This article is an excerpt from "Lawrence Kohlberg's Approach to Moral Education." It refers several times to Kohlberg's "six stages of moral development." Stages 3 and 4 belong to the second level of moral development, which Kohlberg calls "conventional." At stage 3, one becomes aware of conventions as one sees what is right in terms of living up…

Given the way that student, teacher, principal, and school testing and accountability measures are currently leaning, it is understandable why a child's moral development sometimes gets less attention than her aptitude in algebra. Yet even with nearly all major accountability incentives heaped upon the tests in math and English, there are still…

As zero tolerance policies and retributive disciplinary codes proliferate among public schools throughout the country, this essay reflects upon one school's nontraditional model of school "discipline" as an alternative to such punitive policies. In particular, this essay explores the fairness committee at Humanities Preparatory Academy in New York…

In this essay, a high school principal reflects on the time a student took him to the Fairness Committee, a democratic structure for behavioral interventions. By mobilizing this process, the student affirmed his commitment to the school's core values, as well as his commitment to his own education. School structures for the development of…

Earlier essays in this symposium describe Restorative Justice processes in schools, referred to in our school as a Fairness Committee. Implementing these collaborative, restorative processes does not come without challenges. This essay will explore some of the historical and theoretical roots of the Fairness Committee in Lawrence Kohlberg's work…

Exile has its place. As an age-old human response to conflict, its potential value to the healthy maturation of students and the school community should not be discounted. Exile or ostracism goes by various names in school. Students are told: Move your desk. Leave the classroom and wait in the hall. Go to the office. Go to detention. You're…

This story captures the tensions that existed when a small charter high school attempted to provide powerful leadership opportunities for students who had few. It details the process and outcome of offering students leadership roles in designing and implementing a student-led discipline committee. In the process, much changed at the school. The…

This article shows the process through which one teacher and a group of eleventh-graders worked to create spaces for democratic education in a hierarchically organized New York City public school that is heralded as a model of success under current reform initiatives. In response to student resistance to a required unit on Tim O'Brien's novel, The…

The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas suggested that the most ethical act possible is the discovery that one has assumed responsibility for the other. In fact it is the other that makes possible the genuine exploration of the self, an act dominating the adolescent era of development. Although rarely appearing in educational literature, Levinas has…

For millions of years, human beings evolved and then lived in small social groupings that were intergenerational, with simple divisions of labor, oriented to common tasks and values. It was a limited existence in many ways, but there was community and continuity. And now, very suddenly in evolutionary time, we have built the teeming cities and…

In this essay I examine what it could mean to act courageously in the midst of the troubling, disabling degree of standardization taking hold in schools. What does it take to express what I call "everyday courage"? First, there are no guarantees that one's good work will produce the outcomes one desires and is committed to realizing. I call this…

This article examines Francis W. Parker's (1837-1902) and Tsunesaburo Makiguchi's (1871-1944) views of harmonious community life as the goal of education through bilingual analysis of Parker's "My Pedagogic Creed" (1897) and Makiguchi's On the Significance of Social Aspects that Mr. Parker Says Should be Incorporated into the School Experience…

The article is a personal account of my engagement with some recent neuroscientific theory put forth by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang (University of Southern California) about the integral relationship between emotion and cognition. Specifically, the research suggests the necessity of engaging students on an emotional level in order to thoroughly…

The story of students' lives in schools is frequently related through the reductive prism of educational bureaucracy. Students are often narrowly defined by IQ scores, standardized test results, ability groupings, and the like. Such measures are more interested in sorting students into types than in fostering students' growth as unique human…

Why do I do that to myself? As a secondary English teacher, I want desperately for my students to pursue their own interests in their writing, but then I am stuck negotiating topics that push the envelope (read: make me uncomfortable): suicide attempts, cutting, abusive boyfriends, and drug use. When a student noted on his submission that it had…