Nowadays, moral education and moral development of a personality become extremely important. In my opinion, to achieve best results in up bringing of new generations people have to know and use experience of such psychologists as Piaget and Kohlberg whose theories, being closely related, remain quite actual even now and they are still relevant to contemporary theories of moral development. In my work I’m going to compare and contrast two theories of Piaget and Kohlberg, namely they are the theory of cognitive development and the theory of moral development.

First of all, it is necessary to say that basic ideas of both theories correlate because both Piaget and Kohlberg believe that the personal development is influenced by heredity and by a person’s social environment. Moreover, they state that since early childhood a moral development is provided through interaction of a child with peers. Such interaction with peers, who are treated by children as equal, and with adults, who from the beginning are viewed as authorities, makes children evaluate in their moral development. To explain it more precisely, I have to say that children in their peer groups challenge each other and, finally, they force each other to change their moral orientation. During peer interaction children form give-and-take relationship but gradually they realize that all of them have certain “needs and feelings that must be taken care of” (Nucci, 1989). As for relations with adults, both Piaget and Kohlberg agree that adults, being a high authority for children, create and enforce rules that make their relations quite different from those that exist within peer groups. Also Piaget and Kohlberg pay much attention to IQ and moral education that they think is not less important than heredity and environment.

One more way in which two theories practically coincide is that “Kohlberg’s moral stages are directly related to Piaget’s cognitive stages. The ability to reason morally grows as a person reaches a certain level of cognitive ability” ( Nucci, 1989). The evidence of this may be found in children’s egocentrism that is a particular characteristic of elementary age children. Then children grow and evaluate through different stages of moral development and always their levels of moral reasoning relate to children’s cognitive development. In the final stage, according to Kohlberg, a person is able to reason with abstract principles, while, according to Piaget’s theory, “in order to handle abstract principles, a person has to have reached this level of cognitive development in formal operation stage”(Killen, Hart 1995).

Generally speaking, Kohlberg modified and followed the work started by Piaget. He continued to study the development of moral judgment beyond the ages studied by Piaget and he also disagreed with Piaget and estimated that “the process of attaining moral maturity took longer and was more gradual than Piaget had proposed”( Killen, Hart 1995). It also seems to me that Kohlberg was more relevant to the study of adolescence because he pay much attention to school moral education while Piaget focused more attention on the early ages of children’s development. Also he gave optimal context to grow morally by creating “just community” school approach towards promoting moral development” (Killen, Hart 1995).

Thus, it is obvious that Piaget’s theory of cognitive development and Kohlberg’s theory of moral development are really close to one another but, at the same time, they have some differences, probably due to the fact that Kohlberg continued and developed ideas of Piaget. However, it doesn’t make any of them as well as their works less important for the development of contemporary psychology.