During the First World War, Bion fought in three major battles over a period of two years. He left ample writings both honest and soul searching. Travelling to The Front under raging pressure from his father, he enlisted in a state of mind, which fluctuated wildly between wanting to be a "hero" and sudden fears that made him join the…

Given the way that student, teacher, principal, and school testing and accountability measures are currently leaning, it is understandable why a child's moral development sometimes gets less attention than her aptitude in algebra. Yet even with nearly all major accountability incentives heaped upon the tests in math and English, there are still…

Are athletics a positive or negative educational force? The viewpoint widely shared across academe is that participation in intercollegiate athletics has a positive impact on students and contributes to learning and moral development. Often, this notion is captured in the phrase "character development," a shorthand way to describe the individual…

This article deals with the consciousness in a person when one tries to understand her more deeply and as a whole, as is done in studies using the "Participant as Ally-Essentialist Portraiture" approach, and focuses on "higher aspects" or moral-ethical, metaphysical, social and religious ideals, values, commitments, or inspiration in a person. The…

Having a purpose is a form of intrapersonal giftedness. An even rarer giftedness is motivation to positively change society or culture. This exploratory chi-square and ANOVA study reports the prevalence, age distribution, stability over time, and characteristics of two change oriented aims in American adolescents. In a sample of 270, 12%, who tend…

While the ethical dimension of human-animal relationships has become a legitimate, rich subject for contemporary moral philosophers, scholars of moral education, and to a large extent, philosophers of education, have remained surprisingly silent on this subject. The primary purpose of this essay is to illustrate the relationship between the moral…

This study takes up the challenge of middle level researchers to investigate the extent to which schools prepare young adolescents to commit themselves to serve the public interest. One way of assessing the orientation of children and adolescents to the public good is through their emerging self-understanding. This study analyzes middle school…

Kohlberg has produced the most influential theory of moral development both within individuals and within society. As a cognitive-developmentalist, Kohlberg considered mathematical and logical intellectual operations to underlie both social and moral operations. The hierarchical arrangement of the stages was thus grounded in the hierarchical…

If strengthening children's moral and spiritual selves is the most important challenge facing youth-serving organizations in the United States today, three things are required to respond: a clear road map of where to go and how to get there, a critical mass of champions prepared to lead the way, and candid readiness assessments and strategies for…

The correlation between positive and negative group interactions and one or another of individuals' attitudes or characteristics--moral development, critical thinking, resilience, and self efficacy--has been examined previously. However, no systemic examination of individuals' development of patterns of these characteristics and those patterns'…

Notes that, despite great contributions by Lawrence Kohlberg to understanding of moral development, counselors are only beginning to appreciate fully implications of his developmental psychology for practice of counseling and human development. Draws on collective body of Kohlberg's work to show how seven assumptions have direct relevance for…

This study investigates the relationship between intellectual development and moral development in order to provide additional descriptions of the relationship based on a Piagetian type conservation task and a Piagetian type paired-story situation involving intentional behaviors and final outcomes. (JH)

The relationships between character assessment and moral assessment are discussed, showing that the one need not involve the other, and sources of confusion about this relationship are uncovered. (Editor/CB)

This paper discusses a well-known problem of stage categorization within Kohlberg's theory of moral stages (L. Kohlberg, 1973), that of "Stage 4 1/2." Some subjects previously scored at stage 4 in Kohlberg's framework took on some characteristics of stage 2 reasoning, which suggested the possibility of regression. To reconcile this…

The 2004 Council on Rehabilitation Education (CORE) standards were revised to include Human Growth and Development (HGD) as a knowledge domain. The HGD domain introduces a significant amount of new content to the curriculum, including several topics that have not traditionally appeared in the rehabilitation counselor educational curriculum. Thus,…