Values in Education and Education in Values

Mark Halstead, Monica J. Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781135717445
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

An investigation into how schools can influence the developing values of young people is given in this book. The authors first look, from the perspective of educationalists and policy makers, at values within contemporary education; in particular, moral, spiritual, democratic and environmental values together with arts and health education. Secondly, they focus on the values of pupils and schools, examining school aims and mission statements, the formal curriculum, school ethos and assessment of children's development.; Insights are provided with guidance on how values may be most effectively incorporated into the activities of the schools. This book is intended to be of use as a practical and informative guide to all those involved in primary and secondary education and those interested in values education generally.

Part I

Values in Education

Chapter 2

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Liberal Values and Liberal Education

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J. Mark Halstead

ABSTRACT: This chapter argues that the values of liberal education can best be understood in terms of the fundamental values of liberal societies. The values of freedom, equality and rationality underpin all liberal institutions, including schools, and provide a justification for contemporary approaches to multicultural education and education for democracy. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the challenges posed to liberal education by the values of the marketplace and by non-liberal communities within the West.

For most of the last thirty years, theoretical approaches to educational values have typically begun with an analysis of the concept of education. However, I shall argue in this chapter that the best way to come to understand the educational values of any society is to examine the broader framework of values in that society. This chapter therefore begins with an account of liberalism, which, it is argued, provides the theoretical framework of values that comes closest to the actual political and economic circumstances that prevail in western societies generally. In the second section, the influence of fundamental liberal values on the dominant concept of education in the West will be explored. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of some of the challenges to this dominant form of liberal education that have arisen both from within and from outside the fundamental framework of liberal values.

Fundamental Liberal Values

Although it is, of course, acknowledged that many different versions of liberalism exist, it is not relevant to the purposes of the present chapter to discuss the arguments between these different versions in any detail, or to discuss their historical origins. The understanding of liberalism which I shall adopt will be as broad as possible, though it will be necessary to establish the boundaries of liberalism by contrasting it with non-liberal world views such as totalitarianism. The chapter is written in the belief that liberal values are to be found in a wide range of political perspectives from conservatism (in spite of attempts by Dworkin, 1978:136ff, Scruton, 1984:192ff; and others to treat liberalism and conservatism as totally different world views) to certain forms of socialism (cf. Freeden, 1978:25ff; Siedentop, 1979:153). Where it is necessary to concentrate on one typical form of liberalism, I shall focus on the particular strand which can be traced from Kant to contemporary philosophers like Rawls, Dworkin, Hart, Ackerman and Raz, and in the area of education to liberal philosophers such as Peters, Hirst, Dearden and Bailey, because this strand seems to me to be the most influential one in contemporary liberal thought.

Core Values: Freedom, Equality, Rationality

Liberalism is generally considered to have its origin in conflict, but this conflict is variously depicted. Gaus (1983:2f) depicts it as being between individuality and sociability, while Ackerman (1980:3) sees it as a conflict between one individual’s control over resources and another individual’s challenge to that claim. In the present chapter I shall argue that there are three fundamental liberal values:

• 1 individual liberty (i.e. freedom of action and freedom from constraint in the pursuit of one’s own needs and interests);
• 2 equality of respect for all individuals within the structures and practices of society (i.e. non-discrimination on irrelevant grounds);
• 3 consistent rationality (i.e. basing decisions and actions on logically consistent rational justifications);

and that the primary conflict exists between 1) and 2) (cf. Ackerman, 1980:374ff; Norman, 1982). In fact, some liberals have argued strongly that the first value is the more fundamental (Berlin, 1969; Hayek, I960) and others have made out an equal strong case for the second (Dworkin, 1978; Gutmann, 1980; Hart, 1984:77f). However, I want to argue that it is precisely the tension between the first two values which gives rise to the need for the third. It is with these three fundamental liberal values and their inter-relationships that I shall be mainly concerned in this section.

Though they may be understood in a variety of ways (see below), there seems to be fairly widespread agreement among liberals that these are the most fundamental values, and that liberal ethical theory is based on them. Thus the principles of impartiality and tolerance are linked to the second and third values, and the principle of personal autonomy (Raz, 1986: Chs. 14-15) to the first and third. The interaction between all three values provides the basis for the just resolution of conflict and the rule of law.

