There is a lot of talk about "values" in education, and all public schools now display a rather uninspiring, cheap looking poster with a silhouette of Simpson and his donkey and a list of the sort of motherhood values Ken writes about.
Trouble is, adolescents, faster than anyone, can see the gap between values that are talked about and values that are put into practice.
Indeed, I saw the poster at Canterbury Boys High School, our prime minister's alma mater and I couldn't help wondering whether, while the students at that school today are probably proud that one of their old boys now holds the highest job in the land, the reverse is true? Given the rather run down state of the school, it doesn't look like the current students are valued by our society as much as they used to be.

At the moment, we have a two tiered education system, where we seem to regard some kid's potential as less valuable than other kids. What sort of "values" does this demonstrate? And how can a poster make any difference? We need to sort out hypocrisy like this just as much as we need to look at the "values" of a liberal education.

Indeed, one of the core values of an old fashioned liberal education was the right of all kids to get a decent one. We seem to have dropped that value too.

What's an un-eaten icecream got in common with a multi-billion dollar warship building contract, illiteracy,and justice as it's differentially doled out to black and white Australians?

Sadly, the link is one of a national absence of values.

The ice cream made front page news in The Weekend Australian newspaper last Saturday.....telling the story of what was said to be a teenager aboriginal boy's attempt to pinch it and how that led to him being taken into custody...flown away from his people in outback WA....locked up for days and finally put before a magistrate in a courtroom. And we all know that would never have been tolerated if the perfson was a white Australian.

The multi-billion dollar warship contract....we all witnessed the bleating of Victorian Premier Bracks moaning "politics" when his fellow Labour Premier of S.A won the contract....but where was Premier Brack's concern over the report that's noted we in Victoria have the worst child literacy rate in the nation....that children are being allowed tgo go onto secondary school unable even to write their own names....and that the Victorian government alone spent half a billion dollars on "consultants".

The nation needs to decide what it's values need to be and then to prioritise them. Warships should never top illiteracy and an ice-cream should never be a passport to a literal flight to custody.

Talking about education...when will Australia agree on the urgent need for a comprehensive and detailed sexual educational course for all schools.

For a world being devastated by HIV/AIDS..which is now a global tsunami that infects 5 million a year...and killes 3 million a year...could I ask all educators to promote our www.aids.net.au website

With regards,
Brian Haill,
President,
The Australian AIDS Fund Inc.,
Frankston,Victoria
Email:bhaill@bigpond.net.au
Website: www.aids.net.au

Values?

WTF are they?

I have no objections to values being part of the education process, as long as they are my values and not yours! Seriously, what a sound and balanced education should provide is a recognition and acceptance that other peoples values may be as sound and well held as your own (as long as the principle of do no harm applies). Different does not mean wrong.

Somewhat sympathetic with the views of the author, but he doesn't help his case by exaggerating .... kids are certainly still studying the classics eg here is a list of the most downloaded "student notes" for literary texts (in order):Huckleberry Finn, The Scarlet Letter, Macbeth, To kill a mockingbird, Hamlet, The Great Gatsby, Lord of the Flies ....The Odyssey, Great Expectations etc - an American website, but as a librarian who has dealt a lot with school homework, the same is true here.
Western history is taught - and so is the history of Asia. And surely teaching local history is an excellent and interesting way of introducing kids to the sources and methods of history. When I did history at school in the 50s and 60s it was all British (railways, canals, the bloody Corn Laws etc). It made you feel that the place where you lived didn't really exist - it had no history.
I'm not convinced that the problem lies in school curricula - maybe the author should look more critically at the influence of TV and our increasing materialism.

Teaching values may or may not be a good idea. Saying "these values are Good Things" and only teaching them these Good Values seems like indoctrination to me. While the values he's listed (care and compassion; doing your best; fair go; freedom; honesty and trustworthiness; integrity; respect; responsibility and understanding; tolerance and inclusion) are all ideals I value, wouldn't it be better to educate kids about how to form their own values? Perhaps teach the values and the arguments behind them but ultimately with the goal of having students arrive at their OWN set of values?

