The Moral Judgment of the Child [Paperback]

Jean Piaget (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 16, 1997 | ISBN-10: 0684833301 | ISBN-13: 978-0684833309

This seminal book by this century's most important development psychologist chronicles the evolution of children's moral thinking from preschool to adolescence, tracing the concepts of lying, cheating, adult authority, punishment, and responsibility, and offering important insights into how they learn--or fail to learn--the difference between right and wrong.

Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (December 16, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684833301
• ISBN-13: 978-0684833309
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #266,821 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars ONE OF PIAGET'S MOST INTERESTING BOOKS, August 18, 2010

By 

Steven H. Propp (Sacramento, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Moral Judgment Of The Child (Hardcover)

Jean Piaget (1896-1980) was a Swiss developmental psychologist known for his epistemological studies with children. His theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are known as "genetic epistemology".

He states in the Foreword, "Readers will find this book has no direct analysis of child morality as it is practiced in home and school life or in children's societies. It is the moral judgment that we propose to investigate, not moral behaviour or sentiments. With this aim in view we questioned a large number of chldren ... and held conversations with them, similar to those we had had before on their conception of the world and of causality. The present volume contains the results of these conversations."

Here are some representative quotations from this book:

"Is it, then, the loss of belief in the divine or adult origin of rules that allows the child to think of innovations, or is it the consciousness of autonomy that dispels the myth of revelation?"

"Thus the adult leads the child to the notion of objective responsibility, and consolidates in consequence a tendency that is already natural to the spontaneous mentality of little children."

"In short, there is life and purpose in everything. Why should not things be the accomplices of grown-ups in making sure that a punishment is inflicted where the parents' vigilance may have been evaded?"

"It cannot be denied that the idea of punishment has psycho-biological roots. Blow calls for blow and gentleness moves us to gentleness ... (but) the individual factors cannot of themselves transcend the stage of impulsive vengeance without finding themselves subject---at least implicitly---to the system of regulated and codified sanctions implied in retributive justice."

"It is only by knowing our individual nature with its limitations as well as its resources that we grow capable of coming out of ourselves and collaborating with other individual natures. Consciousness of self is therefore both a product and a condition of cooperation."

"This concordance of our results with those of historico-critical or logico-sociological analysis beings us to a second point: the parallelism existing between moral and intellectual development."

2 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Reviewing: The Moral Judgement of the Child, October 26, 2005

By 

L. Karl (Mexico City, Mexico) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Moral Judgment of the Child (Paperback)

As a professional educator, it's always great to review and reread the works of the great theorists such as Piaget. I consider him to be the father of educational psychology as well as a a great cognitive theorist.