It is when we proceed beyond the three fundamental values that the different versions of liberalism part company. The first parting of the ways comes between those who believe that good is of prior importance and therefore justify actions and decisions in terms of their consequences, and those who believe that right is of prior importance and therefore justify actions and decisions in terms of a set of moral duties. The dominant view in the former category is utilitarianism, which maintains that the justice of institutions may be measured by their capacity to promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number; classical exponents of utilitarianism include Bentham (1948) and Mill (1972a), and it has found a modem upholder in J.C.C. Smart (Smart and Williams, 1973). The latter category has produced a range of different views, depending on how the moral duties are conceived. An initial distinction may be made between intuitionism (which involves the attempt to fit a set of unrelated low-level maxims of conduct together into a consistent whole, and thus may be considered the nearest philosophically respectable approximation to ‘common sense’; Bendiff, 1982:81ff; cf, Raphael, 1981:44f.) and distributive justice (which involves the claim that the plurality of moral duties must be conceived hierarchically). There are two main approaches to distributive justice: that of libertarians such as Hayek, Friedman and Nozick who emphasize equality of opportunity within the market place and the individual’s right to a fair reward for his talents and labour; and that of egalitarians such as Rawls, Dworkin and Gutmann, who emphasize (among other things) civil and moral rights, social welfare and meeting the needs of the least advantaged. To pursue the differences between these conceptions of liberalism, however, would take me beyond the very limited brief of this chapter, and I want now to return to a consideration of the three fundamental liberal values.

The framework of values can be classified initially by considering what is excluded by the three fundamental values. The first value, that of individual liberty, clearly excludes a totalitarian emphasis on communal unity to the extent that it endangers individuality; thus liberalism is broadly incompatible with Marxism. (This does not mean, of course, that everyone opposed to totalitarianism must be a liberal, as Solzhenitsyn’s criticisms of liberalism make clear: see Walsh, 1990:228ff). The second value, that of the equality of respect, excludes the hierarchical ranking of individuals according to which some have a greater claim to freedom than others. Thus liberalism rejects slavery, for example, or Nazi claims to superiority over Jews (cf. Ackerman, 1980:6). The third value, that of consistent rationality, excludes arbitrariness, inconsistency and the failure to take account of relevant factors (cf. Taylor, 1982). It rules out the uncritical acceptance of dogma, whether based on authority or revelation, and equally it refuses to drift into the sort of relativism which insists that cultures, for example, can only be understood from within and on their own terms (cf. Hollis and Lukes, 1982).

There is considerable scope, however, for different understandings of the three fundamental liberal values:

• • Individual liberty , for example, may involve freedom to satisfy one’s desires (as in Benthamite utilitarianism: cf. Bentham, 1948) or to realize one’s rationally determined interests (as in Kant, 1948), or simply to be oneself by being free from constraint. It may, but need not, involve the construction of a life-plan (cf. Gaus, 1983:32ff; Rawls, 1972:407ff).
• • Equality of respect focuses on one’s dealings with others (Peters, 1966: Ch. 8). It is understood in a fairly minimal way by some libertarians to imply formal equality of opportunity, but is sometimes expanded (especially by modem liberals) into a stronger form of equality, such as attempts to equalize life prospects or to distribute wealth and power more equitably (cf. J. White, 1994).
• • Consistent rationality may, on a utilitarian view, involve no more than the rational appraisal of utility (i.e. what will promote happiness and reduce happiness), which is taken to provide the basis for the just resolution of conflict. A Kantian view of consistent rationality, on the other hand, is much richer, as it not only provides the basis for the just resolution of conflict, but also is an end in itself (the ‘search for truth’) and enriches our understanding of the first two liberal values: thus the freedom of the individual is understood in terms of rational autonomy and the will (which itself may provide the basis for certain supererogatory virtues such as generosity and humility), and the equal right of all other individuals to similar freedom provides the basis for an ethical system which includes respect for persons, promise keeping, refraining from deceit, tolerance, openness, fairness and freedom from envy. Even those who argue that liberalism is grounded in agnosticism about moral issues (eg. P. White, 1983) are committed to the principle of consistent rationality, in that they insist on remaining sceptical only because no good reasons have as yet been provided to justify a change of view.

Rights

Rights are central to liberalism, particularly in its distributive justice mode. They may be analyzed in terms of content, status, origin, context, or the grounds on which they are justified. They are usually prefixed by some sort of defining adjective: moral, political, legal, social, natural, human, constitutional, civil, individual, religious, women’s, children’s, and so on. In this section, however, I shall distinguish only two types of rights, which I shall call moral rights and social rights.

By moral rights I mean those rights without which the three fundamental liberal values cannot be achieved. Examples of these are the right to life itself, the right not to be enslaved, the right not to be brainwashed. These come closest to the status of absolute rights, though there has always been a debate among liberals as to whether there really are any absolute rights (Gewirth, 1984), for it is not difficult to imagine situations where one set of prima facie rights may be in direct conflict with another (McCloskey, 1985:133ff).

