Values-Clarification
How many of you….
-
1. think teenagers should be allowed to choose their own clothes?
-
2. think there are times when cheating is justified?
-
3. regularly attend religious services and enjoy them?
-
4. enjoy smoking?
Raise your hands if you agree, put your thumb down if you don’t agree, cross your arms if you are undecided and if you want to pass on the question don’t do anything. This is part of strategy number 3 in Sidney B. Simon’s
Values Clarification: A Handbook of Practical Strategies for Teachers and Students
(38-57). The purpose of the strategy is to allow the students public affirmation of their choices. Also the exercise is to show students that there are others who see the issues differently.
Originally based on the ideas of John Dewey, Louis Raths formulated the educational approach of values-clarification that focused not on what people valued but on the process of valuing. He concerned himself with the way people come to hold certain beliefs. According to Raths there are seven sub-processes of the values-clarification process, which are the following:
Prizing one’s beliefs and behaviors
-
1. prizing and cherishing
-
2. publicly affirming, when appropriate
Choosing one’s beliefs and behaviors
-
3. choosing from alternatives
-
4. choosing after consideration of consequences
-
5. choosing freely
Acting on one’s beliefs
-
6. acting
-
7. acting with a pattern, consistency and repetition (Simon, 19)
The values-clarification approach is not interested in the instillation of values; it is interested in giving students the tools to make decisions. Values-clarification enables students to recognize the importance of making informed decisions and how those decisions affect their lives.
School is usually seen as something existing in isolation. Students attend school, are filled with facts and theories, and let go into a world where decisions need to be made. The facts learned in school have little relevance to their everyday world. However, children are faced more and more with decisions in today’s global world. The choices have real-life consequences, which some times can be proved fatal. Values-clarification attempts to engage age-appropriate students in decision-making that has little real-life consequences in the classroom but enormous importance in every day life. This approach attempts to allow students to explore, change, manipulate, strengthen and defend their values without repercussions from authority (adults).
Simon underlines four reasons why the discussion of values is best dealt with in the public school system (15-19). First, he says, adults moralize, which is a direct yet sometimes subtle impression of the adults’ values upon a child. People who moralize do not allow the young to create their own values system. Moralizing has become less and less effective in today’s society. There are too many people inputting information into young people. Parents say one thing, the church says another, Hollywood says yet another and a peer group stands for another. A child is overloaded with ideas and has to make decisions on his/her own. Children brought up by moralizing parents are not prepared to make decisionsthe parents have disallowed the child to experience the process through which decisions are made.
Secondly, the laissez-faire attitude toward the instillation of values does the child no good. This attitude maintains that the child will make his/her own decisions, that there is no one correct value system. Therefore the child will do fine without any adult input. This leads to confusion and conflict for the child because he/she hasn’t had any help making decisions. Children don’t want adults running their lives, but they do want help.
Thirdly, there is the modeling approach. This is the idea that a child will pick up what it means to make decisions by watching another person with attractive values. Also, the approach allows for a young person to chose whom they wish to emulate. The problem with this approach is that the child comes in contact with so many people to utilize as models that he/she is overloaded and ultimately confused.
Finally, the values-clarification approach attempts to help students look at potential situations that require decisions and build their value systems from their possible decisions. This is not a brand new idea. Teachers, parents, clergy and other educators have always looked for ways to help children think for themselves about what they value. In order to utilize the values-clarification approach many criterion must be laid down in the classroom. The students must feel free to express their opinions. They must feel that they are safe from ridicule. They also must feel that they have the right to passnot to answer the question. School might look or feel and safe as free as everyone wants it to be for this to work; however, it can be a safer place to make a life decision than in a tight--potentially fatalsituation. The main idea is for students to have a good idea of their values before they are put into situations that have no safety net.
Outcome Based Education
Outcome Based Education (OBE) is the idea that education should be about the end product, result, or outcome not on what or how much information educators pour into students’ heads. In designing the America 2000, President George Bush called for the “[expectation] to set aside all traditional assumptions about schooling and all the constraints under which conventional schools work” (20). The students are no longer seen as empty vessels waiting for information, but as capable learners that can give and take. For example, students in OBE are no longer taught where specific places are on a map. Rather, they are taught how to read a map on their own and given information they can find the location on their own. Outcome Based Education believes that students will acquire a love of learning through repeated success. In 1991 the National Education Goals were compiled in the pamphlet “America 2000: An Education Strategy” They stressed that by the year 2000 “all children in America will start school ready to learn. …[and] every school in America will ensure that all students learn to use their minds well, so they may be prepared for responsible citizenship, further learning, and productive employment in our modern economy….” (Bush 3). Outcome Based Education’s philosophy is that all students can succeed, given enough time. This means papers can be redone, tests can be retaken, homework could be handed in late. OBE was an “idea touted by educators as a way to raise academic standards and make schools more accountable” (Sykes 244) because one could actually see the outcomes, or results, of education. However, opposition has seen it differently.
