RC:
If you force children to explain complex notions, such as how to balance competing concerns about rights and justice, you're guaranteed to find age trends because children get so much more articulate with each passing year. But if you are searching for the first appearance of a moral concept, then you'd better find a technique that doesn't require much verbal skill. Elliot Turiel developed such a technique. His innovation was to tell children short stories about other kids who break rules and then give them a series of simple yes-or-no probe questions. For example, you tell a story about a child who goes to school wearing regular clothes, even though his school requires students to wear a uniform. You start by getting an overall judgment: 'Is that OK, what the boy did?' Most kids say no. You ask if there's a rule about what to wear. ('Yes.') Then you probe to find out what kind of rule it is: 'What if the teacher said it was OK for the boy to wear his regular clothes, then would it be OK?' and 'What if this happened in another school, where they don't have any rules about uniforms, then would it be OK?'
Turiel discovered that children as young as five usually say that the boy was wrong to break the rule, but that it would be OK if the teacher gave permission or if it happened in another school where there was no such rule. Children recognize that rules about clothing, food and many other aspects of life are social conventions, which are arbitrary and changeable to some extent.
But if you ask kids about actions that hurt other people, such as a girl who pushes a boy off a swing because she wants to use it, you get a very different set of responses. Nearly all kids say that the girl was wrong and that she'd be wrong even if the teacher said it was OK, and even if this happened in another school where there were no rules about pushing kids off swings. Children recognize that rules that prevent harm are moral rules, which Turiel defined as rules related to 'justice, rights and welfare pertaining to how people ought to relate to each other'.
In other words, young children don't treat all rules the same, as Piaget and Kohlberg had supposed. Kids can't talk like moral philosophers, but they are busy sorting social information in a sophisticated way. They seem to grasp early on that rules that prevent harm are special, important, unalterable and universal. And this realization, Turiel said, was the foundation of all moral development. Children construct their moral understanding on the bedrock of the absolute moral truth that harm is wrong. Specific rules may vary across cultures, but in all of the cultures Turiel examined, children still made a distinction between moral rules and conventional rules.
The political implications of Turiel's account of moral development are: morality is about treating individuals well. It's about harm and fairness (not loyalty, duty, respect, piety, patriotism or tradition). Hierarchy and authority are generally bad things (so it's best to let kids figure things out for themselves). Schools and families should therefore embody progressive principles of equality and autonomy (not authoritarian principles that enable elders to train and constrain children).
Based on the definitions given in the passage, classify the following as conventional rules (C) or moral rules (M).
i] You must always respect your parents.
ii] You must not spread rumours about people.
iii] You must visit a place of worship (temple/church/mosque/etc.) at least once a week
1) CMC 2) MMM 3) MMC 4) CCC
What is this passage about?
1) The difference between conventional and moral rules
2) The difference between the moral views of children and adults
3) The origins and development of moral reasoning in children
4) The role of morality in children's lives.
Which of the following would the author of this passage agree with?
1) Most of the rules that we follow in everyday life are arbitrary conventions.
2) Children need to be taught to distinguish right from wrong from an early age.
3) Values like loyalty, duty, etc. are unimportant in comparison to fairness and preventing harm.
4) None of the above
Which of the following, if true, would undermine the author's conclusions regarding Turiel's experiment, as stated in the last paragraph?
i] Though it is important to teach children to treat individuals well, not teaching them about social conventions would result in chaos in society.
ii] There is no point in basing children's education only on principles that they already consider important (such as harm and fairness) instead of the ones they don't (loyalty, duty, etc.).
iii] Just because children can distinguish between moral and conventional rules does not mean that these are innate, i.e. that they haven't been taught to them by their parents and teachers.
1) Only [ii]
2) Only [iii]
3) [i] and [ii]
4) [i] and [iii]
-IMS