Search

We have become rather shy about stating aims of education. There is wisdom in this attitude. Discussion gets further if it deals with the known. Talking about defects to be removed is therefore more productive than talking about goods it would be nice to attain, because the defects are part of most people's experience and so are known, whereas the goods for which we might strive are ex hyp. not present and hence our picture of them is less clear (see further Popper 1966, Vol. 1, pp. 158-159, 284-285 [n. 9, Chap. 9, and text]). Modern schooling has some clear defects. To name just three, there are young people whose ability to do what they want is hindered by their lack of skills in decoding print, whose ignorance of simple mathematical operations makes them look foolish, or whose credulity leaves them open to exploitation. Nevertheless, it is sometimes useful to step back from the tasks of the moment and try to find a short formula which unifies and systematises the varied activities in which we are engaged. One such formula which has perhaps been too hastily dismissed as an aim of education is rational autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Australian schools, values education policies and programmes have existed in various forms in the past, but in recent years, the area has received renewed attention since the publication of the National Framework for Values Education in Australian Schools (DEST 2005) by the Australian government. The Framework was developed from the national Values Education Study (DEST 2003) and the Australian National Goals for Schooling in the Twenty-First Century (MCEETYA 1999). In this chapter, models of practice are explored where schools articulate and implement values education in whole-school approaches: through their school ethos, classroom teaching, and learning and co-curricular programmes, and through links to the wider community. In presenting the models of practice, the intersection between the schools' stated and implicit values, and the synergies and tensions in their connections with current education policies are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter explores the lifelong learning implicit in the promotion and defence of inclusive democratic values particularly in relation to formal and informal forms of Adult and Community Education practice. It suggests that behind the values of an inclusive and courteous social democracy is an ideal that lives in a reflective, pragmatic, and critical imagination - i.e., an imagination that envisages inclusive democratic values as possible and desirable in human life which need to be visioned and revisioned constantly to meet changing circumstances. The specific learnings involved in renewing the inclusive imagination underpinning democratic values - how it can be fostered and what barriers exist to impede it - pose considerable challenges to educators and trainers of adults particularly where their educational work has been concerned largely with imparting information and skills. Although this chapter has an eye to adult education practice, it is largely concerned with contextual and curriculum themes so that many of the ideas and explorations may be of use in the world of schooling as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last decade has seen major education reform initiatives in Asia. There are some common emphases in these initiatives, such as school management reform in relation to school-based development, emphasising accountability especially in requiring school achievements be known to the public, redefinition of educational goals, aiming at quality and the assessment of quality, focusing on learning outcome rather than teaching performance, diverting the function of examinations from assessment and screening to assessment for learning and development, and - lifelong learning. These changes are not a single incidence, but are interlocking and build upon one another. They also reflect ideological shifts towards demands for efficiency, performativity, and measurability in education enterprises. In the face of more volatile economical situations and with a general elevation of education attainment in most countries, there are increased demands for public participation in educational provisions, including increased parental involvement in school activities and even policymaking and public participation in curriculum development. Lifelong learning is an area of educational provision that contains most of these elements in current educational reforms. It addresses educational needs for the volatile economies that would lead to quick turnovers in the types of jobs available because of quick turnovers in industries. To many, this type of economic situation is coined as the knowledge economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The continent of Australia in the south-eastern area of the Asia Pacific region has a population of 20.3 million spread over a huge, largely arid, land mass. The bulk of the population live along the coastline where cosmopolitan cities, industrial towns, and holiday locations are to be found. Founded as a penal colony by the British in 1788, Australia is yet to formally sever ties with mother England. From its initial uneasy coexistence with the indigenous population, Australia has become multicultural, with 23% residents born in another country and second- and third- generation migrants often retaining an affiliation with their parents' or grandparents' birthplace. Some 52% of marriages are between spouses from different birthplace countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From both ancient biblical times - where the motivation was the "desire for order and continuity" (Crenshaw 1998) - and the period from Aristotle and Socrates onwards, moral formation of children and the shaping of their character have always been regarded as a primary function of both parental nurture and formal education. The central concerns of ancient sages (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Israel) were about knowledge and religion. The aims of education, for Aristotle, were to teach the intellectual and moral virtues necessary for right action, the pursuit of what is noble and thus of happiness as the telos (natural end) of life (Hollinger 2002, pp. 46-49). At the beginning of the 19th century, "nearly everyone was persuaded that religion and morality were inseparable; so inseparable that moral education must be religious education, and that no sense of absolute obligation in conscience could be found apart from religion. That moral philosophers taught the contrary made no difference" (Chadwick 1975, p. 229). