Favorable Learning Environments for Moral Competence Development. A Multiple Intervention Study with 3.000 Students in a Higher Education Context

"If other sources of ethical values have declined in influence, educators have a responsibility to contribute in any way they can to the moral development of their students," writes Derek Bok, the former president of Harvard (Bok, 1976, p. 26). Most educational policy-makers and the public seem to agree that schools and colleges should promote moral development in their students. Yet, there is still a debate whether it can be taught. A quarter of a century ago, the educational researcher Theodore Newcomb had been asked: “What does college do for a person?” His answer was clear and simple: “Frankly, very little that is demonstrable” (Newcomb, 1974). The sociologist Martin Trow even believes that mass (higher) education cannot achieve this aim at all. "I believe that the development of the capacities to make moral judgments is a characteristic of higher education as we would like it to be. There is no doubt that some of the characteristics of mass higher education, especially the impersonal processing of large numbers of students through institutions where they have little close or sustained relation to any teacher, do not aid the growth of their moral capacity." (1976, p. 25) Even Kohlbergians and neo-Kohlbergians believe that moral development does not depend on education but on chronological age: “As one would expect of a developmental variable, our data show a clear relationship between age and moral judgment stage” (Colby, Kohlberg et al., 1984).