Actions speak louder
Clarification and identification of values is the beginning, not the end, of values education, argues David Aspin, who believes that students need to learn to become active agents of their moral beliefs and judgements
These days, there is widespread acceptance of the view that no schooling is value-free; that everything schools do—the curricula they adopt, the forms of their organisation and administration, the staff they appoint, the pedagogical approaches they take up—are all imbued with value considerations of one sort or another. This is particularly true in the case of the curriculum. In schools, values exist, are found, embodied and presented in subjects throughout the whole curriculum.
It is not uncommon for claims to be made that learning in the arts, for example, enables students to:
- affirm their cultural identities and understand their origins and histories
- clarify and reflect on their attitudes, beliefs and values
- reflect on the beliefs, values and attitudes of others
- understand how other people express their beliefs, ideas and feelings.
However, such general statements of aspiration leave some important questions unanswered. Firstly, we might point to the use of such terms in the foregoing as ‘affirm’, ‘understand’, ‘clarify’, ‘reflect on’ and ‘value’. While it is important that students develop such understanding and reflection, these terms give us no indication of what the students are actually to do when they have finished ‘valuing’ the contribution of their subjects to their lives and their community. How is that valuing to be made manifest? To what kind of conclusion is their reflection on the beliefs, values and attitudes of others to come?
All these value words express an injunction to reflection rather than to making judgements, forming conclusions or making plans for action. We are not told how students will be encouraged to demonstrate their affirmations, understandings and reflections in any public forms of action that will indicate not only that they have understood but they have also drawn the appropriate implications as to their future conduct and commitments.
This enables me to say something about one current approach to values education—that of values clarification. I agree that values are present throughout the curriculum and in all the work of educating people that schools do. Thus, it is clearly important to pay explicit attention to the place of values in the fabric of our schools’ work of educating students, and this involves being ready to get down to the hard work of identifying and clarifying them. The skill of learning how to clarify values; analyse policies and issues; see what value considerations and issues are at work in our handling of curriculum content and methods of learning and teaching; and judge whether the behavioural reality matches the moral rhetoric, is certainly a vital and indispensable feature of our lives as educators. It is important that all our colleagues in education—teachers and learners—acquire these skills.
In my view, however, values clarification will only take us part of the way in this undertaking. It misses out on the crucial element of values education. For that enterprise to do its real work, it is not sufficient for people to merely clarify the things they value and approve of, to desire those things, accept them, prefer them, incline towards them and even to seek to emulate them. People must also accept them as binding—commit to adopting and implementing particular modes of conduct, types of judgement or kinds of choice, and then commend them to other people. One has to show that their values are generalisable and action guiding.
Thus, it is not sufficient to merely analyse, identify or clarify values. There has to be an action consequence that makes a difference to us and everyone else. It is not enough to tell people about the avoidance of risk-taking behaviours or the arrival of an exhibition of great paintings. We must also try to alter their behaviour to make them shun the one and visit the other. That is the educational and moral point of this approach. School leaders, subject teachers and educational policy makers in our community have the responsibility and task not only to get students to become part of a particular community and adopt and commit to certain attitudes and beliefs, but also to secure that commitment in students’ actions and conduct as well. This means that a vital part of our educational endeavours will be to act as models of those dispositions, beliefs, values, attitudes and modes of conduct, kinds of judgement and forms of choice that we wish students to adopt for themselves.
The point for us is that all work in values and discussions involving value words and expressions, such as ‘ought’, ‘good’ and ‘wrong’, have a force and significance far beyond the subjective reactions of our own personal biological constitutions. Values and value judgements function as bridges between us; they act as targets for emulation and as guides to judgement, choices and conduct. They are objective, in that people agree or disagree about them interpersonally, even though different people place weight upon different values.
The values clarification approach enables some teachers to call into question the views often expressed in staff rooms whenever discussion of values, value judgements or values education is taking place. Some people think it a clever refutation of other people’s value judgements to voice what they take to be the irresistible rebuttal—‘Whose values?’ These people are perhaps endeavouring to assert as self-evident the contention that values are individual, subjective, irreconcilably different and in no way congruent, such that, on any matter of policy or practice, product or performance, absolute differences of opinion are to be expected, and often with the implicit conclusion that the resolution of differences in such matters reduces to the need to have recourse to power of some kind. In my view, by contrast, values are objective because they are intersubjective, and our awareness of differences between us and our interlocutors on matters of value is the start, not the end, of all discussion and attempted resolution between us.
It is in our institutions that such differences and disagreements can be articulated, developed and rationally resolved. The values embodied and at work in such institutions are agreed upon at the level of the community culture. They determine beliefs, actions and behaviours on a normative basis for a good deal longer than the mere utterance of the relativistic moment. Among the major institutions in which such matters can be broached and put into play are those of education, those schools and colleges in which we seek the best ways to institutionalise our child rearing practices and purposes.
Values are instantiated in every word we select and speak, every piece of clothing we wear, our reading of others’ reactions to what we are saying, the cues we pick up and the actions we take as a result (and sometimes get wrong, too). They are embedded and embodied in everything we do, as part of the warp and weft of our and our community’s whole form of life. We owe it to our students and community to not merely clarify values, but develop the settled disposition to engage in moral action.
David Aspin is emeritus professor, Faculty of Education, Monash University.
topEQ Summer 2003 © Curriculum Corporation