Editoral: Values in education - we've made a start

For the past two months the Herald has been drawing attention to an effort to install stronger, clearer values in the education system. Our interest in the subject will not end with the conclusion of our series today. So long as the campaign for values education continues, we will report its efforts. And if it flags, we will do what we can to rekindle it. The values we want to uphold are - or ought to be - beyond dispute. They are values such as honesty, personal integrity and responsibility, generosity and respect for the dignity, rights and property of others.

Nobody seriously disagrees that those are virtues worth imparting in our schools, yet the Living Values campaign seems to have encountered uncertainty and suspicion. Committees have cast about for definitions of values, tried to distinguish them from virtues, and ended up in some confusion. Nor have they resolved the question of whether values are better instilled by overt study or in more subtle ways, by the model behaviour of teachers, for example. "We must have both," says the campaign director, Judy Lawley.

Meanwhile, a state education lobby styling itself the Quality Public Education Coalition wants to insert a political agenda into any values that schools are to discuss. A spokesman for the group, Emeritus Professor Ivan Snook, of Massey University, finds recent proposals "conformist." He says his group wants to "get away from the excessive individualism of these programmes to look at social justice." The fact that Living Values has business backing and grew out of an initiative by private schools meant it was "unlikely to be critical of the current social order."

It is at least encouraging that he believes efforts to inculcate a sense of honesty, integrity, generosity and respect for others are unlikely to lead to criticism of today's social order. If that is so, the social order might not be too bad after all. In fact, there are people who advocate social change in the name of precisely the same values. The point is, these personal qualities are politically neutral. It is not unusual to find supporters of hard-nosed politics who are kind and considerate in person, and politically compassionate people who are not very warm individuals.

It is disturbing that a drive to promote good character among the young should have to surmount such suspicion and uncertainty. Every generation has probably believed that standards of behaviour have declined in its lifetime, but today's generations are growing up in a climate that lacks moral conviction. The virtue of respect for others has been perverted to the point that almost any self-indulgence, and destructive belief or behaviour is to be respected if it is asserted strongly enough. To be "judgmental" these days is almost a moral failing.

Young people need and deserve guidance in the personal qualities that are still as important as anything in education for their well-being and for the good of the community. Values education improves society at its roots. It teaches people the principles of harmonious, reliable and constructive relationships. When the Governor-General addressed a seminar on values in education yesterday, he criticised individualism as much as the moral relativism that muddies notions of right and wrong, good and bad today.

Good parents punish antisocial behaviour in their families and expect schools to do likewise. But too many parents neglect the task and still expect schools to do the job. On the whole, schools try. Teachers are trained these days to treat pupils with respect and to promote principles of tolerance and non-violence in the school. The campaign for values education urges them to go a bit further, to model the behaviour that goes to develop good character, and to talk about some timeless values confidently in their classrooms.

It doesn't seem much to ask; many probably do so already. But the difficulty the campaign has faced to date suggests we are just beginning.

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