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| WHAT KIND OF VALUES EDUCATION DO WE NEED? By Panagiota Kavouri, PhD E-mail: kavuri@otenet.gr III European Meeting on Values Education I would like to thank all of you for giving me the opportunity to get involved in the Comenius Programme, to cooperate with you, to visit your website and exchange ideas and experiences from Spain, IrelaNd and Greece on such an important topic of "Education for Values". We live in a world of increasing turbulence and high complexity; in a world in which children’s imaginative capacity for the common good is increasingly co-opted by mass media in the name of the profit; in a world which tries to prepare them for successful functioning in a high-technological future giving emphasis only to more knowledge and satisfactory tests and leaving out the culture and soul of the human beings; and finally, we live in a world where the schools, unfortunately, accepted the political, social and economical values of the system. We all know that our schools need at once to challenge these values and suggest alternatives As society, we need reasonable citizens who know how to think. As teachers, we need to help our young children to become critical, creative and caring thinkers (three C’s). Along our journey, we need to explore our own values and children’s values, reflect and reason on moral issues, build bridges among us, and why not, build a new value system and better world. I read the speech of Dr. Mullan, who warned us, to explore as teachers and as a community, the human freedom and mind, to realize that education is never really complete, and to continue to be rigor and truth seekers in the service of humanity. I read also the presentation of Alexandra about the techniques of argumentation and dilemma situation we can use for asking good questions and giving good answers. I have to confess you that I caught myself singing her two lovely (rich of values) songs from her speech, and I thought ‘How nice it will be if we promise to each other that we will compose a ‘new song’ tomorrow on the way to Hydra Island’. I keep reading the work you have done in your classroom and discuss it frequently with my lovely and dedicated teachers in P. Faliro. Finally, reading the Creative Writing of Eduardo from Spain "The House of the Answers", I realized how much we need "The House of the Questions". His words, the words of Marie from Ireland and Ioanna from Greece reminded me a story. So, I traveled back in Ancient Greece to find it in Plato’s work "Apology". Well!! Once upon a time, as Eduardo begins, he was a man called Socrates who played over and over with the questions in order to find "The House of the Answers", the ‘House of the Truth’. Socrates was the philosopher who mentioned that "the unexamined life is not worth living by man". When one of his student, Meno, asked him, "Is virtue (arete) something that can be taught? Or does it come by practice?", he was the one who replied "Far from knowing whether it can be taught, I have no idea what virtue itself is" and he continued his questions about the meaning of virtue first,and then he returned to make its capacity to be taught, with his unique dialectic method of moral inquiry, an inquiry for all the disciplines, open to every man, child or adult of the past and the present. I guess, he is sitting somewhere on the back seats, trying to help us bring to birth our own ideas, our own answers. I have the impression that all of us we are raising questions, we are looking for answers. Am I right? All these reflections are not coming from Socrates; they are coming from the teachers of Spain, Ireland, and Greece, and from our students. This makes me feel comfortable to be with you today and try to share my questions and my experiences as a teacher. ? don’t come to you from the field of "Ethics" or "Values Education", except in my heart. However, I feel that the "Philosophy for Children Programme", I attended in Schools of Wales with other teachers, gave me the opportunity to try a similar programme with my students in Greece and explore the moral issues throughout the curriculum in different texts, stories and news and in everyday school life, as I think you do it right now. Also, as a School Adviser, I had the opportunity to prepare an in-service teachers’ training course and share this programme with the teachers of my district. It is true that there is a great deal of talk and many educational programmes and projects are running the last decade about Values, Character, Moral, Citizenship and Ethics, as well as Religion(s) in Education supported by different Governments, Organizations and Universities all over the world. Even with the diversity that marks each of the above programmes there is an agreement among them. They want schooling to focus on producing good behaviour, because there is so much bad behaviour around. They support that there is a relationship between values and behavior. They believe that children with family, social, political, economical and cultural problems need values education. Also, they point out that we need values to maintain the health of democracy. Therefore, they expect that it is the work of the school (and the society) to teach and transmit values from one generation to the next. I visited the world of Internet and I found out that most of the researches agree in some way. First, there is no direct relationship between values and good behavior. Instead, some mix psychological, situational and sociological factors are involved in determining behavior. Second, there is confusion on deciding which values to teach and how to teach. What is wrong? Some blamed the parents and the community, others blamed the Board of Education, the schools and the teachers, the books and the methods. In each of these programmes, we can find different psychological and educational approaches. What kind of approaches are they? Do we apply some of them in our classrooms? After one year in Comenius, how do we deal with values? Let’s take it from the beginning, as Socrates did it. "What do we mean by values?" first, and "If and how values can be taught?" later. Trying the brainstorming technique with my colleagues about the definition of values, I came up with more than forty values and many meanings. For many of them, value is a socially, culturally and