Current Events Paper: Moral Development Stages Education Coursework

Stages of Moral Development
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Stages of Moral Development
As children grow and develop into young adults, they need to go through particular stages of moral development. Various professionals have come up with theories explaining how parents can follow these stages to ensure their children develop well. A child’s moral development should be monitored from a tender age. However, some parents and guardians fail to take their children through these stages. As a result, most of them do not develop well morally. Children who have not been taken through these stages can be assisted in coming back into the track by using different measures.
An article by Suzanne Bouffard in The New York Times talks about a child who is not allowed to go through the early stages of moral development properly. Matt, a preschooler, is punished harshly and even expelled from school on several occasions due to his stubborn behavior (Bouffard, 2017). Matt is found doing the wrong things by his teachers most of the time, cutting his hair under the table in one of the cases, throwing a yoga ball when and where he should not focus on another (Bouffard, 2017). Instead of understanding the boy and trying to bring him back on track in the right way, the teachers immediately take the boy for a problem. The take to punishing the boy by giving him an in-school suspension. This only makes the child’s behavior worse. In the end, the teachers resort to expelling him when they can not take his behavior anymore when he is only eight years old (Bouffard, 2017). In-school suspension and expulsion do not work for Matt.
At such an early stage, some things can work for Matt in shaping his moral development. What he is being subjected to in school can never help him deal with his issues at such a tender age. Instead, the measures taken by the teachers only make Matt’s situation worse. He gets more aggressive instead of cooling off and hates school even more than he did before the punishment. Even though this is not the intention of the teacher, the effects are observed when the boy’s behavior does not change. The ineffectiveness of the methods used by the teachers is because they are making the boy skip some stages of ethical growth.
Every child should go through several stages of development for proper growth. These stages are outlined by Lawrence Kohlberg in as stages of moral development. From his research, Kohlberg suggested that the major stages of ethical growth are into two more groups, bringing a total of six (Kohlberg, 1971). A child needs to go through each of the stages so they can proceed to the next smoothly. Children need to go through all the stages like pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional (Kohlberg, 1971). The pre-conventional level has two stages which are; obedience and punishment orien...