










































Title


13 

Developmental Theory and the Progressive Curriculum: 
Lessons from an Unheralded Success Story 

 
Susan Jean Mayer 

Harvard Graduate School of Education 
 

 
Abstract 

Jean Piaget’s fifth text, The Moral Judgment of the Child, 
remains his single most influential text within the world of 
educational practice.  This paper explores general perceptions 
and expectations of moral versus academic development in 
order to illuminate possible reasons for both Piaget’s and his 
readers’ relative clarity regarding the need to foster students’ 
autonomous reasoning in the moral realm.  Subsequent 
analysis of relevant classroom realities then suggests that, in 
contrast to Piaget’s primary focus on intellectual reciprocity, 
cultural constraints may also support developmentally 
oriented educators in nurturing their students’ moral 
reasoning. 

 
Relative to the world of educational practice, The 

Moral Judgment of the Child serves as Piaget’s masterwork.1 
Based on novel empirical findings he had established with 
colleagues at the Jean Jacques Rousseau Institute, and on his 
pointed critique of influential works in sociology and social 
psychology of the time, Piaget argued that human morality 
arises from the species’ developmentally sensitive ability to 
reason morally and that moral education must therefore 
concern itself with the active nurture of this natural capacity.  
Children must be challenged to reason themselves, in 
increasingly nuanced fashion, about moral issues as they 
encounter them in the world.   

Reviewers greeted The Moral Judgment of the 
Child, Piaget’s fifth work in the field, with great enthusiasm; 
several termed it the most significant of the first five (Mayer, 
2003).  Particularly among educators, this warm reception 
can in large part be attributed to the work’s compelling mix 
of findings, theory, and educational recommendations, a mix 
not otherwise seen within Piaget’s oeuvre. Although Piaget 
typically deferred to the expertise of educators when queried 
about his recommendations for educational practice, he chose 
to propose pedagogical principles in the moral realm, linking 
them both to his findings and to a critique of existing theory.   

The considerable influence Piaget’s claims about 
moral education have exercised within developmentally 
oriented contexts, however, raises the question of what other 
factors may have supported a broad cultural integration of 
this work.2  Educational practice has never followed directly 
on the heels of established psychological findings and theory; 
certainly, the relationship between developmental theory and 
progressive educational practice can not be thought a simple 
one. 3  For what complex set of reasons, then, did the 
pedagogical implications of developmental theory seem 
relatively clear, both to Piaget and his readers, in the moral 
realm?    

This paper begins by briefly reviewing Piaget’s 
findings and claims and the critical reviews they received in 

the English and American scholarly press.  It then presents 
three possible explanations for this relative clarity: 1) 
Western democratic societies are founded on the principle 
that a human propensity for moral reasoning exists and 
citizens therefore have a vested interest in believing that such 
a propensity can, in general terms, be nurtured; 2) the notion 
that all students must learn to wrestle with concrete issues in 
the academic areas may seem less obvious to many; 3) the 
essential questions, logics, and conclusions of the moral 
domain may seem more readily available, or comprehensible, 
than those of the various academic areas.   

Finally, discussion of relevant classroom realities 
generates the tentative conclusion that three common 
dynamics of classroom life may also implicitly support 
educators both in fostering their students’ ability to reason 
independently about moral issues and in seeing such work as 
essential: 1) the wealth of pressing issues or dilemmas in 
which the children are themselves invested; 2) the teachers’ 
own practical expertise with the underlying purposes, 
premises and logics of the domain; and 3) the presence of 
fundamental performance standards throughout a student’s 
school career.  This last point, then, invites the hypothesis 
that the tension generally active between established 
performance parameters and the reasoned negotiations Piaget 
advocates may help to fuel the kind of moral growth that 
educators recognize as acceptable. If so, Piaget under-
theorized the role that existing cultural constraints play, via 
authority figures, in inspiring intellectual accommodation to 
established moral and ethical principles.  

