Michael Hand’s A Theory of Moral Education is a good book, and his theory a powerful and plausible one. The book is curious in one respect, however, which I want to poke at here. Hand presents the challenge of moral education in contemporary liberal democracies in the form of two questions: 1) what should children be taught by way of moral education? and 2) is it possible for moral education to be more than indoctrination? Hand spends a little time exploring why these two question seem most pressing, and the answer seems clear. The first arises when we acknowledge the pluralism of moral beliefs in modern liberal democracies, and the second when we acknowledge the paramount importance of respecting children’s autonomy either, as some would have it, while they are children but at least as future adults. In short, we don’t want to sanction state enforcement of some controversial beliefs and values over others, and we don’t want to foist upon children beliefs they cannot have chosen for themselves on some rational basis. Hand aims to outline an approach to moral education that respects both these constraints in the face fo doubts that it can be done. So far so good. 

But here’s the thing. We’ve already had this debate in philosophy of education, framed in just these ways. It was a constructive debate, one that produced in time a pretty solid consensus about what moral education ought to look like in liberal democracies. As it happens, it was a fairly short lived consensus, as practical realities intervened that produced a backlash that led in the US to a rather insipid revival of traditionally minded ‘character education’ and eventually, if I understand things rightly, commitments to inculcate ‘British values’ in the UK. A major focal point of this earlier debate was the work of Lawrence Kohlberg and responses to Kohlberg from the left and right. The curious thing about Hand’s book is that little mention of any of this is to be found in its pages. What follows is a brief primer of this apparently lost history and its immediate relevance to Hand’s project. (For a more detailed treatment of this history see Chapter Three of my book.) 

In his extensive writings on moral education, Kohlberg sets out to answer the exact same questions that occupy Hand. As Kohlberg saw it, there were two prominent approaches to moral education in play at the time, and both were inadequate. One he famously dubbed the ‘bag of virtues’ approach that amounted to identifying the beliefs and values important to a community and instilling just those in children on no other basis than their cultural currency. (The patron saint of the bag of virtues approach is Aristotle; modern defenders are David Hunter and Christine Hoff Sommers.) Kohlberg argues this approach fails to provide satisfactory answers to either of the questions on the table. As he puts it, with a nod to James Brown, ‘everyone has their own bag’ and so there’s no principled answer to why these values rather than those ought to be taught to children. Consequently, Kohlberg concludes, direct instruction in the virtues of this or that ‘bag’ would amount to indoctrination. 

On the other extreme was what Kohlberg dubbed ‘Romanticism’. On this approach no prior set of beliefs and values is rightly taught to children. Rather they should be trusted to arrive at their own authentic values on their own. With his eye fixed on A.S. Neill of Summerhill school fame, Kohlberg captures this approach with the optimistic slogan that ‘what is natural is good’. According to the Romantics, children will be fine if not ruined by the misguided and oppressive intervention of adults. (The patron saint of Romanticism is Rousseau; a modern devotee is Alfie Kohn.) This approach, Kohlberg argues, suffers from a fatal equivocation on the word “natural.” The slogan ‘what is natural is good’ could mean whatever values a child arrives at if left to her own devices is good, which seems daft—who’s to say a child won’t ‘naturally’ arrive at her beliefs and values by way of time spent on 4chan? On a more plausible reading the view is that if left to her own devices a child will arrive at the ‘right’ values. But this is just to revive the worries about the ‘bag of virtues’—who’s to say which values are right? And again, who is so optimistic to suppose children will magically arrive at just those beliefs and values if left alone? Again, even if left alone by parents and teachers children will be influenced by one source or another, for good or for ill. 

So, what to do? In Kohlberg’s mind it is here that his celebrated if equally maligned theory of moral development comes to the rescue. If his stages of moral development are universal, and so transcend culture, it can provide a basis for moral education that avoids  the relativism of the bag of virtues approach. If each successive stage is appreciated as rationally superior by the person going through them, then the worries about indoctrination are also avoided. So: a moral education focused on guiding students to higher levels of moral development avoids the pitfalls of both the bag of virtues and Romanticism. An elegant conclusion if ever there ever were one.