Developing Self-Discipline and Preventing and Correcting Misbehavior

This text offers a balanced and comprehensive approach to show how a variety of research-supported and practical strategies and techniques are used to prevent and correct misbehavior and to help achieve the long-term aim of developing self-discipline. Rather than focusing on untested models of classroom discipline this book presents a more balanced and comprehensive approach to classroom discipline, balancing the perspective of character educators and the perspective of those who are concerned about managing and correcting misbehavior. This text encourages teachers to reflect upon critical issues of classroom discipline and their beliefs, recognize multiple perspectives toward classroom discipline, and be able to select and apply the most effective techniques that not only prevent and correct misbehavior but also serve the long-term aim of developing self-discipline.

Journal of Moral Education

Vol. 35, No. 3, September 2006, pp. 407–427

Character psychology and character education

Daniel K. Lapsley and F. Clark Power (Eds), 2005

New York & Notre Dame, IN., Notre Dame Press

$55.00 (clothbound), $25.00 (pbk), 352 pp.

ISBN 0-268-03371-4 (clothbound), ISBN 0-268-03372-2 (pbk)

This new collection of essays on the moral education of character, edited by two

distinguished contemporary theorists of moral education and including contributions by

other psychologists and philosophers of reputation, would appear to mark something of a

turning point in latter day theorising about moral education. In brief, it represents

something of a shift from the dominant Kohlbergian ‘cognitive developmental’ paradigm

of the past half century (even on the part of some of those most closely connected with the

development of that model) towards the more recently (especially in the USA but also now

more widely) emerging paradigm of character education. While this is certainly no mere

capitulation to fashion, and despite the continued fidelity of many in this volume to the

best theoretical insights of Kohlberg ― sometimes via attempted bridge-building between

cognitive developmentalism and character education ― it is nevertheless the aim of many of

the present essays to explore the limits of Kohlbergian moral epistemology and

psychology, particularly with respect to the social and motivational dimensions of moral

engagement. From this viewpoint, many chapters of this work raise and address profound

conceptual and theoretical problems that have also long exercised the present reviewer.

That said, given that the introduction, postscript and thirteen chapters of this

substantial work range quite widely in topic and approach, it should also be noted (and

perhaps expected) that the contributions vary somewhat in quality. In this light, since it

is not possible to discuss each and every one in the space of a short review, a few initial

remarks about the structure and organization of the work may be in order.

Very roughly, the thirteen chapters seem (at least to this reviewer) to fall into two main

groups of six each divided by a very fine and insightful critical survey of the history of US

character education by Craig Cunningham ― an essay that should be required reading for

anyone interested in this topic. On the face of it, the six chapters that precede the

Cunningham essay seem to focus more directly on theoretical and methodological

questions concerning the role of psychological research in the theory of moral education,

and about the interface of ethics and social science ― and it is to these that I shall devote

most attention later in this review. The six chapters that follow Cunningham’s historical

essay are more broadly concerned with social, political and other contexts of character

education, and while some of these raise issues of real interest, it is arguable that they are

less concerned with the psychological study of character in the sense of the earlier

chapters. More precisely, without unduly begging questions about the boundaries

between psychology and ethics that some of the earlier chapters are clearly keen to raise,

Journal of Moral Education

Vol. 35, No. 3, September 2006, pp. 407―427

ISSN 0305-7240 (print)/ISSN 1465-3877 (online)/06/030407-21

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2006 Journal of Moral Education Ltd

DOI: 10.1080/03057240600874687