabilizing the Black population. Armstrong was convinced that
stabilizing the Black population was key to reconstruction and nation building.
180 WATKINS
Pastors and deacons can sell whisky and lead loose lives without
scandal; and ex-jailbird 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 him—his 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 question 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, December, 1877, p. 94)
SCIENTIFIC RACISM*
The brutal exploitation of people of color provided context for “color coding”
and classifying. Scientifically rendering dark people as inferior helped justify
and rationalize colonial plunder. If proof could demonstrate that nature rendered
Whites superior, a ready-made explanation for social hierarchy 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 supremacy.
Its virulent brand of slavery outlasted most others. Long after most European
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).
*
An earlier version of the section of Scientific Racism appears in Watkins (2001). See
references.
9. RACE AND MORALITY 183
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 elementary 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 development, (cited in Biddiss, 1970, p. 116)
184 WATKINS
He further argued that all civilizations derive from the White race, especially
the superior Aryan stock. Mankind is thus divided into races of unequal 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 descriptions of each
group.
White people were characterized by “energetic intelligence,” great physical
power, stability, inclinations to self-preservation, and a love of life and liberty.
Their great weakness, according to Gobineau, was a susceptibility to cross-
breeding. Asians were mediocre, lacked physical strength, and wished to live
undisturbed. They could never create a viable civilization. Black people, the
lowest of all, possessed energy and willpower but were unstable, unconcerned
about the preservation of life, given to absolutes, and easily enslaved.
Theoretically, Gobineau developed a notion of racial determinism. He
insisted racial determinism was objective and could be reduced to scientific law.
His racial view of history meant that race had driven all events back to the
beginning of time. Race theory was more scientific than politics, morality, or
state organization.
In The Essai (1854/1967), Gobineau wrote about race and social order. He
believed civilization defined itself in the process of war, conquest, and
migration. It was, however, these interactions that allowed miscegenation to
occur. If unchecked, miscegenation would undo civilization.
For Gobineau, advanced status and civilization, such as possessed by Aryans,
could only survive in a rigidly hierarchal order. An elite must totally dedicate
itself to the maintenance of racial and social hierarchy, and use force and
domination to maintain that social, racial, and economic organization. Society
must not be disrupted by the popular classes or lower racial groups.
Gobineau, the “racial prophet” (Biddiss, 1970), was among the first to
articulate a political sociology of race and racism forecasting social decline. His
ideology helped frame a generation of “scientism” on questions of race and
social development.
In 1735 Carolus Linnaeus, the acclaimed biological taxonomist, was among the
first (Ehrlich & Feldman, 1977; Gould, 1981; Tucker, 1994) to classify human
beings by race. He used both skin color and personal characteristics for his
typology. His essay Systema Naturae divided people into White, Black, Red,
9. RACE AND MORALITY 185
Scientific racism was reinforced and expanded when the established medical
profession entered the field. Notions of anatomical, physiological, and
psychological difference framed their inquiry.
186 WATKINS
slavery would help increase lung and blood functions according to Cartwright.
Slaves, he argued, were sometimes afflicted with “drapetomania,” a disease of
the mind making them want to run away. The prescription for drapetomania he
argued, was care and kindness, but the whip should not be spared should
kindness fail.
Dr. Edward Jarvis (1844), a specialist in mental disorders and President of
the American Statistical Association, wrote that insanity for Blacks in the North
was 10 times greater than for Blacks in the South. He concluded that slavery had
a salutary effect on Blacks, sparing them the problems that free self-acting
individuals faced.
Thus the scientific racists established a body of views that served as a
foundation to explain race for the next 150 years. Conservatives, reactionaries,
and apartheidists would draw on these themes for their partisan outlooks.
habitual paupers.” Giddings believed that this group pretended to be the victims
of misfortune but were really shirkers and loafers who leeched from the public
trough.
The final antisocial grouping had no redeeming value. They existed totally
without virtue. This was the class of criminals who carried out aggression
against the other classes. This group grew with the expanding affluence of
society, living off its surplus.
These social classes, for Giddings, were difficult to escape. They were the
products of lengthy evolutionary development; thus it was extremely difficult to
abandon one’s class moorings. An individual’s social class was manifested by
his or her “consciousness of kind” or his or her “social mind,” both of which
were allegedly indicators of one’s level of civilization.
