Moral Development

I recently read in an etiquette blog about how important it is to be nice to everyone, even the receptionist, office manager, or secretary, when on a job interview. After all, this certified etiquette trainer pointed out, you could lose the job if the secretary spoke poorly of your social skills. While the end result of this advice is positive – a concern for others’ feelings regardless of their station in life – the underlying message that being nice is simply a means to an end struck me as severely misguided.

            This raises the question of the real reason we should be kind to the secretary and how we can raise children who will know the answer to that question. In schools and as parents, we are concerned with our children’s moral development as well as their cognitive and athletic development. The earliest stage of moral development revolves around consequences:  will I be punished or rewarded for my behavior? If the former, the behavior must be bad, and if the latter, it must be good. Next comes a stage of utility – does the behavior serve others’ and my interests? This seems to be right on target for our etiquette specialist. As children develop morally, they move beyond what Lawrence Kohlberg calls pre-conventional moral thought, through stages that focus on interpersonal relationships, maintaining social order, respecting social contracts and individual rights, and internalized principles of justice. A child develops a moral and ethical conscience by building his or her own abstract understanding of the complexities of the world in which we live

            The development of moral character is individual work for each child, but it is accomplished within a social framework. If we want to help children make the move from caring only about themselves, we can do so by helping them think more about others’ feelings. Once children have developed the habit of thinking about social relationships, we can help them extend their thinking from individual interactions to broader societal and cultural issues. This happens in so many different ways throughout the school day. A young child who has had an altercation with another child is encouraged to think not about punishment, but about how the other child feels. Students at all ages work on interpersonal relationships during our Morning Meeting, and we often touch on social justice issues and cultural awareness in our social science classes. Throughout the history of our school, we have taken pride in how the adults in the school model thoughtfulness toward one another and toward students…and ask the Upper Primary students to practice and to do the same.

            It is our hope that our children would demonstrate their agreement with the etiquette specialist by being kind to the secretary when on a job interview. However, our goal is that the students would be kind not just because the secretary may have an impact on whether they would get the job, but because it is the right thing to do.