 
Piaget’s findings and claims 

As one would expect and many will remember, the 
research of Piaget and his seven collaborators identified 
developmental phases in a child’s understanding of moral 
questions, in this case, two.4  Younger children tended to 
judge level of culpability according to amount of damage 
done, regardless of intention, older children the reverse.  
Piaget argued that these and other findings indicated the 
existence of two moralities, an earlier ‘heteronomous’ one, 
which defers to established authority, and a later 
‘autonomous’ one, which seeks to cooperate on equal terms 
with others in judging what is right.  An intermediate phase, 
“during which rules and commands are interiorized and 
generalized” (p.195), was also theorized.  Piaget also 
discovered a tendency among children to embrace one of two 
types of punishment -- either ‘expiatory,’ based on a felt need 
for retribution, or ‘reciprocal,’ based upon reasoned 
negotiation -- and correlated these two opposing inclinations 
to the two types of morality. 

Having presented these findings, Piaget offered a 
critique of the work of Emile Durkheim, Pierre Bovet, and 
James Mark Baldwin in relation to them.  Piaget argued that, 



14 

though these theorists had in various ways begun the work of 
distinguishing between the role of authoritarian constraint 
and that of democratic cooperation in the construction of 
moral sensibility, their preexisting distinctions were 
underspecified.  He further claimed that this was especially 
clear when one considered the educational implications of 
these earlier theories, none of which stressed the nurture of 
children’s autonomous moral reasoning sufficiently; indeed, 
he maintained that Durkheim’s theory implied an 
unequivocally authoritarian model.5   

Piaget believed that his research, in demonstrating a 
developmental progression from ‘heteronomous’ to 
‘autonomous’ morality, indicated the need for  a radically 
new approach to moral education -- one that would build 
upon maturing children’s natural inclinations to reason 
through the moral questions that life presented.  Children 
must be given opportunities to claim the underlying means 
and purposes of the moral realm on their own terms and in 
relation to the practical issues they faced in their lives. 
 

The critical reception 
 When The Moral Judgment of the Child was first 
published, New Statesman and Nation called it “the most 
brilliant and persuasive of Professor Piaget’s studies of the 
child’s mind.” That statement well represents the 
contemporary academic response in Great Britain and 
America.6  William White, co-founder of Psychoanalytic 
Review, who had reviewed all four of Piaget’s previous texts 
in tones ranging from disparaging to neutral, seems to have 
reconsidered his stance entirely.  He wrote, “This volume of 
Piaget’s, like all of the preceding ones, is illuminating, 
exceedingly helpful, interesting, provocative, and 
informative,” and added “It can not be too strongly 
emphasized that if we are going to develop any program for 
the child that we should inform ourselves about him 
beforehand, that we should know something of his 
development, that we should realize that there are these 
various stages in the unfolding of the psyche. . .” (White, 
1933, p.215).  White had apparently come to see all of 
Piaget’s research in a more sympathetic light. 
 In his review in Progressive Education, Randolph 
Smith of the Teacher’s College Child Development Institute 
stated, “[T]he book contains ample evidence, out of the 
mouths of children themselves, indicating the desirability of 
early and continuous social experience with contemporaries 
if the more mature forms of social judgment are to be 
developed” (Smith, 1933, pp.237-8).  A review in Journal of 
Educational Psychology refers to The Moral Judgment of the 
Child as “the most valuable of this significant series” and 
says it “should be pondered long and seriously by our moral 
guardians, whether parents, teachers, or ministers” (Schoen, 
1933, p.157).  Another in The Personalist calls the work “an 
outstanding contribution not only to experimental ethics but 
also to educational theory.”  
 Susan Isaacs, the closest and most prolific critic of 
Piaget’s five early works, termed Piaget’s critique of Emile 
Durkheim “most satisfying in its penetration and vigorous 
hold upon a living empiricism,” and said of the work overall:  
 

In none of his other books have his 
conclusions grown so inevitably from the 
vital nexus of actual fact.  One of the great 
qualities of this book is the masterly way in 
which point after point of the material is taken 
up and used to qualify, elaborate or sustain 
his tentative hypotheses.  One sees 
conclusions actually growing before one’s 
eyes, out of the living movement of the 
children’s minds (Isaacs, 1934, p.94).  
 