Much of the material in OBE is about a student’s “attitudes and feelings” (Sykes 241). “As we shape tomorrow’s schools we should rediscover the timeless values that are necessary for achievement” (Ibid 25). Students need values to achieve the goals launched by the program. Values are based in how a person feels about situations and students need to recognize their values. Outcome Based Education certainly seems to have roots in values-clarification.
Opposition
“It’s not a program that improves education; it’s a program that rounds out education will all sorts of social goals. And it hurts a lot of children it’s designed to help,” complained one parent about Outcome Based Education (Sykes 245). Much of the problem with OBE is in the defining of it. Some people believe that it is “expanding the role of schools into the areas of student values and attitudes at the expense of learning” (244). Every student needs to learn to write. WHAT they write about is becoming more controversial. The controversy does not revolve around so-called hot topics, but around general, more family-related topics. Phyllis Schlafly's book Child Abuse in the Classroom was published after the U.S. Department of Education held hearing across around the country to hear parents' reactions on the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (Hatch Amendment). Parents and teachers criticized courses, teaching methods, and specific assignments. Schlafly, in her introduction to Child Abuse in the Classroom, refers to the ideas of former educator and Senator Samuel I. Hayakawa, who warned "the schools have become vehicles for a heresy that rejects the idea of education as the acquisition of knowledge and skills and instead regards the fundamental task of education as therapy." (13). He believed that "such inquiring into attitudes, beliefs, and psychic and emotional problems is a serious invasion of privacy." (Ibid) The grieving parents objected to the invasion of private affairs the school was doing by asking them questions about their sex life, religion, drug and alcohol abuse, their parents' incomes, etc. Some of the parents protested any questions where the students had to express their feelings and/or opinions on anything. They believe that those questions do not serve an educational purpose and they intrude on a student's right to privacy.
Articles
Many articles exist espousing opposition to values-clarification and Outcome Based Education and general invasions of privacy in school. The Education Reporter published on the Eagle Forum website which is Phyllis Schlafly’s organization, prints many articles regarding student privacy. The website holds conservative views of education. The articles in the Education Reporter range from examples of outrageous classroom assignments to book reviews to a look at the surveys and questionnaires students are asked to complete. Some of these articles would be beneficial for the discussion on privacy in the classroom ( HYPERLINK "http://www.eagleforum.org" http://www.eagleforum.org ).
One such article from The Education Reporter (April, 1996), “Yes, Schools Teach ValuesBut Maybe Not Yours” by Anne Haff describes a video shown in a 6th grade social studies class and how a parent has little opportunity for say in the matter of what his/her child is taught. A note was sent home asking permission so that the child could view a video series entitled “The Power of Choice.” The parent wanted to view the tape before it was shown to her child. The video was scheduled to be seen that day (the day after the note went home). The parent was granted to view the film and was “very disturbed by what [she] saw” ( HYPERLINK "http://www.eagleforum.org/educate/1996/apr96/focus.html" http://www.eagleforum.org/educate/1996/apr96/focus.html 6/6/00) The first video was being used in a social studies class but after seeing most of the series the parent knew she didn’t want her child seeing the series. The main focus of the series was values-clarification and the parent felt that the series “clearly seeks to erode parents’ authority even further. The impression one gets from these films is that the values parents have tried to instill in their children are considered archaic, out of date, and not truly valid in today’s society” (Ibid).
The video utilized group sessions during which a facilitator asked each person to describe a major problem. The topics were heated and charged. The parent viewing the video questioned whether or not her child could concentrate after one of these “highly charged, emotionally draining, privacy-invading sessions” (Ibid). She also expressed concern about family secrets being looked at from the view of an juvenile. The parent did find some good points in the video but also found that know-everything teenagers quickly invalidated these points. She certainly did not want her child listening only to her inner-self and peers. She finds fault in this approach. “With this kind of pap for guidance, how can we be surprised that many children no longer seem to know the difference between right and wrong?” (Ibid)