Abstract: From Freud to today most of writers especially educational researchers think a lot how moral development of any person preschool to post doctoral students develop or give chance to open personal sense to become morale. This study argues a new theoretical approach for how moral development occurs and starts.This study is simplified and shortened from of Usakli, H. in 2010. Recurrent issue in the moral development of children and the need for a new approach. Occasional Papers in Education and Lifelong Learning: An International Journal 4 1-2 97-109.

INTRODUCTION

Moral concerns principles of right and wrong behavior. Especially being moral ethically means the courage to face opposition bravely when doing what is right. It is based on people ’s sense of what is right and just not on legal rights and obligations. It is the following standards of right behavior; good or virtuous. It is being able to understand the differences between right and wrong. It is the teaching or illustrating good behavior.

Moral is all collective behaviors which was accepted by group or specific environment. Distinguished Turkish philosopher Hancerlioglu states that moral is a science that determines and investigates whole behavioral roles of society within specific term. Another Turkish well known philosopher Develioglu claims that moral is a profound science that teaches us all rules and norms to be good or make goodness for others and to scruple from bad manners.

Driscoll and Nagel (2008) clarify that introduction to moral development that families should start to teach children first is very important. That ’s why when we teach the children why bad is bad or good is good, we have to make statements and good explanation for the children.

If we wonder why moral development is important or what the root of this is the only solution, we have to look at Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Socrates meno (Nucci, 2001). Child rearing customs and strategies are not so different from past to today. Socialization of children which is moral development is the most important feature of children.

Now with in complexity of society if we want the children ’s society and socialization and good relations with us and connection of future generation, we should know moral development. Is moral development for children universal or does it only depends on rearing surroundings of children? What is waiting for the children ’s moral structures in the near future? We are going to get closer and force ourselves to answer this question.

Are moral rules changeable? According to Heimsoeth these rules can not be changeable. Moral is something with in strict rules and it is determinist.

MORAL DEVELOPMENT IS VERY IMPORTANT PROGRESS FOR ANY HUMAN RELATION

Certain ideas and recommendations about human development influence a great deal of today particularly in shaping children rearing, educational settings and research environment about old tradition and moral values.

This study is vital for re-examining how people morally develop. From early studies to today, there are lots of writings about moral development. But all writings can ’t go beyond to early philosophers ideas. What is good or what is awesome? When we think deeply to give answer for this kind of question for a group of children, this isn ’t easy to explain philosophic terms.

HISTORICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES OF MORAL DEVELOPMENT

Confucius (551-479 B.C.E.) believed that humans are social beings. They must interact with society without necessarily surrendering to it and more individual will attempt to change to conform to the moral path (Ozmon and Craver, 1999).

Idealist view of educational philosophy concerned with moral character as an outgrowth of thinking and thoughtful actions. According to idealists, moral conviction causes wisdom itself. In Augustine ideas, God is the highest wisdom and this is also the highest moral principle. Contrast to theologians who said that God is unknowable, Hegel believed that individual can know God.

Kant sees character development as a proper aim of education. He made reason not God, the source of moral law; consequently, the only thing in morality valuable is good will. All these ideas summarized within Butler point of view which is that any education worth of the name is character education. Education of will which was emphasized by Horne means that students should be educated to resist temptations and to apply themselves to useful tasks. Development of loyalty that is main ideas of gentile is an important aspect of character education.

Realists put great emphasis on the practical side of education and their concept of practical includes education for moral and character development. John Locke, Johann f. Herbart and Herbert Spencer all held that the chief aim of education should be moral education. Whitehead was close to this position when he said that the essence of education is that it be religious. Spencer (in his essay What Knowledge Is of Most Worth?) held that science provides for both moral and intellectual education because the pursuit of science demands integrity, self-sacrifice and courage. For Locke, good character is superior to intellectual training however, Locke ’s views on character education seem to have been directed primarily at the english gentry of his day who were supposed to set examples for the test of society. Hebart thought that moral education is founded on knowledge and Spencer agreed with this theory (Ozmon and Craver, 1999).

THEORETICAL BASE OF MORAL DEVELOPMENT

Freud is the key person whose research is milestone or start point of modern educational psychology especially in personality development. According to him, importance of life span is given 0-5 years of age. He mainly concentrates on emotional component and the moral issues of Freudian theory based on superego of which consist of conscience and ego ideal. Formation of superego depends on identification of child ’s same sex parent while getting over conflict of Oedipus and Electra complexes.

