Educational values

"What are the qualities, attitudes, understandings and capacities which all young people should acquire through their education?" We need to give young learners far more than skills for employment alone, even if such skills are key to the country’s economy.'

The paper highlights how the government’s use of business jargon, when describing the aims and values of education, demonstrates the changed understanding of education over the last few decades. Terms such as ‘inputs’, ‘measurable outputs’, ‘targets’, ‘curriculum delivery’, or ‘performance indicators’ sound business-like, as compared with only a few decades ago. In 1972, education was defined in terms of an ‘engagement’ between teacher and learner and, in 1931, as ‘the source of common enlightenment and common enjoyment’ .

The paper says that the government quite rightly defines its reforms as an attempt ‘to raise standards’, but the concept of what ‘standards’ means is rarely examined. Should it not be defined in terms of the overall aim or purpose of educating young people? If so, the paper says it makes it difficult to understand the ‘equivalence of standards’ between learning standards geared to the more efficient working of, say, a budget airline, as compared with those geared to grasping complex concepts of nuclear physics, or appreciating the poetry of Hopkins.

The Review believes that the central aims and values of education should be about making young people think intelligently and critically about the physical, social, economic and moral worlds they inhabit. It also recommends that recognition be given to ‘competence, to coping, to creativity, and to co-operation with others’ (as set out in Capability Manifesto of the Royal Society of the Arts in 1980); with respect for the experiences, concerns and aspirations of the learners; and provide the preparation for responsible and capable citizenship.

Education should also be about ideas and values which inspire and prepare young people to face actively the ‘big issues’ that affect them and their community, such as environmental change, racism and injustices of many kinds, it says.

The Review recommends that the aims and values of education be constantly appraised, and that teachers should play a central role in such deliberation. It also urges further discussion on this issue, through forums, that involve teachers, learners, parents and members of the community.


source: www.ox.ac.uk/media
Nuffield Review on Education



The Nuffield Review is an independent review of all aspects of 14-19 education and training: aims; quality of learning; curriculum; assessment; qualifi cations;progression to employment, training and higher education; providers; go vernance; policy. The question that the Review has posed is, What are the qualities, attitudes, understandings and capacities which, in different degrees, an educated 19 year old should have in this day and age.

For the government the question has been how to improve the nation’s skills considered as one of the defining political, economic and social issues of our age - looking at wider aim of greater social inclusion, a more just society and personal fulfillment.

The review points out to the task of education which is to help young people realise some potentials and not others; it is to do so by drawing upon the cultural resources which we have inherited and through which those potential strengths and interests are directed. But the selection of this and not that potential (e.g. the potential for cooperation rather than conflict) and the choice of the cultural resources through which to develop ‘selected potentials’ (e.g. through the introduction to a particular literature) depends upon the values which are embodied in the underlying and often unexamined aims of education.

It’s always necessary, then, when the time comes to make changes to our education system, to pay attention to its broader aims. If we don’t do that, if we work on too narrow a front, then we risk damaging the values that ultimately define an educated and humane society. The pursuit of economic prosperity, for example, could be at the expense of social values, such as greater community cohesion, or of personal values such as those of personal fulfilment and growth. Derek Morrell (the civil servant who in effect was the architect of the Schools Council6) argued in 1966 that, since there was lack of consensus over the aims of education at a time of rapid social change, we must find ways of living with diversity:

‘Jointly, we need to recognise that freedom and order can no longer be reconciled
through implicit acceptance of a broadly ranging and essentially static consensus on
educational aims and methods.’

One reason for the neglect of public deliberation in what are morally controversial issues is the changed language of education – one which recently has come to be dominated by the language of management. But, if one speaks the language of
management, one is in danger of treating young people and their teachers as objects to be managed. Cuban, in The Blackboard and the Bottom Line: Why Schools can’t be Businesses, refers to a successful businessman who, dedicated to improving public schools, told an audience of teachers, ‘If I ran a business the way you people operate your schools, I wouldn’t be in business very long’. Crossexamined by a teacher, he declared that he collected his blueberries, sending back those that did not meet the high quality he insisted on. To this the teacher replied, ‘We can never send back our blueberries. We take them rich, poor, gifted, exceptional, abused, frightened, confident, homeless, rude, and brilliant. We take them with attention deficit disorder, junior rheumatoid arthritis, and English as their second language. We take them all.

There is emphasise on dualism between academic and vocational (or applied) that is questionable. In general, of course, both education and training are about the promotion of learning. That clearly is what the system is set up to bring about. But not all learning counts as education. The central meaning of education is evaluative – it picks out certain kinds of learning as worth while. In that sense, an educational activity is to be contrasted with mere training or with indoctrination or with activities which deaden the mind and the capacity to think.

There is a common association between ‘education’ and the initiation into the different forms of knowledge which constitute what it means to think intelligently – the acquisition and appropriate application of the concepts, principles and modes of enquiry to be found in the physical and social sciences, in the study of literature and history, in mathematics, in language and in the arts.

There is a need to recognize the importance, at every level of policy making and practice, of constant deliberation over these aims and values and their manifestation in the particular context of school or college; and to see the central role of teachers in such deliberation.

Source: Nuffield Review of 14-19 Education and Training, Issues Papers 6, Oxford Univ. Feb 2006