Giddings’s writings on sociology were saturated with these classification
schemes. He believed that differences were the essential dynamic within hip
mankind. We could never understand society and its various ability and racial
groups unless we could explain difference.
Another influential racial sociologist, Edward Ross, contributed to the genetic
and moral arguments of the early 20th century. His popular book The Old World
in the New (Ross, 1914) attacked the character and physical features of
Mediterranean Europeans. He wrote of “low foreheads,” “open mouths,” “weak
chins,” “skew faces,” “knobby crania,” “servile,” “wife beaters,” “criminals,”
“alcoholics,” and “given to crimes of sex and violence.”
Like other academic racists he also embraced the argument that the darker
people were morally inferior:
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:
Ross concluded his book by insisting that Europe was keeping its solid citizens
and allowing only the deficient to immigrate to America. He wrote:
His final insult was that the southern immigrants were as repulsive as the
Negroes, in some cases more so:
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
9. RACE AND MORALITY 191
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 substantially unchanged from
generation to generation. The moral and physical character 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. 226–227)
FINAL THOUGHTS
Racism, racial stratification, inequality, and the myth of racial inferiority persist
into the 21st century. Although the language of shiftlessness, flawed character,
and intemperance no longer appear in polite public discourse they are deeply
embedded in the stereotyping of people of color.
The racial myth has gone far beyond personal attitudes and folklore. It is
inextricably connected to social engineering, international politics, labor
economics, and public policy. Although it may make us uncomfortable as
192 WATKINS
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10
Moral Competence Promotion Among
African American Children: Conceptual
Underpinnings and Programmatic
Efforts
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 develop,
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 reducing 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 delinquency. Although
eliminating risk for such problems is essential, what constitutes a well-
functioning African American child has not been clearly articulated.
Social and emotional competence entails an array of intra-and interpersonal
characteristics, which, if considered from a distinct domain perspective, reflect
aspects of personal, prudential, conventional, and moral domains of social
development (Turiel, 1983). This chapter highlights elements of our work
deemed germane to children’s moral competence development. Moral
competence refers to the ability to assess and respond to ethical, affective, or
social justice dimensions of a situation (Catalano et al., 1999). This is
particularly important to us in light of the persistence and intensity of
community violence and its implications for the moral development of children
and youth. We understand this violence to be intrapsychic, interpersonal, and
structural in nature (Jagers, Mattis, & Walker, 2003; Sparks, 1994; Ward, 1988,
1995).
194
10. MORAL COMPETENCE PROMOTION 195
Although it is clear that African Americans have been coerced and have
experienced benign neglect, it is debatable whether a paternalistic power has
ever had the true interests of African Americans in mind. By extension, pure
moral authority has seldom been evident. In a moral social order, authority is
derived from the recognized ability to promote the growth and development of
others.
As Watts et al. (2003) suggested, liberation requires challenging gross social
inequities between social groups and creating new relationships that dispel
oppressive social myths and values. This process necessitates personal and
institutional changes that support the economic, cultural, political,
psychological, social and spiritual needs of individuals and groups. Of course,
issues of power are relevant to liberation processes and outcomes as well.
These observations raise important questions for us about the current and
projected context of Black child development. For example, what are the points
of commonality and divergence among various segments of the African
American community? What are the potential alliances and contestations with
other marginalized foreign and domestic groups? What is the most effective
strategy for dealing with a White power agenda that vacillates between pseudo-
egalitarianism on one hand and domestic repression and neo-imperialism on the
other?
Rather than being seen as rigid, static categories into which African Americans
can be pigeonholed, the four racialized cultural identities just offered are
construed as rough anchor points for our applied research on competence
development. Specifically, we were interested in cultivating a communal
orientation as it holds the potential to reduce risk and to promote moral
competence development. This includes the type of critical consciousness
10. MORAL COMPETENCE PROMOTION 199
needed to identify and correct asymmetric social relations (Watts & Abdul-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 individualism. Rather,
it provides the necessary grounding for such pursuits, hopefully reducing the
unfortunate tendency in American consumer culture 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 cultivate entrepreneurial sensibilities
couched in an awareness of past struggles and a commitment to collective well-
being in a complex present and uncertain future.