Overwhelmingly, then, reviewers of The Moral 
Judgment of the Child agreed that the work successfully 
blended empirical research with theoretical critique and 
found its practical implications for education compelling.  
For these reasons, many found it Piaget’s most significant 
and convincing work to date.  Piaget’s fundamental and 
original claim regarding the existence of two moralities was 
seen to have grown in compelling fashion from recognizable 
empirical realities and to reveal the need for the dramatically 
new approach to moral education that he proposed.   

 
Potential reasons for this relative clarity 
Even today, uncertainty regarding the implications 

of developmental theory for the academic subjects lingers, 
particularly at the secondary level, where a perceived need 
for verbal mastery of key cultural understandings still 
generally trumps concerns for students’ depth of 
understanding.  For what reasons, then, might educators more 
broadly agree that all children do need to internalize the 
fundamental logics and rationales of moral reasoning through 
an active engagement with the concrete moral challenges 
they face in their lives?  What might distinguish the nature of 
moral understandings from that of academic understandings 
in people’s minds?  This paper presents three possibilities. 

First, because Western societies are democratic, 
their citizens have a vested interest in believing that a human 
propensity for moral reasoning exists and that such a 
propensity can be nurtured through appropriate schooling.  In 
general terms, the governing structures of such societies 
require that citizens grasp basic moral premises and tackle 
novel moral issues through the application of reason.  In 
contrast, people may be less likely to assume that everyone 
shares a propensity for mathematical or historical reflection 
or for artistic expression.  Indeed, some educators may 
believe that only a select number are able to think originally 
in these domains.   

Second, the idea that all students must develop an 
ability to wrestle with practical issues in the academic areas 
may seem less obvious to many.  The central relevance of 
morality to all democratic social relations leads to a 
prioritizing of certain central understandings and to their 
permeation, in fact, of democratically oriented classroom 
cultures.  Interpersonal issues rife with moral implications 
continually arise and, if a teacher is not to be preoccupied 
with them continually, children must learn to reason about 
what is right and fair together.  This, in turn, may nurture a 
deeper sense of moral understandings as socially constructed 
(and reconstructed), causing educators and guardians to see 



15 

children’s accommodation of the underlying logics of moral 
behavior as essential to their ability to apply moral 
understandings effectively.  If so, this may lead people to 
view some working set of premises and practical capabilities 
as constituting the worthy knowledge in this domain.   

Third, the fundamental questions and rationales of 
the moral domain may seem more readily available, or 
comprehensible, than those of the various academic areas.  
The basic moral premises of one’s society inform and enable 
all social relationships and may therefore strike many as 
intuitively obvious.  Perhaps such premises, their constituent 
logics, and their practical implications have been so 
thoroughly inculcated among adult educators that they come 
to seem readily discoverable through a child’s autonomous 
exploration of the world.    

In reviewing these possibilities, it is worth 
considering the extent to which the power of Piaget’s 
practical analysis in The Moral Judgment of the Child 
reflected a prior clarity about the significance of his findings 
for education in this domain.  Relevant insights and analyses 
may well have been fostered by the active contemporary 
debate among sociologists and psychologists regarding the 
need for a new basis for moral authority in a post-Darwinian 
world.  A paradigm shift (Kuhn, 1962) among those social 
scientists and educators concerned with theorizing the basis 
of morality and its implications for moral education, then, 
may have been due. 

Although this paper is not intended to confirm this 
hypothesis, it is useful to bear it in mind when contrasting 
pedagogical assumptions in the moral domain with those 
current in others.  What contemporary questions and 
concerns may have prepared Piaget’s readers for his bold 
pedagogical prescriptions?  Might some set of shared 
commitments continue today to inform current 
understandings of the pedagogical implications of 
developmental theory within the moral domain? 

