Education Shortform
Values in Education
In a nutshell…
Good teaching is not just about efficacy — it’s also vital to proceed in an ethical way.
That means working in ways that doesn’t harm students or make them overly anxious, which respects their own aspirations and values rather than imposing a ‘right’ way to study on them.
Values are also playing an increasing role in how students are taught, in part in response to worries over young people being disengaged from communities, and with online radicalisation.
In English schools, pupils are taught ‘British values’, but this approach has been criticised — the values are vague, and were determined by government rather than by the wider public.
Other school systems often promote values that are based around the mainstream religion of the country, although many core values (such as kindness) overlap greatly across religions and are also shared by atheists.
In practice, the extent to which a person’s values can be affected by direct teaching is questionable, as is the inclusivity of the approach. Nevertheless, it’s likely to be an issue that educators continue to prioritise in the coming years.
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This is one of a series of shortform education articles. You can download a simplified summary of my ‘A–Z of Educational concepts’ here.
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