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