Fernando Vidal’s intellectual biography of Piaget’s 
early adulthood establishes the cultural and personal 
circumstances within which Piaget came to feel a pressing 
need to reconcile his belief in a Protestant God with the 
dictates of evolutionary science (Vidal, 1994).7  As Piaget 
himself characterized it at the time, these theological 
struggles only subsided in response to his ecstatic embrace of 
an immanent God.8  Human reason, in its demonstrable 
power to master material reality to compelling end, came to 
represent this Immanence for the adolescent Piaget.  Within 
two years, Piaget had cast off the religious framing, yet still 
sought to establish a biological basis of morality, a goal he 
linked with establishing the biological roots of reason (Vidal, 
1987, 1994; Chapman, 1986, 1988).  

In The Moral Judgment of the Child, written fifteen 
years later, Piaget speaks of experiencing “the higher and 
purely immanent feeling of obligation, which is the product 
of rational necessity” (1965/32, p. 370), and states that only 
those who are deaf to this internal call could ever imagine 
abject deference to external authority to be a reflection of 
moral feeling.  In this language, one hears the theological 
roots of Piaget’s commitment to locating moral authority 
within and to characterizing it as a function of independent 

reason.  Certainly, his oft-quoted observation from The 
Moral Judgment of the Child, “Logic is the morality of 
thought just as morality is the logic of action” (ibid, p.398), 
powerfully conveys his enduring attachment to the equation 
he had posited as a young man between lucid reason and 
moral right. 

Although Piaget concurred with those who claimed 
that morality is an inherently social phenomenon, he objected 
to the notion that moral law exists outside of or prior to the 
specific human relations that construct it.  That morality 
depends upon people reasoning together in relation to evident 
realities, he felt, could be seen in the ways in which the older 
boys he studied came to view the origins and status of the 
rules of the game of marbles as contingent rather than 
absolute.  As Piaget put it, “Social laws are unfinished and 
their progressive formation presupposes the unfettered 
cooperation of personal reason” (ibid, p. 370). 

To the extent Piaget intended to distinguish between 
social and physical laws in this last quotation, he would 
likely have viewed such a distinction as a matter of degree 
rather than of kind. For Piaget, all knowledge resulted from 
the collaborative investigation and theorizing of material, 
social, and psychological structures, and all forms of 
knowledge were interdependent and progressive.9  The 
relative ease with which Piaget’s prescriptions for moral 
education were understood and appreciated, however, 
suggests that Piaget may have underestimated the degree to 
which an opposition between social and physical laws 
functioned within the popular imagination.   

If educators perceive certain types of culturally 
established understandings, say in math or science, as more 
absolute than those in the moral realm, they may be less 
likely to invest themselves in nurturing the quality of 
reasoning required for genuine participation in those 
domains.  As noted above, if the premises and logics of other 
fields also seem more complicated, or less readily apparent 
through one’s interactions with the world, such participation 
may come to seem the legitimate province of only a few.  
Educators may therefore tend to consider students’ active 
intellectual engagement in the reasoning of these fields 
nearly impossible and therefore irrelevant -- both for them 
and for society at large.  

 
A generative convergence of three common classroom 

dynamics 
Consider the depth of understanding 

developmentally oriented educators and guardians seek to 
foster in even very young children in the moral domain.  By 
pre-school, students are expected to appreciate fundamental 
moral purposes, such as getting along peaceably with their 
classmates, and are taught to bring organizing premises and 
logics to bear in the dispensation of moral issues that arise in 
a classroom. (If Sharon expects Tyler to account for her 
feelings, than she must account for Tyler’s.)  By first grade, 
students are expected to be able to reason through minor 
moral dilemmas themselves, by taking each other’s 
perspectives and the larger social context into consideration.   

Inevitably, relevant issues continually present 
themselves in any democratically oriented group setting: 



16 

space and material must be shared, others’ feelings must be 
appreciated, and harmful behavior must be contained.  The 
intellectual struggles demanded in these situations are as 
necessary to relationship as are the struggles required to learn 
one’s first language.  As Piaget himself pointed out, it is a 
child’s feelings of warmth toward, interest in, and respect for 
elders and peers that inspire the first moral leanings.  To a 
large extent, then, the development of these leanings is 
undertaken not just willingly, but without question.  It is 
work that must be done if one does not want to be socially 
isolated. 

