Promoting Values in Education

by Anne Ostrowicz.

In January of this year, I travelled to India to take part in the first conference of the newly formed International Education Today Society Tomorrow. The five-day conference was entitled, A Values-Driven Education in a Power-Driven World.

India ETST has been at work for three decades, founded by several highly successful Indian businessmen, disillusioned with the increasing focus of their employees on personal benefit.  Educator delegates to the conference came from all over India but also from countries like Syria, Lebanon and Indonesia.

There is much discussion and writing in education at present in the UK on values and character-building, and I was particularly interested in which values and virtues would be prioritised at the India conference, and also in the practical question of how these values were being promoted in schools.

To my joy key values presented included: honesty, compassion, justice, forgiveness, collaboration, respect (across sex, sexuality, gender, religion, social class, species), love, and peace towards all nature. Educators are challenged to model these behaviours to their students, flowing from regular self-reflection. We experienced guided self-reflections at the start of each day. Workshops delivered practical and inspirational ways of promoting these values in schools and classrooms:

‘The Gandhi Project’ promotes the value of forgiveness and has been taken to numerous countries including to China. (Rajmohan Gandhi, Gandhi’s grandson and biographer, delivered the conference’s opening address.)  Reference is made to a tribe in Africa who encircle the offending person and then ‘flood’ them with memories of their many good past actions towards their community.

Another series of inspirational lessons focused on a ‘Charter for Compassion’. We met the children who had been part of a project which facilitated the crossing of social class barriers between an affluent city school and a poorer school in the countryside.

I was invited to be on a panel sharing how to promote compassion and inclusivity in a world containing so much violence and extremism. Pertinently, for the very first time a large group of educators from Kashmir had joined the conference, and shared with us the challenges of their difficult political situation.

As a teacher of both Religion and Philosophy I was also interested in the basis upon which the prioritised values of the conference would be proposed. The answer was essentially our shared humanity and what we can see, via experience, brings flourishing to us all. As a foundation this tears down every wall we have created between ourselves as humans; values the insights of science; and is a thread woven into many religions and philosophies (eg. in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas).

Of course, the dangers of not teaching grounding for values includes society simply promoting whatever the majority, or government, propose. Two Lebanese women educators presented citizenship lessons where a good citizen is seen to be not simply ‘participatory’ but ‘justice-oriented’, hence having responsibility to critique societal values including attitudes to women’s rights.

On the final day of the conference I was invited to participate in an inter-faith act of prayer, a fitting and moving conclusion to the week.

This summer I retire after almost four decades of teaching Religious Education. My own approach to teaching the subject has grown in ways I could not have envisaged as a twenty-three year old setting out. Values of inter-faith sharing and of diversity generally, have grown exponentially in recent years, expressed just this last term in my own school in Birmingham in events which included an iftar created by our Islamic Society; a Scriptural Reasoning event where we discussed scriptures from five religions on our relationship to nature; and a garba (dance) celebration created by our Hindu Forum. RE lessons continue to be very popular in many schools in the UK, as are school societies which promote discussions around religion, philosophy and ethics. Whether from religious, agnostic or atheist homes, UK teenagers generally enjoy sharing and discussing with one another, considering the reasons for their views, open to change when they hear persuasive argument and evidence, the most powerful of which is life example.

Today’s teenagers face moral and intellectual challenges which call for each of us in our own unique way to give time to bolster this precious and valiant generation who will be tomorrow’s society. What unfailingly encourages and moves me is the way young people are drawn to the beauty of truth and specifically to those values listed earlier: a most hope-full capacity of our shared humanity.