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Beginnings Kohlberg was born in 1927 into a wealthy family and grew up in Bronxville, New York. After attending Phillips Academy, where he later recalled that he had been known far more for his sense of mischief and forays to nearby girls' schools than for his interest in academic theories, Kohlberg threw himself into the Zionist cause. The young man became the "second engineer" on an old freighter after World War II, smuggling Jewish refugees past the British blockade of Palestine.
In an article titled "Beds for Bananas," Kohlberg recounted with glee that he and his shipmates had convinced various government inspectors that the South American freighter's makeshift passenger beds were, in fact, banana-storing containers. Robert Kegan, chair of the Learning and Teaching area at HGSE, points to the article for an example of Kohlberg's humor and of a nascent "just community" in action. "The ship's crew had a meeting one night to decide whether to risk going ashore and having a good time or staying on the ship," Kegan says with a chuckle. "The crew voted to deny themselves shore privileges and then broke out the beer. Everyone felt virtuous about their democratic decision. But then they drank a lot and promptly left the ship!" In 1948, Kohlberg enrolled at the University of Chicago. Because he scored so high on admissions tests, he extricated himself from most of the school's course requirements and earned his bachelor's degree in one year. Staying on to do graduate work in psychology, Kohlberg thought that he would become a clinical psychologist, not a researcher. But Jean Piaget's theories of moral development in children and adolescents fascinated him; Kohlberg eventually found himself interviewing children and adolescents on moral issues. Kohlberg's doctoral dissertation, published in 1958, made him psychology's newest star. In the dissertation he uncovered six stages of moral development—in contrast with Piaget's two stages—based upon interviews of 72 white boys in Chicago about the dilemma of Heinz.After asking the boys whether a fictional and financially strapped man named Heinz did right or wrong in stealing a drug for his dying wife, Kohlberg explored the reasoning behind the answers. Kohlberg found that young children assumed that they had no choice but to obey rules handed down by powerful authorities. Heinz was wrong to steal the drug, a child typically says in Stage 1, "because it is bad to steal" or "because it is against the law to steal." But once children realize that more than one way of doing things exists, they move to making moral decisions from a position of self-interest (Stage 2). Furthering individual relationships becomes the main concern in Stage 3, whereas by Stage 6, a person works for a moral society—for justice—to the point of disobeying unjust laws. Kohlberg's six stages of moral development—his concept of "the child as a moral philosopher"—broke radically with earlier psychological approaches to morality. Instead of seeing morality as a concept that adults impose on children (the psychoanalytic explanation), or as something based solely on avoiding bad feelings like anxiety and guilt (the behaviorist explanation), Kohlberg believed that children generate their own moral judgments. Moved by social relationships and by a variety of emotions—including love, respect, empathy, and attachment—children become moral agents, Kohlberg said. Because he insisted on using empirical data and thus created a framework for looking for universal qualities of moral judgment, the world of psychology—and the world of education—grew excited. Only in his thirties, Kohlberg had revived a field of inquiry and, in the process, become a hot commodity. In 1968, at the age of 40, he came to the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Married at the time and the father of two young sons, Kohlberg looked the part of the brilliant young academic. Unruly dark hair topping an angular face and a full, sensitive mouth, Kohlberg always seemed to be in motion. In nearly every photo from that era, his hands sweep his hair or jab the air—gestures of a mind racing to keep up with itself. Next page: "The Homespun Business" on Larsen, Third Floor HGSE News, Harvard Graduate School of Education
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