Due to less anxiety while resolving Electra conflict for girls according to psychoanalytic theory, girls have a bit weaker superego. Stressing on Oedipus and Electra conflicts in moral development in Freudian theory mainly is structured by parents. Consciously, becoming member of society requires obedience of these rules. According to Freudian view, desire of sex and aggression is also big issue for a person (Freud, 1961). It seems that Piaget ’s ideas aroused reaction to Durkheim (1925) who viewed moral development as a process of instilling respect for society so each member would conform to social norms. Piaget agreed with Durkheim on re-moral development of young children (learning to conform to social prescriptions).

By going into the years and with in society, children became mature, they also learned how to cooperate with others with the help of reasoning including analysis of ways to reconcile competing interests and goals. Morality of constraint vs. Morality of cooperation two main concepts of Piaget ’s sharpened systemology depends on cognitive development. Not all morality is imposed by the group upon the individual or by the adult on the child (Piaget, 1932).

There are two levels of analysis as in linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) and Noam Chomsky ’s (1928) ideas on language development:

The morality of constraint is that of duty pure and simple and of heteronomy. The child accepts from the adult a certain number of commands to which it must submit whatever the circumstances may be. Right is what conforms to these commands; wrong is what fails to do so the intention plays a very small part in this conception and the responsibility is entirely objective (Piaget, 1932).

Unilateral respect for adults is children's motivation for moral behavior: It is easy to draw this conclusion that is the morality of cooperation is more equilibrated than the morality of constraint:

There are two major descriptions on children's motivation for moral behavior: The first is mutual respect of collaborators for one another and desire for solidarity in coordinating their activity for their mutual benefit. This mutual respect and solidarity are mainly the occurrence between child and adult. There are also differentiated adults and peers interaction between children. Observations by Piaget reveal these statements.

Adults are overbearing, authoritarian, demand obedience; teach ought but not means of cooperation. Peers are less compelling; communicate their views and needs and rationales; respect the autonomous role of the child. Stage-like relationship between the two moralities.According to Piaget in these moral bases each of them is a logically coherent system of ideas about morality which constitutes the deep structure that underlies specific moral judgments. It is impossible to say every stage has been developing independently. The structures are not only developmentally but also logically sequenced. The child's level of moral judgment is revealed by the surface structure, i.e., behavior and stated reasons for moral judgments.

Searching for manner in two pools as right which is good or logically, there is no harm to do and wrong that is bad or causes undesired situations. These are the main idea of moral development of Piagetian ideology. Jean Piaget said there were two stages in this point of moral development, the heteronomous stage and the autonomous stage. In the heteronomous stage, we determine the right and wrong from the rules and laws by not really knowing why it is wrong or not. A moral person can differentiate between right and wrong.

After a while Piaget makes clear how a child development occurs cognitively. According to him, there are three moral developmental stages for any child. Rules, intention and punishment shape the child ’s moral development. About 0-5 ages are named as premoral. In this stage, the child ’s age and limited interaction with outside of home cause to little understanding about rules. About 5-10 years are the moral realism stage when the child starts to face punishment and justice.

Exploration of punishment and psychological immanent justice is one of the chief factors in which the child interacts with real world. After 10 years of age, moral relativism period starts. Recognizing personal aims, goals or intention and punishment of vice versa process are characteristics of this period.

In Fig. 1, Piaget ’s moral developmental hierarchy modal was shown. Cognitive elements of being moral were focus of Kohlberg ’s study. According to educational psychology and educational philosophy, researchers approve that Kohlberg theory gains us an insight how any children develop their own morality regretless of cultural background. There are three levels of moral development in this theory. These are pre-conventional, conventional and post-conventional morality. Internal abstract ideas and external rewards are realty and how can we regulate them morally? Disequilibrium is the motivation of moral reasoning development.

Fig. 1:	Piaget ’s moral development hierarchy

Moral development goes on from early years of age through to early adulthood. Kohlberg feels that child ’s moral development isn ’t as simple as how was explained by Piaget. According to him, there must be more stages than Piaget ’s hierarchy (Kohlberg, 1971). He developed 6 stages model which was broken down into three levels and with 2 stages at each level. Table 1 shows Kohlberg ’s moral developmental sequence.

