- Home
- Pattern Languages
- Liberating Voices (English)
- Liberating Voices (other languages)
- Liberating Voices (Arabic)
- Liberating Voices (Chinese)
- Liberating Voices (French)
- Liberating Voices (German)
- Liberating Voices (Greek)
- Liberating Voices (Hebrew)
- Liberating Voices (Italian)
- Liberating Voices (Korean)
- Liberating Voices (Portuguese)
- Liberating Voices (Russian)
- Liberating Voices (Serbian)
- Liberating Voices (Spanish)
- Liberating Voices (Swahili)
- LIBERATING VOICES (VIETNAMESE)
- Civic Ignorance / Anti-Patterns (English)
- Other
- Projects
- Community
- Digital Resources
- News
- About
- Contact
Education and Values
Pattern number within this pattern set:
632
John Thomas
IBM Research Hawthorne
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
Problem:
Education necessarily promotes and replicates values and does so in many ways. Often, teachers and administrators use the asymmetrical power relationships inherent in most educational settings to promulgate their own set of values deliberately. Even when not done deliberately, values are communicated. Yet, neither the conscious nor the implicit promulgation of values is typically designed with thought to the appropriateness of these values to the future. This is not to claim that newer values are always better than older values; but it is to claim that at least some values of the past need to be re-thought in the light of huge global populations, diminishing natural resources, and the danger and ultimate futility of armed conflict.
Context:
Children normally develop with age morally as well as cognitively (Piaget, 1964; Kohlberg, 1989). Optimally this comes about through acting in the social world, observing consequences, and interacting with peers. Turiel (1983) pointed out that children develop judgments in two separate but inter-related domains, one conventional and one ethical. The appropriateness of clothing is a question of convention that varies from society to society and setting to setting. The appropriateness of killing is an ethical issue in every society. However, if one flaunts a known convention (e.g., appearing nude when inappropriate), it can cause enough disruption and discomfort to cause true ethical issues.
To avoid simply having students parrot back platitudes without deep understanding, an approach to values education has been proposed that uses moral dilemmas for discussion and encouraging the participation in communities where conflicts and resolutions will be a natural outgrowth (Nucci & Weber, 1991). While values in education has always been an important issue, our contemporary context puts special emphasis on this issue.
The world is changing at a rapid rate and many of today's implicit "values" are counter-productive to a viable future (e.g., judging an individual's worth by the size and power of their automobile; believing that a child must live constantly in an environment kept at 70-72 degrees Fahrenheit; that authority is always right and must be obeyed; that the way to success is to follow the crowd). Indeed, many values perpertrated by society are contradictory. For instance, American society encourages over-indulgence in high fat, high sugar foods and simultaneously insists that only people with perfect bodies are worthwhile. While children may be taught during an hour-long health class that too much fat and sugar are bad for the body, this hardly constitutes a sufficient antidote to thousands of expertly designed advertisements that say just the opposite. The capacity of adults to wreak great havoc on others is at an all-time high. Ethical decisions have always been crucial, but the consequences of unethical behavior are greater.
Discussion:
Education is often thought of as a process that helps individuals gain knowledge (vocabulary, rules of syntax, geographic locations, events of historic significance) and skills (parsing sentences, doing research, organizing results, writing, typing). While this is true, education also necessarily promotes values. Values are involved in curriculum choices, the materials chosen within that curriculum, how the material is presented, and in the range of correct answers. For example, if history focuses primarily on the history of ones own country, this promotes the value of chauvinism. If, within that history, the emphasis is on Presidents, Generals, wars, and victories (with little to say about changes that arise from and affect people in general) then that promotes the values of authoritarianism and militarism. If material focuses on white Christian males, that promotes racism and sexism. If the material is taught lecture style with little chance for debate, discussion, or dialogue, then this further reinforces the value of authoritarianism. If the evaluation of the students progress is based primarily on the ability to recite specific known facts, this further promotes the value of authoritarianism.
A study published in the American Psychologist a few decades ago showed that the best predictor of college grades in introductory psychology classes was not high school GPA or SAT scores but the degree of agreement in values between instructor and student. An interesting case study of the degree to which values are inherent even in so-called objective matters comes from the Ph.D. dissertation of Evans, a student of Minsky at MIT. Evans built an AI program to solve multiple choice figure analogy problems. A:B::C:D1, D2, D3, D4, or D5. The program found relationships mapping between A and B and then tried to apply those same relationships mapping C to each of the possible D answers. His program worked. In fact, his program worked too well. According to his program, all the answers were correct. In order to make the program pick the same answers as the test makers, he had to inculcate his program with the same priorities of values that the test makers had. For instance, according to them, it was (implicitly) more elegant to rotate a figure within the 2-D plane rather than to rotate out in 3-space.
The inculcation of values is a pervasive and subtle process. Much of the value indoctrination that schools engage in is done unconsciously. Even when conscious attention is given to values, there seems to be little appreciation of the extent to which children are subjected to much more powerful indoctrination via paid advertisements via print, TV, radio, games, and movies.
Solution:
Educational institutions, individual teachers, parents, concerned citizens and children themselves must work to uncover and understand the values that are being taught as well as to design the entire educational experience to foster those values that will help make for a sustainable and healthy future. For a whole school approach to values, see http://www.valueseducation.edu.au/values/
In addition, a constructivist approach to education, while arguably important for deep understanding in topics as various as science and mathematics to poetry interpretation, such an approach is particularly vital to values education, and especially when values of the past may have to be re-thought for their appropriateness to the future. Examples: http://www.education.monash.edu.au/profiles/ghildebr & http://www.rcdg.isr.umich.edu/faculty/eccles.htm
Pattern status:
Released