religiously accepted behavior or ideals. For others they are matters of importance. Values refer to our beliefs about the things that matter to us, or values refer to our actions. In addition, all of them mentioned that there are traditional values and we as adults try to transmit them from one generation to the next. Finally, they pointed out that values change and what is moral to one person/situation/time may not be moral to the next person/situation/time. All these definitions have their roots on scientific, philosophical, psychological, political, social, cultural and religious movements. From Aristotle to 20th century psychology, the early morality is shaped by fear and punishment. I will not bother you with Aristotle, Freud, Kant, Neitzsche and others. I will avoid discussing about the historical and political events and Religions. As an educator, I will talk about the Cognitive Developmentalists who are in our schools. For Cognitive Development psychologists, as Piaget and Kohlberg, children’s moral development goes through developmental stages. Each stage has different kind of concepts. Concepts in later stages build on earlier ones. Everything is a matter of maturation. The whole process is more a matter of reconstructing concepts than enlarging. Students are classified and placed in higher or lower stages. The early moral development of children is egocentric. Children prior to age seven or eight, see things only from their own point of view and they are motivated first by fear of punishment (because they violate the rules of the authority) or not being loved. In the next stage children still have a self-interested motivation but also have a reciprocal exchange, which is expressed as " You will give me, I will give you". At stage three, children start to show empathy, where they start to imagine what it would be like to be in another person’s situation. Only after the age of 10 and 11 children may have the ability for reasoning. Since children cannot reason earlier and their moral development depends on these stages, moral reasoning cannot play an important role in their early moral education. In lower stages they are not able, to handle moral problems, to have a genuine moral dialogue and to come up with live moral alternatives. The early moral education, influenced by all these movements and the historical and social events of the time, adopted many elements from the formalistic, traditional didactic, moralistic and dogmatic, and relativistic approaches. However, the last two decades some new programmes use mixed approaches, giving emphasis on human relations and social factors. . Since, most of these programmes have many elements from the stage theory. I would like to concentrate on this approach. According to this theory, values education programmes, even though they have adopted the social interaction approach (peer-centered, co-operative learning and community approaches), they keep using the techniques of value listing, values clarification and moral dilemma discussion. According to value listing technique, there are two sets of values: the shared (universal) values and the particular (cultural) values that need to be integrated for cultural development and not for cultural maintenance. Listing of values is simplistic and ineffective because there is no room for making moral choices, no emphasis on value conflicts and no guiding of students toward reasoned position on value issues. According to values clarification method, teachers encourage the students to clarify their moral values and become clearer about their own values, but discourage them to make evaluative or critical remarks about one another’s value. Teachers take a neutral position and they guarantee students’ respect for each other’s point of view. Indoctrination in the classroom is avoided. However, there is a failure to distinguish those values that are a matter of personal preference (free choice) with those values, which reflect basic moral rights and wrongs (obligation). As a result, there is a danger of ethical relativism, where students are left with the impression that all these values (ethical-unethical) have the same value and are equally justifiable or unjustifiable. In ‘moral dilemma’ discussion technique there are only two alternative actions. This means that students have only two horrible choices to make (for example, in a fire when you are limited to save only one child, your little brother or your little sister, and in an accident or health problem, when you have to rub a bank in order to help a friend who is in the hospital). In this kind of dilemma situation students get the impression that moral problems typically resist confident resolution. They are pulled in conflicting directions. They think they have reasons for going either way, or avoiding both ways. None of the choices seem to be without moral cost, and they are very confused about what the right choice is. Thus, instead of having to choose between ‘stealing and saving somebody’s life’ and ‘not stealing and not saving somebody’s life’ two competing moral values which in more contemporary way are decisive, we can provide children with opportunities to sort out difficult and complex features of situation (where only a relatively proportion of such situation involve dilemma) calling for moral reflection (moral puzzlement-careful thinking). We can provide children with opportunities to find other alternatives in order to prevent moral crisis before they occur. In helping the children to acquire moral alternatives we need to avoid the dangers of moralism ‘You have to do it this way’, and ethical relativism ‘Both actions are morally acceptable’. Making progress in resolving puzzlements is a fundamental part of moral development, but the discussion method of moral dilemma (even though the method can work) appears to be of little practical utility in influencing students’ behaviour. In an attempt to bring philosophy in the classroom (even in the first graders), I would like to remind you the words of Prof. Lipman: "Although every child is not a philosopher, every philosopher was once a child", and I will dare to add that, from the time that a child first asks "Why", she/he is engaged in the process of philosophical inquiry. We all know that Philosophy is a difficult subject that is restricted to courses in the universities. You