Teaching Values and Citizenship Across the Curriculum

Educating Children for the World

Richard Bailey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781135377373
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This text presents the issues and principles for teaching values and citizenship at both primary and secondary levels, based on the Crick Report and DfEE/TTA guidelines. It covers the whole of the curriculum and is supported by examples and key stage activities throughout.

Part 1

1	Values education
	Michael Bottery

Introduction

Many teachers, as well as members of the general public, would probably agree that increased attention has been paid by governments to the topic of values education over the last few years. Yet whilst, in the UK at least, governments increasingly believe that they can and should intervene in the workings and values of the school, values education is not a new governmental interest. Historically, many have seen it as important to equip members of their societies with the kinds of dispositions, attitudes and values needed for the future, and which would facilitate the kinds of projects upon which they intended to legislate. As Green argues (1997: 35), one kind of values education was central to the inception of many educational systems. As he says, schools were designed: ‘… to spread the dominant cultures and inculcate popular ideologies of nationhood, to forge the political and cultural unity of the burgeoning nation states, and to cement the ideological hegemony of their dominant classes’.

Nevertheless, there is nowadays a feeling of an increased pace of change in the world, and of an urgency, through some form of values education curriculum, to deal with the problems thrown up by this speed, which may well be unique. Not only that, but particularly in the UK, this is now an aspect of schooling which is subject to official inspection. To that extent then, values education today has an enhanced profile which makes it imperative that it is taken seriously and that a clear understanding is gained of what it means for school practice. This chapter addresses the issue by utilising an historical perspective to highlight continuities and discontinuities of practice, to show that whilst many things necessarily must change, other issues remain constants in the debate within this area.

A brief history of values education

An initial authoritarianism

There is always great danger of over-simplification by suggesting that the history of thought upon a complex issue falls into particular eras, as there are always dissident voices and nonconformist groups against a dominant value code. Nevertheless, there has been a general movement over the last 200 centuries in most western societies from fairly authoritarian value systems to more liberal ones, followed by a recent swing back. In the US, whilst there was a separation of the religious and the secular in the public school system, there was still considerable concern over the melding of a nation, and the creation of individuals with the right character which had quite profound authoritarian overtones:

The danger to civilisation is not from without, but from within. The heterogeneous masses must be made homogeneous. Those who inherit the traditions of other and hostile nations; those who were bred under diverse influences and hold foreign ideas; those who are supported by national inspirations not American, must be assimilated and Americanized…

(Hersh, Miller and Fielding, 1980: 57)

In other western countries, there existed a value code which was seen as essential for preserving the existing class divisions, which provided different schools for different classes, and which inculcated into the working class the ‘right attitudes’ to factory work. In 1867, Robert Lowe described specific ideas about the education of different classes in Britain:

The lower classes ought to be educated to discharge the duties cast upon them. They ought also to be educated that they may appreciate and defer to a higher cultivation when they meet it, and the higher classes ought to be educated in a very different manner in order that they exhibit to the lower classes that higher education to which, if it were shown to them, they would bow down and defer.

(Times Education Supplement, 1985:4)

In terms of its epistemological foundations, it was unremittingly objectivist. As an editor of The School Board Chronicle wrote (9 November 1872), ‘its members… have to instil into the minds of children knowledge… not to undertake the Quixotic task of indoctrinating the rising generation of the working and labouring classes with the dogma of equality… but with… knowledge of their place in society.’ Finally, it was backed by a particular hierarchical form of Christian ethics, as illustrated by a – now expurgated – verse from the hymn ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’:

The rich man in his castle

The poor man at his gate

God made them high or lowly

And order'd their estate.

(Hymns Ancient and Modern, 1924: emphasis added)

The reasons for the decline in this value code are varied: both industrialism and capitalism led to the breakdown of rigid class divisions; the need for a more educated workforce led to the production of one that was necessarily less compliant; the experience of two world wars led to a greater recognition of inadequacies in social and educational provision for those lower down the social scale; the greater influx of immigrants led to a comparison of cultural and value perceptions; and religious objectivism declined to a point where a Church of England bishop could write that: ‘… we are reaching the point at which the whole conception of a God “out there”… is becoming more of a hindrance than a help’ (Robinson, 1963:15–16).

This different ‘inductivis’ approach to religious belief seemed more necessary but also much more dangerous, for within it: ‘The ends are not prescribed, the answers are not settled beforehand. But this is only to say that a real decision is involved in any responsible moral choice’ (Robinson, 1964:41).

More liberal times

The values code which emerged in the 1960s was predicated largely upon the notion of moral choice. Until that time, ‘values education’ had very largely consisted of a set of objectivist values defined by a religious, educational or political authority, and values education had largely consisted of teaching the difference between them. Now it seemed permissible to consider not only a personal approach to values, but even that there might be a plurality of approaches, and an incommensurable plurality at that.

This in its own way had profound difficulties. If value objectivism has epistemological and ethical problems, so does a more liberal code. At its most extreme, it can lead to a relativism of choice, a supermarket of values, such that no single code is more acceptable, or rejectable, than any another. For example, a Nazi value code would have to be as acceptable as any other. As an illustration of this, take the Values Clarification approach, used mostly in the US during the politically liberal 1960s and 1970s. It argued that the dominant value concern for schools should be that of individual rights, and of helping students to clarify their values through using a seven-step process in order to arrive at their own self-chosen stance. Raths, Harmin and Simon, the most famous advocates of this position, argue that, ‘It is not impossible to conceive of someone going through the seven values criteria and deciding that he values intolerance and thievery. What is to be done? Our position is that we respect his right to decide upon that value’ (1966: 227).