By social rights I mean those rights which are established by rational debate as the most appropriate means of ensuring the just resolution of conflict and general human well-being. These rights are open to negotiation even among liberals, and may have to be fought for, even though they involve claims based on liberal ethics. They are often defined by law; examples include the right to education, the right to low cost housing, the right to free medical care or to a minimum income. Often these rights are to do with the definition of roles and relationships and the distribution of power (for example, women’s rights, parents’ rights). Sometimes the rights are little more than a rhetorical expression of desires and needs, or a preference for particular social goals, such as students’ rights and animal rights (cf. Jenkins, 1980:24lf). A right is only a claim or a demand unless it is built into the social structure and there is an apparatus for implementing it. As Jenkins points out, rights are not usually invoked except to redress injustice (ibid.: 243).

Typically, no one conception of the good life is favoured in liberalism, and a vast range of life-styles, commitments, priorities, occupational roles and life-plans form a marketplace of ideas within the liberal framework (cf. Popper, 1966). Liberalism makes an important distinction between the private and public domains (Hampshire, 1978), though Devlin (1965) and others have disputed the validity of this distinction. Thus, for example, religion is seen as a private and voluntary matter for the individual (though the practice of religion is a moral right based on the fundamental liberal value of respect for the freedom of the individual). Certain forms of human behaviour, however, are ruled out in principle by reference to freedom, equality and rationality; these include prejudice, intolerance, injustice and repression. Other forms of human behaviour are necessary in principle on a liberal view in certain contexts (such as impartiality), though ways of putting them into practice or even conceptualizing them are still hotly debated. In contexts where certain forms of behaviour are considered essential to a liberal perspective, a liberal theory can be developed. The liberal framework of values has produced in particular a political theory and an economic theory.

Democracy

The political domain has always been the central arena for liberal debate. Democracy is seen by liberals as the most rational safeguard against tyranny and a way of guaranteeing the equal right of citizens to determine for themselves what is in their own best interests. It provides a clarification of the role of the state and the law (Benn and Peters, 1959; Duncan, 1983). The state is not an end in itself but ‘exists to regulate the competition among individuals for their private ends’ (Strike, 1982b:5). It provides the means of protecting the public interest and ensuring social justice (Miller, 1976). The law exists to maintain order in society, by protecting persons and property (Jenkins, 1980) and to prevent harm (Mill, 1972b). Key liberal causes include human rights, free speech, opposition to censorship, racial equality, and opposition to the enforcement of morality through the criminal law (Hart, 1963). The liberal state is expected to show official neutrality on religious matters, together with a respect for individual freedom of conscience. As Fishkin points out,

The state could not enshrine the religious convictions of any particular groups by public commitments and avoid the charge that it was biasing the marketplace of ideas by giving certain metaphysical and religious claims, certain ultimate convictions, the stamp of state authority and legitimacy (1984:154).

Some major debates within liberal political theory include the extent to which democracy should entail representation, which may satisfy the protection of interests, or participation, which may contribute also to human development (cf. Lucas, 1976; Pateman, 1970, 1979); the extent to which political liberalism is part of a comprehensive liberal world view as opposed to an ‘overlapping consensus’ among different comprehensive views (Rawls, 1993); the extent to which nationalism is compatible with the liberal state (Miller, 1993; Tamir, 1993) the balancing of state power with civil liberties (cf. Dworkin, 1977:206ff; Strike, 1982a); and the conflict between the right-wing emphasis on stability, non-interference, free enterprise, initiative and merit, and the left-wing emphasis on egalitarianism and the combating of social injust...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Values and Values Education in Schools
• Part I: Values in Education
• Chapter 2 Liberal Values and Liberal Education
• Chapter 3 The Ambiguity of Spiritual Values
• Chapter 4 Moral Values
• Chapter 5 Environmental Values and Education
• Chapter 6 Democratic Values and the Foundations of Political Education
• Chapter 7 Values in the Arts
• Chapter 8 Food, Smoking and Sex: Values in Health Education
• Chapter 9 Values and Education Policy
• Part II: Education in Values
• Chapter 10 Voicing Their Values: Pupils' Moral and Cultural Experience
• Chapter 11 Vision, Values and Virtues
• Chapter 12 School Mission Statements and Parental Perceptions
• Chapter 13 Planning for Values Education in the School Curriculum
• Chapter 14 An Inner-City Perspective on Values Education
• Chapter 15 Assessing Children's Personal Development: The Ethical Implications
• Notes on Contributors
• Index