CHILD COMPETENCIES
Family Programming
negotiate their neighborhood, but is inconsistent with school rules that often
feature a zero-tolerance policy for violence.
The contribution of household work to fostering responsibility is another
aspect of the family component that is worthy of comment. Consistent with
Grusec, Goodnow, and Cohen (1996), we advise that family care, as compared
with self-care work, assignments enhance children’s concern for others.
However, as Jarrett and Burton (1995) pointed out, within low-income African
American families, family responsibilities and associated authority are often
defined by the age structure of the family unit. They contrasted an age-extended
structure, which has 18 or more years between generations, with an age-
condensed structure, where there are only 13 to 17 years between children and
their parents. It is suggested that age-condensed structures often force children
to assume adultlike self-and family-care responsibilities in the home. This not
only limits adult authority, potential for guidance, and monitoring, but it also
makes it difficult for children to fulfill age-appropriate expectations in schools
and other public settings.
Caregivers’ cultural and racial-related attitudes and practices should have
implications for their race-related socialization of children. Such socialization
has been identified as an important factor in the competence development of
children of color (Coll et al., 1996). Racial socialization is used in the literature
to encompass both cultural and race-related socialization efforts. Although a
majority of African American parents engage in race-related socialization
(Thornton, Chatters, Taylor, & Allen, 1990), low-income single parents were
least likely to do so. Most parental messages emphasize personal attributes
needed to integrate into mainstream American culture, with a smaller percentage
of parents focusing on racial pride and cultural heritage. Hughes and Chen
(1997) found that among middleincome parents, parents’ perceptions of
workplace bias and the age of the child help to determine the content of race-
related socialization messages. Consistent with these developmental trends, we
emphasize the need for younger children to be exposed to Black history and
heritage. As children get older, we suggest caregivers prepare them for the
prospects of confronting racial stereotypes and biases.
Finally, we highlight the need for consistent proactive caregiver advocacy for
children in school and community contexts. Strategies for cultivating
meaningful relationships with school personnel, especially classroom teachers,
are provided. An effort is made to identify and develop partnerships with
community members and organizations that can assist in supporting the healthy
development of children. We support a sense of collective efficacy (Sampson,
2001), which refers to “the extent of social connections in the neighborhood and
the degree to which residents monitor the behavior of others in accordance with
socially accepted practices and with the goal of supervising children and
maintaining public order” (Leventhal & Brooks-Gunn, 2000, p. 326).
206 JAGERS
School-Based Efforts
Attention is then turned to ways in which the necessary moral authority can
be developed and exercised in several ways. For example, class meetings are
promoted because they feature democratic principles. They minimize the
hierarchical relationship between teachers and students and allow both to
express their opinions and suggestions about classroom rules and processes
(Developmental Studies Center, 1996; Nelsen, Lott, & Glenn, 2000). This
provides an opportunity to align these norms and practices with children’s
notions of justice and harm (Nucci, 2001). Once agreed on, rules, procedures,
and practices should be actively taught to ensure that they are understood and
can be performed well.
Positive recognition and encouragement are encouraged (Emmer & Stough,
2001). When inappropriate behavior does occur, the focus should be on
highlighting moral consideration and brainstorming, selecting, and enacting a
just solution, rather than blaming and punishing students (e.g., Nelsen et al,
2000; Nucci, 2001). There is some evidence that using these classroom
management strategies can yield positive results with low-income African
American children, (e.g., Freiberg, Stein, & Huang, 1995; Ialongo et al., 1999).
These teacher-student relational strategies set the context for the infusion of
social and emotional competence modules into the regular classroom instruction.
Social and emotional curriculum modules are intended to teach the requisite
understanding, skills, and abilities students need to become productive,
responsible members of a caring community of learners and to contribute to
their families and broader community. Proponents of the social and emotional
learning movement suggest that programs should entail the core skills of
awareness of self and others, positive attitudes and values, responsible decision
making, and social interaction skills (Payton et al., 2000).