The author speaks of values being "care and compassion; doing your best; fair go; freedom; honesty and trustworthiness; integrity; respect; responsibility and understanding; tolerance and inclusion".

Couldn't agree more.

Why then, has this same author been quoted in The Daily Telegraph "accusing educators of 'political correctness'" in reference to a NSW program which encourages students to show empathy toward fellow gay and lesbian students?

"Tolerance and inclusion", indeed, Mr Donnelly. Unless of course, you're a gay or lesbian student and then it's just "political correctness".

This report released by LaTrobe University shows exactly what gay and lesbian youth are facing in our school system right across Australia at the moment. You would do well to read it very carefully.

www.latrobe.edu.au/ssay

The previous poster seems to have seriously misread Kevin Donnelly's piece. The values you quoted above were in the DEST report, which was being criticised by Donnelly.

What a terrific piece! If you're reading this, Kevin, I found it one of the best I've read in Online Opinion for a long time.

Regardless, given his comments in The Daily Telegraph, he should still read the report. Gay and lesbian youth and those perceived to be gay and lesbian are being subject to everything from verbal abuse to rape. Perhaps he should be supporting "tolerance and inclusion" in our schools, lest even more of these children kill themselves.

Religion is an inescapable concept. Everyone has a framework of basic assumptions about his worldview encompassing metaphysics, epistemology and ethics that is held on faith. In other words, everyone has his religion. Education is therefore going to be inescapably religious, since it necessarily entails the inculcation of a certain worldview to students.

This is why it is fundamentally wrong to have the state provide education, because doing so requires tax-payers to subsidise the inculcation of a religion that may not by their own and with which they may have major disagreements. Just as a Humanist may not like his being forced to pay for the inculcation of the Islamic worldview to children who may not even be Muslims, or the Christian dislike being forced to pay for the teaching of Humanism to students who may not even be Humanists, in the same way I may not like my being forced to pay for the inculcation of a religion that is not my own and the tenets of which I may fundamentally disagree with.

Education should be private. This way, none of us is forced to pay for the inculcation of a religion that may not be ours and so of values which we may not hold.

"Unfortunately, much of the current approach to education is the opposite of a liberal education. Students are taught the way one interprets the world is both subjective and relative and that everyone is entitled to their opinion."
Yes even Kev is entitled to his opinion.

Brazuca That view is so out of touch that even Kev would oppose it.

Schools teach kids WHAT to think rather than HOW to think.

Maybe they could teach the VALUE of HOW to THINK.

Some Facts:
* Australian teenagers have the 3rd highest abortion rate and the 6th highest pregnancy rate in the developed world
* For the first time in Australian history, there are now more abortions taking place than actual births amongst teenagers
* Condom use amongst teenagers has fallen as most STI/STD rates are rapidly rising
* The 100,000 abortion taking place each year and the treatment of Chlamydia (plus infertily issues arising from non treatment), will cost the Australian Tax payer over $1 BILLION over the next five years!
How much extra new federal funding is the government putting into comprehensive sex education and values education? $0
THE ANSWER?
New federal funding for comprehensive sex education such as 'Sexual Health for Life' www.sexedco.com AND 'Values for your life' by the same course publisher.

Brazuca seems to fundamentally misunderstand the difference between public and private education.
In Australia, public education is secular. It does not use tax payers money to inculcate a particular religious viewpoint. Its purpose is to educate all our children whatever their race, creed, gender or economic situation.
In Australia, almost uniquely in the developed world, tax payers money is used to heavily subsidise private schools -often as much as 80% of their total income - that are church based and so we do use taxpayers money to inculcate a particular religious viewpoint. It is interesting to point out, that while public schools are open to all, although some parents may choose not to use them, many tax payers are currently contributing to large sums of public money given to private schools that would never accept their children as students.
Surely, Brazuca, you should be arguing that all tax payer funded schools should be public and secular, and that private schools should be unsubsidised and, well, private.