This kind of relativist position is one possible consequence of rejecting objectivism. Other ‘liberal’ approaches attempted through a variety of strategies to avoid this position, but it is doubtful if they fully resolved the problem. In the UK, for instance, McPhail (1982) adopted a content and value approach based upon what pupils regarded as the important issues in society. In so doing, he avoided the charge of authoritarianism, but also failed to answer adequately what he would have done if his respondents had come up with categories like ‘burning Jews’ or ‘stealing from others’. Would he have accepted such views simply because students vocalized them; and if he had rejected them, on what basis would he have done so?

In the US, Kohlberg (1981) suggested that there are universal, invariant stages of moral development which could be scientifically assessed and then, by the use of appropriate moral dilemmas, children could be helped to progress more quickly through them. In so doing, Kohlberg claimed that an objective development in values thinking was possible. This approach, at first enthusiastically adopted, was increasingly subjected to a barrage of different criticisms, as commentators came to doubt whether these stages existed in the form that Kohlberg claimed, whether they were underpinned by a philosophically adequate moral theory, and whether their pedagogical effects were significant.

An increasing number of commentators argued that the teaching of these approaches provided students with little moral foundation. Kilpatrick was not alone in arguing that all they did was to encourage students ‘…to develop their own values and value systems…The ground rule for discussion is that there are no right or wrong answers. Each student must decide for himself/herself what is right or wrong…’ (1992: 93).

Economic and social concerns

Lumping these approaches together may well be unfair (particularly as cognitive developmentalists have been amongst those who have accused values clarificationists of value relativism!), but it is important to recognize that undergirding any direct criticisms of such approaches was the change in the political climate in western societies. This began in the early 1970s with widespread economic problems, dramatically increased oil prices, an apparent failure of Keynesian economic policies, and an inability to finance welfare state policies. In such circumstances, the political right enjoyed a resurgence, which led on both sides of the Atlantic to a curious mixture of ultra-liberal market economics and moral authoritarianism. Feeding into any values agenda, then, was a strong economic argument that national economic competitiveness could only be maintained by the education of a suitably qualified workforce, with the ‘right’ kinds of work attitudes. Indeed, by the late 1990s the policies of the notionally more liberal Clinton-Blair governments had superseded the Thatcher-Reagan nexus, and there have been attempts to exert more policy control. Thus, Clarke and Newman (1996) argue that whilst governments increasingly believe that they must reduce the amount of policy ‘rowing’ that they do, they also feel the need to increase their involvement in policy ‘steering’, particularly with respect to the economy. This concentration upon the prioritisation of economic concerns is seen strikingly by the British Secretary of State for Education in the introduction to his Green Paper The LearningAge. It begins with the statement that:

Learning is the key to prosperity – for each of us as individuals, as well as tor the nation as a whole. Investment in human capital will be the foundation of success in the knowledge-based global economy of the twenty-first century. This is why the Government has put learning at the heart of its ambition.

(Blunkett, 1998:1)

If there are new economic problems, new social ones have appeared as well. The heady days of free love and ‘flower power’ have long since receded, and have been replaced by very different concerns. Commentators such as Lickona suggest that: ‘… everyone is concerned about the breakdown of the family; everyone is concerned about the negative impact of television on children; everyone is concerned about the growing self-centredness, materialism and delinquency they see among the young’ (1991:19).

Through the 1980s and 1990s, therefore, more conservative counsels have taken dominant policy positions on both sides of the Atlantic, and part of the blame for this perceived societal breakdown has been laid at the feet of liberal approaches. As Kilpatrick argues: ‘If anger is called for in the schools, it should not be misdirected at forms of political oppression visible only to the eagle eyes of the politically radicalized; rather it should be directed at the culture of self-gratification, sexual permissiveness, and irresponsibility visible elsewhere’ (1992:163).

In place, of concerns about individuals and their rights, this approach has been underpinned at the philosophical level by modern versions of Aritistotelian virtue ethics (MacIntyre, 1982), leading to a very different set of assumptions:

● that the ‘good’ should take priority over the ‘right’, and be defined by what the community takes to be its core values;

● that these goods and duties should be prioritized over individually chosen goods and duties;

● that the state should take an active role in implementing such prioritisation.

Writers like Etzioni have been influential in the thinking of both the Clinton and Blair governments on social issues, through calling for ‘… a moratorium on the minting of most, if not all, rights’ (1993: 4). Emphasis has also moved steadily from the belief that values agendas are to be taught through providing students with the reasoning skills by which they might arrive at their own preferred position, to one in which values, and their teaching, are to be embedded within a set of accepted core values. This forms the basis of the development of movements like Character Education, in which policy makers and educators attempt to specify what kinds of characters their students will need to leave school with, and so what virtues should be transmitted.

Of course, the picture on the ground is not as simple as this description suggests. Within any society, there is a plurality of interests and opinions, and within democratic ones, diversity and criticism may be seen as positive virtues. Furthermore, there are genuine attempts at building bridges between differing views (see, for instance, the volume by Nucci (1989), on bringing cognitive developmentalists and character educators together). Indeed, a reading of recent documents like the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) and Depa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Series Editor's Foreword
• Preface
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• References
• Index