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Australian Commonwealth Government is investing heavily in educational reform. Increasingly, a key feature of the projects undertaken as part of Australian Government programmes is the encouragement that schools work collaboratively to develop innovative approaches to teaching and learning. This approach is intended to improve student learning whilst at the same time strengthening both the member schools and the provision of education across Australia. This emphasis on collaborative clusters and learning networks is consistent with a number of international initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is said that travel broadens the mind. Features of one's home environment hitherto taken for granted are challenged by what one sees elsewhere. One begins to think differently and, almost inevitably, to behave differently. But as far as expanding one's view of education is concerned, travel - whether actual, by visiting education institutions abroad, or virtual, by studying first-hand accounts, film, etc. - is unlikely to provoke a re-evaluation of core assumptions about the responsibilities of the student in a formal educational setting. In education systems worldwide, students are expected to learn what other people have decided they should be taught. Students are sometimes given a menu of curriculum options from which to choose, but if they would prefer to learn something completely different this predilection will seldom be catered to or even acknowledged. Student-initiated curricula - that is, curricula conceived and formulated by the students themselves - are very rare within formal education. Fundamental decisions about the content of the formal curriculum are normally taken by teachers, the school board, the local education authority, or central government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been written about the need for both schools and leadership to be different from what they are today if they are to meet the challenges of the knowledge society (Hargreaves 2003; Mitchell & Sackney 2000; Sackney et al. 1999). The impact of globalization, new technologies and the need for a well-educated society has put pressure on educators to improve opportunities for student learning. Various restructuring attempts have been made with minimal success. Unfortunately, the traditional worldview of schooling, based on Newtonian science, does not seem to be getting the job done. Equally unfortunate are the conditions that foster and unnecessarily exacerbate human pain, fragility, injustice, frustration, and create disease in schools. In a fast changing world, sustainable and continuous learning is a "given" (Hargreaves & Fink 2005). In this chapter we outline an alternative worldview of leadership based on an ecological perspective to meet the challenges of a knowledge-based society and provide a critique of toxic leadership (egoism). Finally, we present some considerations for ethical and sustainable leadership in schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Africa's formal transition to democracy in 1994 was an inspiring moment. However, it would be naive to assume that the task of transforming so evil a social order as apartheid can be accomplished in a moment. Many practices of the apartheid era persist, as do age-old vices such as murder and incest. Add to these, widespread corruption at all levels of the public service and apparently new vices such as a shocking spate of baby-rapes, and there may be good reason for moral outrage if not despair. Values education would seem to be an obvious place to begin to overcome these ills. A central aim of this chapter is to describe and evaluate South Africa's approach to values education for an emergent democracy built on the foundations of a corrupt and divided society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In July 2005 the then Australian Government Minister for Education, Science and Training, the Hon'ble Dr. Brendan Nelson MP, visited an independent school in Hamilton, a regional town in the State of Victoria. He was there to open a new science facility. It was an ordinary task of office undertaken by most ministers of education in most countries. However, on this occasion, in his address to the school community, the Australian Minister outlined a vision for education in Australia that highlighted a significant new focus he and the government were pursuing in their national education policy. The focus was on the role of schooling in values education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational research of the 1990s and beyond has challenged earlier conceptions concerned with the capacity of teachers, and formal education generally, to make a difference in the lives of students. Decades of apparently experimental research simply served to confirm time and again the view that the destiny of a student was fairly well fixed by heritage and that what was left of impacting agencies related more to issues like peer pressure, media, and disability than to the agencies of teacher and school. Countless studies were conducted by eminent figures such as the revered Talcott Parsons wherein the extent of research merely reinforced his fundamental belief that families were "factories which produce human personality" (Parsons & Bales 1955, p. 16). Against the potency of the family's formative power, all else paled to insignificance according to the research findings, leading Christopher Jencks to sum up so aptly that "the character of a school's output depends largely on a single input, namely the characteristics of the entering children" (1972, p. 256). