Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

This study done by Perry and Harvard’s Bureau of Study Council
examined “an evolution in students’ interpretation of their
lives evident in their accounts of their experiences during four
years in a liberal arts college” (1), which represented “a
coherent development in the forms in which they functioned
intellectually, in the forms in which they experienced values
and the forms in which they construed their world” (11). Out of
this, Perry and his research group determined that this
“evolution,” “a common sequence of challenges” (11), took the
form of a unidirectional movement along a developmental scheme
made up of nine distinct stages, from a basic and elementary
consciousness – one of perceiving the world “in polar terms of
we-right-good vs. other-wrong-bad” (13) and “knowledge and
goodness [as] quantitative accretions of discrete rightness to
be collected by hard work and obedience” (13) – to a more, if
not most, thoroughly evolved stage, in which a student
“experiences the affirmation of identity among multiple
responsibilities and realizes Commitment as an ongoing,
unfolding activity through which he expresses his life style”
(15), thus embodying an ultimate state of what Perry called
“relativistic pragmatism,” something, in terms of its purpose
towards the democratization and further humanization of society,
remarkably similar to Schor’s “critical consciousness” (after
Freire’s “critical reflection”).
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