Lawrence Kohlberg Biography

Born in Bronxville, New York, on October 25, 1927, Lawrence Kohlberg grew up in the well-to-do community, but was more interested in world events than in academics. After World War II, he became second engineer on an old freighter that helped to smuggle Jewish refugees past the British blockage of Palestine in the late 1940s. He returned to what became the nation of Israel in 1969 to study the morality of young people in that country's collective settlements.

Ready to pursue his education, Kohlberg enrolled at the University of Chicago. His scores on the admissions tests were so high that he was excused from most of the required courses and earned his bachelor's degree in one year, 1948. He began study for his doctorate degree, which he earned at Chicago in 1958. Kohlberg's career started at Yale University, as an assistant professor of psychology, 1956-1961. In 1955, he married Lucille Stigberg, and the couple had two sons, David and Steven. Kohlberg spent a year at the Center for Advanced Study of Behavioral Science, 1961-1962, and then joined the staff of the University of Chicago as assistant, then associate professor of psychology and human development, 1962-1967. He spent the next ten years at Harvard University, as a professor of education and social psychology.

While studying for his doctorate degree, Kohlberg became fascinated with the theories of moral development in children and adolescents proposed by Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980). For his doctoral dissertation, Kohlberg set six stages of moral development in children, in contrast to Piaget's two stages. Kohlberg interviewed 72 boys in Chicago concerning whether a man with no money is morally right or wrong for stealing drugs that would benefit his desperately ill wife. He concluded that in stage one, most children say the man is wrong because it is wrong to steal. By stage two, the child realizes that here is more than one way of doing things. By stage six, the child has grown to the point of understanding that to work for a moral or just society, it is sometimes necessary and valid to disobey existing laws. This concept of the child as a "moral philosopher" was at odds with earlier psychological views of morality. Kohlberg was often criticized, for example, by Harvard Graduate School of Education professor Carol Gilligan. She disagreed with his decision only to study male's moral development and, in her 1982 book In a Different World,, Gilligan cited the case of an 11-year-old girl who was the question about the morality of stealing to aid an ill person. The girl answered, "It depends." Later, however, Kohlberg and Gilligan held many discussions on the subject of adolescent reasoning and co-author a paper.

The psychoanalytic explanation for morality in children is that it is a concept imposed on them by adults. Behavorists claim that it is based only on avoiding such bad feelings as guilt. Kohlberg, however, believed that children are their own moral agents or moral philosophers. They are moved to become so through many emotions, such as love or respect.

While doing cultural work in the Central American nation of Belize in 1971, Kohlberg contracted a parasitic infection. For the next 16 years, he was in constant pain, which brought on debilitating physical and mental problems. Nonetheless, in 1974, he became interested in the concept of cluster schools--a school within a school--in Massachusetts. In these cluster, or "just," schools, moral discussions would be conducted. A number of such schools formed in Massachusetts and New York with Kohlberg's help. Just schools were also started in a women's prison in Connecticut; in a program for dropouts in a high school in Bronx, New York; and one in a high school in France. However, most did not last long after Kohlberg's death. With no solution for his ailment, Kohlberg increasingly tried nontraditional remedies to little avail. On January 19, 1987, after leaving a treatment session at a local hospital on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, he reportedly walked into the Atlantic Ocean and committed suicide.

Kohlberg is the author of The Philosophy of Moral Development , 1981. He also contributed articles to professional journals and texts, such as "The Just Community School: The Theory and the Cambridge Cluster School Experiment," with E. Wasserman and N. Richardson, 1975, for Harvard University Center for Moral Education.