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational institutions have institutional identities that, in most cases, seem to have developed spontaneously. In numerous instances, there seems never to have been a conscious effort to purposely define the identity of the institution at the outset, i.e., to establish an institution with a deliberate process of defining sources of meaning for the institution on the basis of a set of religious, life-conceptual, philosophical or cultural attributes, and values that are given priority over other sources of meaning. For a collective social actor such as an educational institution (cf. Castells 1998, p. 6), there may even be a plurality of identities, the existence of some of which the institution may not be consciously aware of. In most cases, the identity of a particular educational institution, such as a school, college, or university, seems to have developed as a result of the way in which the individuals forming the totality of the institution strove for "success in action" (Blackburn 1996, p. 297). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teachers usually say that they would like to do moral and social education and that they would like to teach for autonomy and critical thinking and the like (cf. Patry & Hofmann 1998). In the curricula such goals are also very frequently formulated, although usually in the prefaces and not in the content sections. The parents claim that students should not only learn cognitive content knowledge; rather social learning, civic education and the like should be done as well as values education, although without interfering with the values defended at home. In educational policy and public debates, schools are frequently blamed for not doing social education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There seem to be two competing tendencies in values education of late in the West: character education based on virtue ethics; and citizenship education based on democratic values. In the formulation of two British scholars, McLaughlin and Halstead (1999, pp. 137-138), they are both embraced as character education, yet being called "nonexpansive" and "expansive" character education, respectively. The nonexpansive character education insists on the inculcation of transcultural moral values as moral basics, combining Aristotelian ethics and moral cosmopolitanism. It assumes that human beings, wherever they live, share roughly the same psychological makeup and a similar set of moral virtues and values. On the other hand, the expansive character education downplays the importance of transcultural moral values and virtues. Instead, combining liberal ethics and moral perspectivism, it emphasizes more expansive values of particular political systems, cultures or religions to advocate the cultivation of perspective-sensitive attitude as democratic virtue. It can be noted that, while the former is primarily concerned with the formation of an individual's character via personal virtues, i.e., justice, honesty, or loyalty, the latter is focused on the inculcation of civic virtues, i.e., tolerance, social and moral responsibility, and political literacy.1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, not much of values education theory has been rooted in the neuro- and psychological sciences. Kohlberg's enterprise was rooted in philosophy (Kohlberg 1981), Piaget's in non-human biology (1932), Gilligan's in psychoanalytic theory (Gilligan 1982), Shweder's in cultural anthropology (Shweder 1993). Yet a prescription for moral or values education requires an up-to-date and frank assessment of human nature, needs, and possibilities (Flanagan 1991; McKinnon 1999). Like a chef, educators need to think about the nature of the ingredients with which they work and the potentials that lie within. In education, this requires having an empirically derived human psychology and an empirically grounded pedagogy. A smattering of each is provided here. After reviewing two main approaches to values education, I suggest new directions for values education more strongly rooted in recent findings of social sciences and in a Triune Ethics theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An ability to make wise moral decisions in the face of conflicting and competing ethical values is of paramount importance for a successful life. Cicero said that truly wise persons will never do anything they might regret and that every action that they perform will always be dignified, consistent, serious and upright (On the Good Life, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971, p. 95). He also observed that custom can give people the power to face pain and suffering, noting that, in the case of the Romans, false beliefs and dangerous habits had softened and weakened them (op. cit., p. 94). Cicero argued that a disciplined life in which persons had schooled their desires so that they were satisfied with a simple life would be happiest. Our natures, he observed, actually have only modest requirements and so going beyond these requirements is unnecessary and leads, in times of privation, to misery. In this respect, he mentioned the Spartans, a community who had habituated themselves to enjoy frugal living. The Persians, too, he said, enjoyed a moderate diet and life and by this means had sound bodies and unimpaired health (pp. 102-106). We do not wish to concentrate on the question of whether or not a frugal and simple life is better than a wealthy and extravagant life. We wish, rather, to focus on two propositions which underlie this claim, namely, that what matters to our happiness is what we have become habituated to; and that what reinforces and supports the commitment to the way of life to which we have become habituated is an appropriate habitat. Thus, the frugality and moderation of the Spartans was possible because it was reinforced by the Spartan community. Without the appropriate habitat to support good moral habits, especially in the formative years of a person, good moral habits will not be developed and so the bad habits into which they fall will rob them of a measure of their autonomy in moral choice, perhaps paradoxically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this chapter, I am recognising a body of normative scholarship under the label "lifelong learning theory". Scholarship so labelled I consider to be either that which argues for lifelong learning or that which provides a critique of lifelong learning as a concept of worth. Included are such works addressing the notion of "lifelong education", rather than that of "lifelong learning", and also those that are recognised in the scholarly literature of lifelong learning theory as being works importantly foundational to the theory but which are less explicitly working under the label of lifelong learning or lifelong education - such as