As it is shown in Table 1, there is no age interval. Perhaps this is the one of the advantages of Kohlberg ’s moral development theory. The theory provides both for explaining past moral-judgment behavior of children and youths and for predicting their future behavior.

Not only does it permit predictions but also does it permit predictions for the average child but by proposing four interacting determinants of moral-judgment development, it offers the possibility of doing so for individuals as well. The moral education scheme which Kohlberg has founded on his theory offers clear guidance for child rearing. However, critiques of the traditional approach find flaws inherent in this model. This approach provides no guiding principle for defining which virtues are worthy of espousal and wrongly assumes a community consensus on what are considered positive values. In fact, teachers often end up arbitrarily imposing certain values depending upon their societal, cultural and personal beliefs. In order to address this issue of ethical relativity, some have adopted the values-clarification approach to moral education.

This teaching practice is based on the assumption that there are no single, correct answers to ethical dilemmas but that there is value in holding clear views and acting accordingly. In addition, there is a value of toleration of divergent views. It follows then that the teacher's role is one of the discussion moderator with the goal of teaching merely that people hold different values; the teacher does attempt to present her views as the right views.

Table 1:	Kohlberg ’s moral development
Kohlberg, 1969

Kohlberg and his research group come across about moral development theory ’s drawbacks. So these foundlings lead them to review all stages in holistic idea. These drawbacks or anomalies as Gibbs (2003) stated, lead to Kohlberg to add one more stage; metaphorical stage 7. Researchers committed to the basic Kohlberg ’s framework to resolve those anomalies through adjustments in the stage descriptions (Power et al., 1989, reference for an account of those changes). There are other theorists on the contrary, who found that a comprehensive resolution to disfeature of data required substantial adjustments in the theory itself. The domain theory that was advanced by Turiel (1983) has been one of the most productive lines of research to come out of that period.

A second major critique of Kohlberg's research was put forth by Gilligan (1982). In her popular book, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development Gilligan highlights sexism in Kohlberg studies. She suggested that Kohlberg's theories were biased against women as only males were used in his studies. By listening to women's experiences, Gilligan offered that a morality of care could serve in the place of the morality of justice and rights exposed by Kohlberg. In her view, the morality of caring and responsibility was premised in nonviolence while the morality of justice and rights was based on equality. Another way to look at these differences is to view these two moralities as providing two distinct injunctions-the injunction not to treat others unfairly (justice) and the injunction not to turn away from someone in need (care). She presents these moralities as a distinct, although potentially connected (Nucci, 2001). As Peters (1971) stated, Kohlberg ’s findings are important unquestionably but there is a grave danger that they may become exalted into a general theory of moral development. Any such general theory presupposes a general ethical theory.

Kohlberg himself surely will be the first to admit that he has done little to develop the details of such a general ethical theory. Yet without such a theory, the notion of moral development is pretty unsustainable.

Kohlberg ’s theory with in all theories which have been reinvestigated so far has taken praise and criticism. Although there are shortcomings about this theory, it can be said that it has a wider view on moral development.

Assessing moral development is crucial. Bull (1969) states that even so sketchy a picture of the contemporary moral scene gives ample justification for concern and for the growing interest in moral education in schools.

Heteronomy
External morality: In the stage of heteronomy, the child is dominated by rules imposed by others.

Socionomy
External-internal morality: The stage of socionomy has two essential characteristics. There is development within the child in growing awareness of others and of responsibilities towards them.

Autonomy
Internal morality: The highest stage of moral development must be this in which the individual has his own inner ideas of conduct.

CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES ON MORAL DEVELOPMENT

There are contemporary approaches on children moral development in two decades. Moral thinking is important for decision making as a whole because most real decisions involve moral issues at least because they affect other people. Baron (2007) states that there are some emotions which are related to moral behavior in particular such as guilt feelings, anger and empathic sadness or joy.

Understanding emotions is thus an important part of children ’s theory of mind, part of their socialization, part of their moral development (Meadows, 1986; Nunner-Winkler and Sodian, 1988) and part of their mental health. In the subsequent development of social understanding, contributions are made first by the intensity of the child ’s self-concern in the context of family relationships and second by the child ’s participation in the moral discourse of the family.

