| The fundamental task of this dissertation is to offer a critique of two dominant approaches in values/moral education--Values Clarification and Lawrence Kohlberg's moral theory--from the framework of Kant's moral concepts. The specific aim is to demonstrate that, by virtue of their roots in the assumptions and methods of scientific philosophy and psychology, both approaches are necessarily limited to a utilitarian-"consequentialist" ethical position. In the case of Values Clarification the outcome is a values-relativism grounded in a psycho-analytical model of freedom lacking any source of moral responsibility to others as moral beings; in the case of Kohlberg's theory, the outcome is an "ideal" utilitarianism grounded in a logico-mathematical model of freedom lacking any Kantian source of moral responsibility, notwithstanding Kohlberg's alleged debt to Kant and to John Rawls's "Kantianism." Further, albeit proponents of both approaches claim that the priority of "process" over "product" immunizes their theories from indoctrination, it is counter-argued that ethical "products" emerge which are educationally indefensible. Accordingly, this thesis differs from preceding studies (1) by examining the inadequacies and disorder in the foundational premises of both educational cases, and (2) by contrasting these cases with Kant's critical philosophy. The primary focus of contrast is that of a "developmental" epistemology which absorbs ethical freedom in the naturalistic, evolutionary processes of "affective" and/or "cognitive" growth, and Kant's epistemology which distinguishes between psychological and ethical freedom by way of his transcendental method.; Part I adumbrates the dimensions of a scientific epistemology, suggesting the limitations of this method for a theory of morals; Part II explores the assumptions of behavioristic, psychoanalytic and phenomenological "systems" in psychology, assumptions embedded in the thought of John Dewey, Jean Piaget and Carl Rogers, the influential "mentors" of the two educational theories; Part III criticizes Values Clarification and Kohlberg's theory, concluding with a contemporary interpretation of Kant's moral thesis. It is consistently argued that Kant's moral insights, and particularly the ideal of persons always as ends-in-themselves, never merely a means, offers a more adequate and defensible approach for education than the cases in point, both from a conceptual and moral point of view. |
