The Circular Relation of Kohlberg's Moral Development Theory to Educational Practice : Focusing on Just Community Program in Scarsdale Alternative High School

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  • コールバーグにおける道徳教育の理論-実践問題 : ニューヨーク州スカースデールオールタナティブスクールにおけるジャスト・コミュニティの実践を中心に
  • コールバーグ ニ オケル ドウトク キョウイク ノ リロン ジッセン モンダイ ニューヨークシュウ スカースデールオールタナティブスクール ニ オケル ジャスト コミュニティ ノ ジッセン オ チュウシン ニ

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The purpose of this paper is to show how the excess of educational practice functions to an educational theory, by re-examining the documents of Scarsdale Alternative High School (SAS) where Lawrence Kohlberg's moral education program, Just Community, has been practiced. Just Community is a program of moral education produced by Lawrence Kohlberg, who is well known for his theory of stages of moral development and moral dilemma discussion program. Kohlberg himself criticized the moral dilemma discussion program for its hypothetical character oriented by the theory, and introduced the Just Community program as an alternative to overcome this theory-practice problem. He came to recognize that his theory of stages of moral development was insufficient to describe and evaluate what happened in ordinary settings of SAS's Just Community. At the beginning, he and other researchers used stages of moral development as a scale of evaluating how SAS' s Just Community program succeeded. But he was soon dissatisfied with this way of evaluation, which he called "system atic research approach". He also used "historical and anecdotel approach" as a new one in order to describe and examine what happened in SAS that the "systematic research approach" may have ignored. The fact that there is something only the "historical and anecdotel approach" can appreciate tells us about the excess of practice, which no theory is sufficient to explicate. Any theory may face to the excess of practice. This means that a different theory will be open to another feature of practice that the present theory fails to see. It is not easy to harmonize two theories--- "systematic research approach" and "historical and anecdotel approach" in our case, but educational theory has a chance to find out another possibility of educational practice.

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