will wonder, why I insist in Philosophy for Children? I can give you some reasons: First, there is no age classification and categorization of children. Child’s natural sense of wonderment can be developed early and expanded in a capacity for thinking and discovery that is an essential part of personal cognitive and affective growth. Additionally, the child’s early attitudes, beliefs and values, representing his/her experiences to date (picked up at home, from TV), can also be developed into a more reflective and considered perspective on life and its significance. Since we realize that the children do not come to school as empty bottles, schools cannot be value-free or morally neutral. Teachers cannot teach that one specific moral view is the correct one. They cannot push pet values and prejudices because this is indoctrination, dogmatism and catechism. Also, they can not support an open strategy according to which one moral opinion is as good as another, and they can not believe that morality is a private affair and so cannot be taught objectively because this is ethical relativism. Instead, they have to provide children critical thinking skills for examining and evaluating their own values, attitudes and beliefs and those of their classmates. These skills can be applied in an appropriate environment. This environment is called ‘community of inquiry’. In this community, the primary source is the children themselves who will learn to strengthen their reasoning and moral judgment through questioning, analysis, explanation, looking for alternatives, self-correction, sensitivity to context and reliability upon criteria. The other sources are novels, specifically written for the children, which contain philosophical ideas for inquiry. With these books children do not have to learn philosophy, ethics, and logic. The leading ideas of these novels, such as good, fair, right, consistency, truth, caring, fighting, freedom, justice, etc, are plenty. These ideas can be found in different textbooks and in different subjects, in thoughtfully selected children literature, in newspapers and TV, in arts and in real everyday life situations. However, the effectiveness of these ideas on students’ behavior and attitudes depend mostly on the methodology and the climate of the classroom. The third source is the methodology and the teachers. It is not so easy to shift from a didactic-memorization model to dialogical model, from one point of view to multiple points of view. Young students must learn that a story or a textbook does not explain it self, but must be figure out. They must learn to begin to question, organize, interpret and synthesize. They must also begin to consider alternative interpretations. As a result, they will see the need to check, revise and refine their interpretations. Only then they will begin to accept or reject and fit their new understanding into their previous frames of thought. Thus, teachers must know to facilitate classroom dialogue, the Socratic dialogue, and to form classroom community of inquiry. Also, as Johnson supports "they must be intellectually open and honest, curious about as well as critical of the world, knowledgeable but not all-knowing". What are the Socratic Questions? Socratic questions raise basic issues, probe beneath the surface of things, and pursue problematic areas of thought, rather than focusing on the mind’s relationship to emotions, ask for more examples of its functions and have students analyze them. Teacher or a classmate asks a question, and the student instead of giving a direct answer to the question, is looking forward to the possible consequences of his/her reply. Under these circumstances and without arguments for victory the student is exercised as judge and not advocate. What about Community of Inquiry? Community of inquiry is actually a moral community, where reflective exchanges promote different values. In this community, first, teachers help students become aware of what they believe, why they believe what they do, and what the limitations of their beliefs are. Second, students become clear about the beliefs of others, understand the different perspectives and answers that are accompanied with supporting reasons. This encourages a mutual respect and care. Third, students learn that when one’s thinking is inadequate, or even mistaken, is not the end of the world, but the beginning of a new and better one. There is no final wisdom as to what is right once and for all. Finally, children come to appreciate that while their views are respected, they are required to support them with reasons. Reason giving is the central activity not only in clarifying one’s views, but also in dialogues, in which students try to evaluate one another’s thinking. In other words, they are encouraged to learn the virtue of reasoning with others. The programme tries to get pupils to look at alternative viewpoints, even if it does lead latter to question the values of the society in which they live, or the teaching in the school in which they are taught. Probably, this bothers a lot, but there is no need to be afraid of it. Applying this type of programme is an alternative to all of us, if we really want to build a new value system. At the end of this presentation, I will pass on a brief guide for classroom practice and a lesson plan to all of you. I expect that you may come up with different questions and criticism about Philosophy for the Children. I will be glad to discuss it with you and I will appreciate your comments. In closing, I would like to thank you for inviting me to be with you today. I hope my focusing on values has been some help to you (or moral puzzlement). Schools will be better places for young people because of your commitment. Keep up the good work. We have taken the first steps; now let us continue the journey, the journey that seems endless in education. In the mean time, I wish you to enjoy your journey in Greece. Before you return back to your country, don’t forget to take with you, as a present, few verses from Cavafy’s poem "Ithaca, (Greek poet from Alexandria) and keep them in your heart: "When setting out upon your way to Ithaca, Written by Constantine P. Cavafy, 1911
Bibliography: Johnson, T.W. (1993 ) Philosophy for Children:An Approach to
Critical Thinking.
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