Conflict, Contradiction, and Contrarian Elements in Moral

Development and Education 1st Edition

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Conflict, Contradiction,
and Contrarian Elements
in Moral Development
and Education
Edited by

Larry Nucci
University of Illinois at Chicago

LAWRENCE ERLBAUM ASSOCIATES, PUBLISHERS

Mahwah, New Jersey London
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008.
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Copyright © 2005 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any
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without prior written permission of the publisher.
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers
10 Industrial Avenue
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Cover design by Sean Sciarrone

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Conflict, contradiction, and contrarian elements in moral development
and education/edited by Larry Nucci.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8058-4848-7 (cloth)
1. Moral education—United States. 2. Socialization—United States.
3. Conflict (Psychology) in adolescence—United States. 4. Inter
action analysis in education. I. Nucci, Larry P.

LC311.C49 2005
370.11’4—dc22 2004047106
CIP

ISBN 1-4106-1195-7 Master e-book ISBN

 Contents

Preface vii

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 3

2 Taking a Stand in a Morally Pluralistic Society: Constructive 21

Obedience and Responsible Dissent in Moral/Character
Education
Diana Baumrind

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 53
William Ayers

4 Adolescent-Parent Conflict: Resistance and Subversion 69

as Developmental Process
Judith G.Smetana

v
vi CONTENTS

5 Risk Taking, Carnival, and the Novelistic Self: Adolescents 93

Avenues to Moral Being and Integrity
Cynthia Lightfoot

6 Adolescents’ Peer Interactions: Conflict and Coordination 113

Among Personal Expression, Social Norms, and Moral Reasoning
Stacey S.Horn

7. Negative Morality and the Goals of Moral Education 129

Fritz K.Oser

Part III: Moral Education When Social Injustice

and Youth Resistance Converge to Produce
Negative Outcomes
8 The Rise of Right-Wing Extremist Youth Culture 157
in Postunification Germany
Wolfgang Edelstein

9 Race and Morality: Shaping the Myth 173

William H.Watkins

10 Moral Competence Promotion Among African American 194

Children: Conceptual Underpinnings and Programmatic
Efforts
Robert J.Jagers

Author Index 214

Subject Index 222
 Preface

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.

RESISTANCE AND CONFLICT AT A SOCIETAL LEVEL

IN RELATION TO SOCIALIZATION AND
EDUCATIONAL PRACTICE

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

inequalities embedded in the structure of social systems: the inequalities

inherent in social hierarchies that allow greater power and personal entitlements
to some groups (e.g., social hierarchies based on gender, socioeconomic class,
ethnic or racial status). In their everyday lives adults come into conflict with
others and resist moral wrongs embedded in cultural practices that serve to
further the interests of those in higher positions in the social hierarchy.
Resistance frequently entails hidden and deceptive actions aimed at
transforming aspects of the social system judged unfair and detrimental to the
welfare of groups of people. Over the long term, conflict, resistance, and
subversion are sources of the transformation of culture.
The second chapter is by Diana Baumrind, who is widely known for her work
on children’s socialization in relation to patterns of parenting and adult
authority. In this chapter she combines those issues with a neo-Marxist analysis
of morality and social hierarchy. Many Americans given the outcome of the
Cold War have a knee-jerk response to anything labeled Marxist. In Baumrind’s
hands, however, the theory speaks to fundamental questions of moral relativism,
individual moral growth, and the definitions of moral progress and character. As
Baumrind argues, moral ambiguities and uncertainties affecting praxis are not
resolvable by appeal to either universalizable, certain, and fixed principles of
justice or to cultural norms, but arise from historically and personally situated
divergent worldviews that guide actual decision making as well as accepted
criteria for validating beliefs. Cultures then may construct radically different
moral codes and value systems. Rather than simply accept these irreconcilable
differences as a fait accompli, individuals and groups are obliged to adopt and
justify a standpoint that should then mandate their moral praxis. In cases where
power disparities privilege one group, one is obliged to take the standpoint of
the least advantaged. From Baumrind’s point of view, deontologists, such as
Kohlberg, fail to acknowledge sufficiently the plurality of real value systems
arising from irreconcilable worldviews, whereas culturalists fail to recognize the
multiple conflicting standpoints within a culture arising from divergent class
interests. She argues that the development of optimal competence and character
in children requires the cultivation of the ability to responsibly dissent and
accept unpleasant consequences, as well as to constructively comply with
legitimate authoritative directives. Baumrind reminds us that the authoritative
model of childrearing that she developed was to serve as a viable alternative to
both the conservative (authoritarian) model and the liberal (permissive) model of
childrearing. From this she makes the case that effective moral and character
education must coordinate flexibility, and adult authority in the face of the
inevitable and essential challenges from children and youth.
x PREFACE

RESISTANCE, CONFLICT, AND CONTRARIANISM IN

YOUTH: IMPLICATIONS FOR EDUCATION AND
PARENTING

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 result of a career of efforts to apply developmental discourse in classrooms

and schools. From those efforts and his reading of the research literature, Oser
concludes that moral discourse in the absence of a direct connection to negative
lived experience is superficial at best and wasteful at worst. In his chapter he
provides a critique of virtue-based character education as perhaps even more
benighted in its reliance on inculcation and traditional socialization. Oser’s
thesis is a rather simple one; that one can only grow from one’s mistakes. He
makes the point that all other areas of education, such as mathematics, anticipate
the negative as an explicit and necessary part of successful pedagogy. An
example of what Oser views as successful moral education entails making direct
use of lived moral conflicts such as peer harassment or theft as the basis for
genuine moral discourse. Through such discourse students are said to integrate
emotions within their moral judgments that serve to regulate future moral
conduct.

MORAL EDUCATION WHEN SOCIAL INJUSTICE AND

YOUTH RESISTANCE CONVERGE TO PRODUCE
NEGATIVE OUTCOMES

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