Painful learning and learning for hope: On the difference between teachers work for moral growth and for religious/spiritual change

Fritz K. Oser

Department of Education
University of Fribourg
Switzerland

In this presentation I would like to give an overview over recent research in moral development in context, and religious and spiritual growth with respect to acting in situations. One such phenomenon concerns the so called “unhappy moralist effect.” We can show that persons in different ages – if they have to decide between being moral and being successful – feel unhappy if they choose morality as a steering power. Let’s take a negotiation case in which instead of slightly cheating on the other and thereby receiving much more money, someone chooses to be moral – he/she feels bad afterwards, and he/she thinks he/she doesn’t have enough self-efficacy to manage life.

This effect is joined by another one. In comparing three generations (grand-parents, parents and grand-children) the grand-children’s responsibility for moral virtues and religious virtues is mostly either value-lower than the other two generations or higher than the other two generations. For instance, the statement “I do not like to share with others” on a Lickert four-point-scale was weighted much higher by grand-children than between grand-parents and parents. If we take the virtue justice, we just find the opposite tendency. Children value this much lower than the other generations (N = 132 three-generation families). Interesting is the fact, that subjects of all three generations weight the spiritual behavior as very important, whereas with respect to religious development grandparents show a significantly higher estimation towards religious judgment and religious belief. Strong moral norms or social norms that protect children and adolescents (like not taking drugs) are mostly rated very high.

Finally I would like to turn our attention to studies on the correlation between moral mistakes/moral transgressions and religious mistakes or religious judgment. These studies are accompanied by results of intervention programs that show a conceptual change with respect to exclusion, xenophobia and rightwing orientation. One unexpected result is that students who are insecure with respect to their attitude towards strangers and immigrants grow significantly toward more integrative behavior. But students who are right-wing at the beginning of the intervention are even more right-wing oriented after the intervention. They use or misuse the argumentation of integrative tendencies for their own counter-arguments. We have to find out how we can scientifically, strategically and diagnostically deal with this phenomenon.

In a final statement I would like to show that it is necessary today to combine the vertical stage-oriented growth with horizontal change. Data shows that intervention studies are only successful in this combination with respect to moral and religious/spiritual learning.