the Club of Rome report (Botkin et al. 1979) and the UNESCO report Learning to Be (Fauré et al. 1972). That body of theory I see as presupposing and implying a particular ethic, which I have characterised elsewhere (Bagnall 2004) as an aretaic ethic with a teleology of optimising universal human flourishing through learning. It is an ethic that suffuses the character of social entities or individuals who practice lifelong learning - at least to the extent that they are true to the theory in that practice. It does not, in other words, lend itself to being compartmentalised into those aspects of individual or social action that in some sense pertain particularly or majorly to lifelong learning activities and those aspects that do not - if such were possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schools in democratic societies have traditionally been expected to reinforce the basic values of these societies and to initiate young people into traditions of critical thought. During the 1960s and 1970s there were new demands for what was variously called Moral Education; Personal, Social and Moral Education; Citizenship Education; and Human Development and Relationships. Among theorists there was an acute awareness of the problem of indoctrination and about the importance of "neutrality" or at least "impartiality" in the handling of moral and religious values. Thus, there was much stress on Values Clarification (e.g., Raths et al. 1966), Kohlberg's "content free" approach to moral development (e.g., Kohlberg 1970) and the work of the Farmington Trust (Wilson et al. 1967). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his eye-opening book The War Against the Family, the Canadian author William Gairdner writes in the chapter "Looking After Their Souls: Moral Values and Sex-Ed" about values education today: [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At present there is enormous interest in values issues and in the question of how we may attempt to resolve our differences over them. Accounts and details of what Thomas Nagel (1979) called the great "mortal questions", such as the rights and wrongs of euthanasia, genetic cloning, and the tensions and possibility of reconciliation between different ethnic and religious groups in our societies, appear on the front pages of our newspapers and on the television almost daily. It is inevitable that students in our educating institutions will want help in coming to decide what they ought to think about these and similar issues, how they ought to judge, which way they ought to behave in respect of these and those other values issues "of great pith and moment", with which their lives, and that of their community and its future health, stability and progress, are increasingly beset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In broad terms, an ability to learn in complex ways is a characteristic of the human race; and although we learn as individuals, how and what we learn can have profound effects on other human beings and upon life on our planet in general. A supreme example is the invention of nuclear weapons, but less dramatic examples can be almost equally important from an ethical point of view. One such issue is our depletion of the natural resources of our planet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two contrasting ‘humanist' and inter-related forms of discourse of lifelong learning are evident in the literature: the first, dominated by politicians and employers, appears to interpret lifelong learning as a means to improve competitiveness and productivity regarding what is done in practice within a global economy; the other, led mainly by academics, are represented as the very means to continually resolve the conflicts and contradictions posed by the first. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The grey haired woman on the bus from the National Pensioners' Convention was carrying a peace flag and wearing a Greenpeace T-shirt. Her rucksack was scattered with badges supporting the Anti-War Coalition and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Around her arm she wore white and red wristbands wanting to make capitalism, as well as poverty, history. She was bending the ear of the young man sitting next to her: ‘Why do politicians suddenly become stupid once they get elected? It always happens. Those G8 has-beens are the worst. Forget about forming a ring around the city, I'd put a ring around their necks!' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lifelong learning, like democracy, is a highly contested term with its meanings closely tied to theories of socio-economic development. As with democracy, lifelong learning can stay at the symbolic or rhetorical levels. Moving it from this to considered policies and practices reveals how complex and contextually enmeshed it is. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The papers in this collection provide philosophical perspectives on lifelong learning. This particular paper, however, is less concerned with providing a philosophical perspective than with examining how we approach the provision of a philosophical perspective. How do we approach educational practice philosophically? Of course one can have a philosophy of lifelong learning, in the sense of a more or less developed theory about what it is and how it should be done. However, this paper is not concerned with a substantive philosophy of lifelong learning but with exploring how the traditional tools of analytical philosophy (conceptual analysis, ethical reflection, epistemological, and ontological critique) can contribute to out understanding of lifelong learning. (The application of philosophical tools and the raising of philosophical questions in the field of education has, of course, been known as the philosophy of education.) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attempts to translate lifelong learning theory into effective policy and practice have given rise to a diversity of issues. The issues may be seen as arising from tensions immanent to common tendencies or trends in educational policy and practice in those attempts. A number of the common trends have been drawn together in the first volume of this series, where the issues are examined from an ethical perspective through fables and accompanying critiques (Bagnall 2004). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]