A sense of practical necessity has naturally 
informed the authority figure’s relationship with the moral 
realm as well.  As adults, and as children before that, they 
have also been called upon to make sense of their culture’s 
moral understandings relative to the experiences of their own 
lives.  Perhaps in general terms, then, teachers can be thought 
to possess greater practical expertise in bringing the 
constituent logics and premises of moral reasoning to bear in 
resolving concrete issues than in the academic subject areas. 
In contemporary pluralistic democracies, basic moral 
precepts are no longer recited from a book, and it is not to a 
book that most educators will turn in order to resolve the 
moral issues classroom life presents. 

Finally, in reflecting on the nature of the social 
realities that the child must accommodate in the moral realm 
in order to sustain peer and authority relationships, one sees 
that these are not only socially constructed, but that certain 
basic agreements are socially necessary.  Even those most 
committed to reasoning out all matters with children will 
recognize the need to uphold behavioral standards that keep 
people safe and make relationship and communication 
possible; moral reasoning therefore tends to occur in contexts 
where such standards are in place.  A child may be 
encouraged to come to terms with these standards in a 
manner he or she finds meaningful, but he or she is required 
to respect them regardless.   

If authority figures do appreciate their necessary 
role in negotiating various moral dilemmas, they are more 
likely to play this role effectively.  A tension is thereby 
activated between the child’s emergent understandings and 
culturally established ones.  The shifts of perspective this 
requires of the child may serve to challenge and to foster the 
child’s thinking.10  If so, such activity likely bolsters 
educators’ and guardians’ sense of themselves as capable of 
educating effectively based upon this belief.   

This logic would suggest the need to extend and 
elaborate the role Piaget theorized for authority figures in 
moral education.  Although Piaget acknowledged that adult 
authority may constitute “a necessary moment in the moral 
education of the child” (p.319), this argument would indicate 
that adult authority actually plays a central and continuing 
role in constructing the circumstances within which even 
older children are able to appreciate the culture’s moral 
reasoning and to incorporate it into their own lives.   

 
Conclusion 

 “In the moral as in the intellectual domain we really 
possess only what we have conquered ourselves” (p. 366), 

Piaget said.  From this statement, as well as from all that he 
said about education throughout his career, we know he 
thought his recommendations for moral education -- which 
emphasized children’s independent intellectual efforts to 
make sense on their own terms -- applicable to all areas of 
knowledge.  Nonetheless, the recounting of established 
academic understandings, what Piaget termed “verbalism” 
and reviled as a pedagogical aim, remains an acceptable and 
even principal educational outcome in many academic 
disciplines, particularly at the secondary level.   

I have proposed that three factors -- our vested 
interest in believing everyone can reason morally, our 
cultural prioritizing of foundational moral understandings, 
and our sense that moral understandings can be uncovered 
through interactions with each other and the world -- together 
support a willingness among developmentally oriented 
educators and guardians to engage children in moral 
reasoning.  In contrast, a relative discomfort with the 
fundamental purposes, premises, logics, and their material 
and theoretical bases in the various academic realms, as well 
as a sense that reasoning in these areas is less necessary and 
that not all are truly capable may tend to perpetuate 
traditional teaching methods in these areas.   

In addition, reflection on the classroom context has 
suggested that several classroom dynamics may implicitly 
support teachers’ effectiveness in this domain.  I have argued 
that the ready availability of pressing and situated moral 
issues leads to a practical expertise on the part of teachers 
and eventually students.  This expertise may, in turn, foster a 
teacher’s willingness to engage central and reoccurring 
questions over time and in a variety of circumstances, leading 
to a depth of understanding regarding the relevance of certain 
concepts for daily life.  

Finally, I have proposed that an implicit tension is 
generally in place in the domain of moral education between 
the personal investigations and peer negotiations that Piaget 
advocates and the culturally rooted performance parameters 
authority figures generally insist upon.  This tension may 
help to support the kind of growth that educators and 
guardians recognize as acceptable.  If true, such a conclusion 
suggests that Piaget under-theorized the role that established 
performance standards play in inspiring intellectual growth in 
the moral realm.   
 