I think we must understand that we cannot teach values in the same way we teach the elements in the periodic table. This is because, while the periodic table is supported by experimental evidence, values, on their own float free with no visible means of support other than sounding like a nice idea. Values must be attached to a seminal story for them to mean anything other than good intentions. This is why they cannot be detached from the seminal story of a culture, in our case that of Judeo/Christianity. This is the way values, or more accurately virtues, are clothed. Any effort to teach values on their own will result in either derision, or if they are taken seriously, pietism, neither of which is the intended outcome.
I have discussed these issues in detail in : http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=655
Peter Sellick

Hi Geoffrey,

Thanks for the support. I also agree with Peter that values need to be seen as arising out of or being based on a larger narrative. A liberal/humanist view of education can be traced back through the renaissance and reformation to ancient Italy and Greece. The English philosopher, Michael Oakeshott, refers to the conversation of Mankind and the need to educate young people to understand and to contribute to the conversation.

Yes, the essays on education in Oakeshott's Rationalism in Politics are excellent; they, like the work of many profs of that generation at the LSE, demonstrate a breathtaking knowledge of the narrative of which you speak and an acute awareness of our place within it.

That narrative certaintly does reach back to Aristotle, Plato and Socrates but an understanding of that sweep of history seems uncommon now. It's unfortunate that poor old Classics is given, as a discipline, so little attention. Neglect of the canon in favour of faddish vocationalization is a myopic policy.

So when is an education minister anywhere going to take up this issue of cultural knowledge and the need for education rather than training? I remember raising it with David Kemp after reading Alan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind". Kemp was aware of the book, but didn't appear to want to act on its premise.

Much of this current debate is quite ephemeral to the realities
of classroom based education in public schools. A school values
program, such as "You Can Do It," will ofcourse be derived from the Western Judeo Christian tradition, and model those values, but not exclusively.

Teachers make every effort to incorporate and explore values from the range of different student backgrounds, for example, the Eastern value of "harmony."

At the primary level, though, the reality is that values such as "fairness" and "tolerance" and the behavioural skills derived from these, need to be inculcated to make classroom learning possible. This is because a typical mainstream classroom is often multicultural, with students from different socioeconomic backgrounds and/or broken families, and frequently with learning disorders/difficuties or behavioural disorders.

A classroom that fails to implement a program of values, often with an emphasis on caring, compassion and tolerance, will be one that is not safe and comfortable for students, or effective for learning.

I have just come across this forum and I find this particular topic very interesting.

I believe that “Values” is something that cannot be taught by a text book.

Values have to be taught by example and it is the adults job to install values in children, through their own actions.

Schools play a crucial role as children spend a very large chunk of their childhood at school.

Just like you cant teach somebody to think, you have to ask them to think, you cannot really teach values.

In order for values to be understood and learned they must be felt as the human race learns by example. We need to acknowledge our youths feelings and show them that we care and that we value and respect their opinions, feelings and thoughts.

I believe our Education system fails our children miserably in the area of valuing our children as individuals. Our children are taught and seen as a group without taking into consideration their needs, circumstances or situation, they are often disciplined as a group regardless of whether they were responsible, and as a result many children feel neglected, victimised and treated unfairly.

The general message is that “It doesn’t pay to be good”.

Too many of our children don’t feel valued or respected and worse still nobody is required to care!.

Values...

Here we are talking about education in general an on a national level. Teacher play a key role along with parents installing values in our kids and should be well-educated and consider the conservative majority of Australians.

Take South Australia for example. In mid-high school in a number of our public schools a sex-education course has been started. You think sure no worries, most schools are doing this now. But this has been initiated by Labor Party agenda and is attempting to make homosexuality and transexuals normative in society. It's not merely neutral but encourages same-sex attraction between children as yound as 14. An age where some kids are still in the middle of puberty