One of the different issue is about economy is child ’s understanding of socio-economic systems. Children ’s development including their social cognition has mainly been studied in terms of microsystems such as home or school or mesosystems such as the relationships of agreement or discrepancy between home and school (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). Home and school are of course the settings most immediately relevant to children but they live also as we all do within wider socio-economic worlds.

Their part in the economic and political system is less prominent than their part in the life of the family and we may overlook it in ways to disadvantage children (Leach argues this strongly) but it is nevertheless of potential interest to developmental psychologists. Turiel (1983) argues that it is reflected in the three general categories of children ’s social cognition: their concepts of persons or psychological systems, their concepts of systems of social relations, organization and institutions and their moral judgments of justice, rights and welfare.

MORAL DEVELOPMENT AND GROUP INTERACTION

Stating a contemporarily perspectives for moral development leads us feeling of some development of global change. From early philosophical approaches to today ’s views, there is slight change on moral development. Being good or desired person seems no care or none of business of younger people. Especially teenage or young adults habits of smoking, alcohol use, drug taking and narcotic dependence are deeply concern of world. In addition of these, AIDS has been still chief problem of all countries around the word.

Global warming, environmental deserters, wars, shrinking fresh water have been also deeply affected the interaction between people. In contrast to old time customs, living in a larger family today ’s people prefer to live loneliness. Sexual preference, abortion, adaptation and having baby, getting sperm from sperm bank have started to change moral structures of people. Feeling good person as you are without confession, afraid of God without 5 times prays and thoughts of other religions seem not to be the concerns of people.

Now a days, mothers and fathers prefer fewer babies to rear and most babies and children protected by governmental cares. This forces us to develop new moral developmental approaches. The aim of this study only to inform how moral developmental theories shape briefly and the other aim is to draw attention to new views. Here is a brief description of moral development with in group structures.

Fist stage is dual communication: Dual relation is regardless of ages how people are only give their attention to their first expression to the last of the moment that this expression is end. We say hello, hi, selam is same evidence for dual morality.

Second stage is triangular information change: No matter what the age differences are when people with the same cultural backgrounds of sex come together they start to change information that they wanted to share. They can introduce themselves to each other and self disclose about their political or religious beliefs or they share ordinary knowledge such as a recipe of a meal or a mending any broken thing. Gossiping, joking, heart to heart talks all this structures are examples of triangular morality.

Third stage is quartet striving for superiority: In group structures, every participator seeks for moral superiority in group of fourth people by expressing some statements such as I am the best, I can do better that I feel like the only person who is okay. Quartet morality is kind of interaction and communication or administrational hierarchy.

Fourth stage is fifth group judgment evaluation: It is the meeting of five people whatever their relation is they can be friend or they can be colleagues or they are the people of first time meet. They mostly think that s/he can be wrong; yeah s/he can be right, this can be an alternative for solution. Juries, evaluation communities has fifth some morality.

DISCUSSION

This is very short explanation of how moral development occurs. More than 50th years have passed away from profound theories of moral development. Today ’s technological, global and crowded word settings need much more than to understand moral development. This is the time when to say only folk psychology sex, aggression, values, ethics, authenticism or self actualization. All of these are the concepts of individuality. Searching for meaning under sex and aggression that Freud (1961) stressed seems to be renew the interaction. There is no day without human rights violation. Children and women most affected this unresolved difficulty. Intellectual ability which we desire for as scholar to be as equal as in all parts of globe is a utopia how Piaget (1932) taught us. It is high time to seek the roots of moral developments in group structures. Complexity of Kohlberg (1969) ’s moral development still protects its folk tale myth. From pain killers to antibiotics, children can give answer to Heinz story Okay he doesn ’t need to still because all chemicals harmful. Sexual role identities have been changing. It is apparent that women are in every where from all kinds of sport activities to management position in international companies. Mass media especially TV channels and net connection surround us limitlessly. Children are playing internet games in groups. Interaction with in society is crucial even if peer relations are effective for The wisdom with in moral perspective.

Rapid globalization forces educators for new arrangements in educational policy. We are reaching of seven billions of world population. Without groups and group interaction it is useless talking about moral development it the way of observing single life. Five children from different countries will be easily come together to discuss not only global issues but also their interested topics. It is recommended that comprehensive experimental research should be conducted.