Bibliography A 
 
Chapman, M. (1988). Constructive evolution: Origins and 

development of Piaget’s thought. Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press. 

Chapman, M. (1986). “The structure of exchange: Piaget’s 
sociological theory.” Human Development, 29(2), 
181-194. 

Gruber, H. & Vonèche, J. (1977).  The Essential Piaget.  New 
York: Basic Books. 

Kuhn, T. (1962/96). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 

Mayer, S. (2003).  The Character of and Academic Response 
to Jean Piaget’s Clinical Method in Its Early Years.  
Qualifying Paper.  Harvard University. 



17 

Piaget, J. (1923/1959). The Language and Thought of the 
Child. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. 

Piaget, J. (1928/1951). Judgment and Reasoning in the Child. 
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. 

Piaget, J. (1930/1969). The Child’s Conception of the World. 
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.  

Piaget, J. (1927/1969). The Child’s Conception of Physical 
Causality. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. 

Piaget, J. (1932/1965). The Moral Judgment of the Child. 
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. 

Piaget, J., (1970). Structuralism. New York: Harper 
Torchbooks. 

Vidal, F. (1987). Jean Piaget and the Liberal Protestant 
Tradition.  In M.G. Ash & W. R. Woodward (Eds.), 
Psychology in Twentieth-Century Thought and 
Society, (pp. 271-294).  Cambridge University Press. 

Vidal, F. (1994). Piaget Before Piaget. Cambridge and 
London: Harvard University Press. 

Vidal, F. (2000).  Entry on Jean Piaget.  In A. Kazdin (Ed.), 
Encyclopedia of Psychology. Pp. 193-196)   New 
York: Oxford University Press. 

Vygotsky, L., (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of 
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Harvard University Press. 

 
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Reviews of Piaget’s first five works in the field 
 
Blumer, H. (1930/31). [Review of The Child’s Conception of 

the World]  American Journal of Sociology, 36:1/6, 
150. 

Chadwick, M. (1926).  [Review of The Language and 
Thought of the Child]  International Journal of 
Psychoanalysis, 7, 518. 

Chrisof, C. (1938).  [Review of La Naissance de 
L’Intelligence Chez L’Enfant]  American Journal of 
Psychology, 51, 200. 

Fernberger, S.W. (1927). [Review of The Language and 
Thought of the Child]  Psychological Bulletin, 24, 
506.  

Gould, M.C. (1928). [Review of La representation du monde 
chez l’enfant]   American Journal of Psychology, 40, 
658. 

Hazlitt, V. (1932). [Review of The Child’s Conception of 
Physical Causality] Pedagogical Seminary and 
Journal of Genetic Psychology, 40, 243-249. 

Issacs, S. (1929a). [Review of The Language and Thought of 
the Child, The Child’s Conception of the World, and 
Judgement and Reasoning in the Child] Pedagogical 
Seminary and Journal of Genetic Psychology, 36, 
597-607. 

Issacs, S. (1929b). [Review of The Child’s Conception of the 
World.]   Mind, 38, 506. 

Issacs, S. (1966).  Intellectual Growth in Young Children.  
New York: Schocken Books.  (Originally published in 
1930).  

Issacs, S. (1931). [Review of The Child’s Conception of 
Causality]  Mind, 40, 506. 

Issacs, S. (1934). [Review of The Moral Judgment of the 
Child]  Mind, 43, 85. 

Issacs, S. (1972).  Social Development in Young Children.  
New York: Schocken Books.  (Originally published in 
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Leonard, S. (1929). [Review of The Language and Thought of 
the Child]  English Journal, 18 (Jan/Dec), 520. 

Mitchell, L.S. (1927).  [Review of Language and Thought of 
the Child]  Progressive Education, pp.136-139. 

Murray, E. (1931). [Review of The Child’s Conception of the 
World]   American Journal of Psychology, 43, 154. 

Peterson, J. (1929).  [Review of La causalite physique chez 
l’enfant]   American Journal of Psychology, 41, 481. 

Peterson, J. (1932).  [Review of The Child’s Conception of 
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44, 612. 