Our curriculum modules are intended to extend best practices in social and
emotional learning through a critical treatment of self-other relationships in
African American cultural and racial contexts. An initial set of lessons is
intended to guide students through an exploration of who they are from a
cultural history perspective so that they can appreciate various aspects of their
personal and communal identities. This provides a foundation for valuing
themselves as unique, but deeply connected individuals. It also prepares them to
learn to identify and understand the antecedents and consequences of their moral
emotions, with special attention to empathy and guilt, anger and stress
management, self-efficacy, persistence, and goal setting.
A subsequent set of modules addresses various levels of self-other relations.
The critical need to respect others and a have a sense of social responsibility is
supported by the discussion of interpersonal and situational cues and the
importance of prosocial verbal and nonverbal communication processes. As
children experience frequent and often intense interpersonal conflict, we explore
the causes of disagreements, prosocial goals, and problem solving as part of a
critical examination of familial, school, and community relations. The
208 JAGERS
connection is made between school success and family and community well-
being and moral questions associated with oppression are addressed, including
evidence of its internalization. The value of community service participation is
highlighted and meaningful, replicable opportunities are created through
community partnerships. Only after these issues are addressed is attention turned
to multiculturalism and diversity.
Similar to the family component, collaborative learning and hands-on
activities are featured prominently in each module. The critical analysis of books
and films accents and brings additional substance to each module. There is a
focus on children’s comprehension of moral themes (Narvaez, 2001). There is
an effort to promote moral sensitivity, moral reasoning, and moral motivation
through reading comprehension strategies like discerning feelings, perspective
taking, fact versus opinion, cause and effect, drawing inferences, and predicting
outcomes.
CONCLUSIONS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The work reported herein was supported by a grant from the Institute for
Educational Science (formerly the Office of Educational Research and
Improvement), 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.
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10. MORAL COMPETENCE PROMOTION 213
214
AUTHOR INDEX 215
222
223 SUBJECT INDEX
I N
Identity and peer exclusion, 123–124 Negative knowledge, 129–132
and adolescent neo-Nazism, 161– Negative morality, 129–130, 133–135
166
racialized identity and morality, O
197–198 Oppression, 26
Individualism and collectivism, 11, 12, and freedom, 9, 16
75
and acquisitive individualism, 196
Intuitionism, 35–37 P
Peer exclusion, 113
and convention, 117–120, 122
J and development, 122
Just community school, 130, 143–146 and gender, 116
and realistic discourse, 146–149 and morality, 117, 120
and race, 116–117
L and sexuality, 118–120
Liberalism, 23 Peer groups in adolescence, 113–115
Lowrider Art, 105–108 Personal (psychological) domain, 7, 80,
116, 142
M and social exclusion, 117
Montessori classroom, 35 in adolescence, 74–75, 78
Moral atmosphere, 34, 45 Punishment, 43
Moral competence, 194 Puritan ideology, 175–176
Moral decay, current period of, vii, viii, and race, 175–178
55–56, 70, 93–94, 149–150
Moral development as entailing R
resistance, 3, 11, 63–65 Relativism, 28
Moral discourse ethics, 27 and morality, 29
Moral domain, 7, 73, 77, 116, 142 and tolerance, 29
Moral education as developmental Resistance and subversion among
process, vii, 31, 137, 169–170 women, 8–13
as identity formation, 60–61, 169 and culture, 12
and Kohlberg, 142–143 and social change, 4, 9–10, 16–17
and peer exclusion, 124–125 as developmental process, 3, 11
and teachers, 61, 66 in adolescence, 76, 81–82
Morality, 30, 95–96 in childhood, 4–6, 39, 63
and agency, 37, 97 in social relationships, 3, 7, 16
and authority, 5, 42, 96 Rule utilitarianism, 22
and humanism, 58
and racism, 174 S
and religion, 58 Scientific racism, 182–187
and school rules, 5, 63 Self and consciousness, 97–98
and self, 109 as carnival, 101–102
disengagement from, 37 as novelistic, 99–101, 108–109
SUBJECT INDEX 224
Social convention, 5, 64 U
Social hierarchy, 12 Utilitarianism, 23, 25
Socialization, 42–43
Standpoint theory, 13, 26–28 V
Values clarification, 33
T Violence prevention, 198–200
Taliban, 9, 10, 17 Virtue, vii, 13, 21, 25, 31–32, 45, 54–
Tolerance, 29 56
Triforial system of moral education,
138–141