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(3) A stage of concrete operations from 7 to 11 years when the child is no longer bound by his or her perceptions at a given mo ment and can apply reasoning.
(4) A stage of formal operations from 11 years onwards in which the young adolescent can now use hypotheses, experiment, make deductions and manipulate ideas.
FAITH AND MORALITY
Educators and psychologists have also been turning their attention to the stages of development of man’s higher aspects, such as the development of his values, morality and faith. Lawrence Kohlberg, for example, who has recently established a Center for Moral Development in the School of Graduate Education at Harvard University, has defined six stages of man’s developing sense of morality—relating them to his deepening social consciousness and his capacity for intuitive, abstract, logical and insightful thinking. And James W. Fowler, Ph.D., Harvard Divinity School, defines six stages of faith development which correlate with Piaget’s cognitive, Kohlberg’s moral and Erikson’s psycho-social stages.
Each one of these developmental stages can be defined by a number of parameters, including age of occurrence; association with a certain location in the body; characteristic developmental issues such as dependency, trust and autonomy; specific drives, needs and desires; critical tasks such as walking, bowel control and socialization; particular constellations of feelings and emotions; characteristic styles and patterns of thought; types of behavior; motivations, fears and aspirations and their relationship to environmental (familial, societal, cultural and economic) influences; level of maturity of regulatory mechanisms like ego, superego and ego defenses; strengths and potential for evolution; characteristic conflicts and obstacles; and specific techniques and approaches for transcendence.
The proper and full establishment of each developmental stage presupposes a healthy and complete development of the preceding stage, with resolution of its developmental challenges, issues and conflicts. If there is unfinished business from a preceding stage, it continues into the next as an unresolved conflict still demanding attention. Therefore, an individual may exhibit at any one time conflicts, emotions and motivations characteristic of a number of different developmental stages. He or she may exhibit varying levels