Peterson, J. (1935).  [Review of The Moral Judgment of the 
Child]   American Journal of Psychology, 47, 523. 

[Journal Review of the book The Moral Judgment of the 
Child]  (1932/33).  Child Study: A Journal of Parent 
Education. 10, 175. 

Schoen, M. (1933). [Review of The Moral Judgment of the 
Child]   Journal of Educational Psychology, 24,157. 

Searles, H. (1934).  [Review of the book The Moral Judgment 
of the Child]  Personalist, 15:4, 363. 

Smith, R. (1933).  [Review of The Moral Judgment of the 
Child]  Progressive Education, 10, 237. 

Stone, C.  (1929/1930).  [Review of Judgment and Reasoning 
in the Child]  Journal of Abnormal Psychology and 
Social Psychology,   24, 239. 

Stone, C.  (1930/1931). [Review of The Child’s Conception of 
the World]  Journal of Abnormal Psychology and 
Social Psychology, 25, 93. 

Stonier, G.  (1932).  [Review of The Moral Judgment of the 
Child]  The New Statesman and Nation, 33, 605. 

Warden, C. J. (1931).  [ Review of The Child’s Conception of 
Physical Causality]  Pedagogical Seminary and 
Journal of Genetic Psychology, 39, 296. 

Weber, C. (1927).  [Review of The Language and Thought of 
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White, W.  (1927). [Review of The Language and Thought of 
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White, W.  (1929). [Review of The Language and Thought of 
the Child and Judgment and Reasoning in the Child] 
Psychoanalytic Review, 16, 312. 

White, W.  (1929). [Review of The Child’s Conception of the 
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18 

                                                

Notes 

 
1 This paper is based upon another entitled “An Elaboration 
of the Pedagogical Vision Implied by Piaget’s Call for Moral 
Reasoning,” which I presented at the Jean Piaget Society 
Annual Meeting in 2004. 
2 Historian Fernando Vidal’s biographical entry on Piaget 
(Vidal, 2000) cites Piaget’s pedagogical influences in both 
moral and science education.  I would argue, though, that 
Piaget’s influence in the scientific realm has been somewhat 
anomalous, relying as it largely has on the elaboration of 
Piaget’s experimental protocols themselves.  
3 “Progressive” pedagogical approaches, defined here as 
those that have attended to children’s own forms of reasoning 
and that have encouraged children to make sense of various 
realities on their own terms, clearly informed classroom 
practice (in progressive schools) prior to the advent of 
Piaget’s research.  Educator Lucy Sprague Mitchell, who 
favorably reviewed Piaget’s first work, Language and 
Thought of the Child, for Progressive Education in 1927, 
termed it “a relief to the layman” and closed with the 
following  “. . . I believe no one of his major conclusions is 
new to teachers who have been observing children’s behavior 
objectively in their successive growth stages and who regard 
their work as the establishment of an environment suited to 
meet these needs of growth.” 
4  In Piaget’s investigations into the development of scientific 
and mathematical concepts, he generally identified at least 
three stages. 
5  See particularly pp. 353-371, where Piaget discusses the 
implications of Durkheim’s theory for the authoritative 
relation. 
6 (Mayer, ibid) I located eight reviews of The Moral 
Judgment of the Child and thirty-three, all together, of the 
first five works in the field (see bibliography B). 
7 See particularly chaps. 5-10. 
8 See Gruber and Vonèche, (1977), pp.26-37.  These excerpts 
from Piaget’s prose poem of the time, ‘The Mission of the 
Idea’ powerfully demonstrate the quality of Piaget’s 
attachment to this vision. 
9  See Piaget’s brief work, Structuralism (1970), particularly 
the final chapter on “Structuralism and Philosophy.”  See 
also Gruber and Vonèche for a concise treatment of Piaget’s 
epistemological commitments (1977, pp. 735-743). 
10  Those familiar with psychologist Lev Vygotsky’s zone of 
proximal development (1978) will note some resonance 
between this claim and the arguments with which Vygotsky 
supports that theory. 
 
 


