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Values education suggests a range of stances toward the broad goal of moral development in young people. It may express a desire for intentional education about values to complement education about facts or imply an insistence that education (and schooling) be viewed as value-laden. Some would argue that the term is redundant, that education is always about values.

Values education is also used today throughout the English-speaking world as a synonym for character education, broadly construed as the inculcation or development of prosocial character traits in children and adolescents. As a distinctive approach to moral education, however, values education is typically associated with values clarification and, less often, with a family of other efforts that share a focus on critical reflection in the process of moral development. This entry looks at values education, its critique, and some alternatives.

What It Is

Values clarification was born with the publication of Raths, Harmin, and Simon’s Values and Teaching in 1966. It was perhaps the best known effort in a significant movement by educators to question the tenets and tactics of traditional moral inculcation. Its temper matched the political temper of the time, that is, questioning authority. In its formal version, it involved an effort to systematize reflection on ethical concerns.

In this, it can be allied with Kohlberg’s work in moral reasoning, with Edward Fenton’s analytic approach to The New Social Studies (1967), with efforts to implement Deweyan democratic schooling, and with service learning accompanied by critical reflection. It can also be allied with what Fritz Oser calls a “discourse perspective” regarding moral education. What distinguishes values clarification from these other critical and reflective values education approaches is its clear focus on the individual as the locus of value recognition and determination and on its determined neutrality with respect to an individual’s value choices.

A discussion of values clarification highlights the issues that can arise when values education is invoked. Raths, Harmon, and Simon ground values clarification in concern for children and adolescents who lack self-direction and purposefulness. They seek to develop purposefulness in children with the parallel development of conscious habits of choosing and prizing as well as (consciously) acting in concert with one’s choices. They favor the process of valuing over the transmission of predetermined values because they explicitly question the possibility of universalizable truth in any particular social, cultural, political, or epistemological claims. They maintain instead, echoing Dewey, that habits of intelligent choice will better serve those who seek to lead examined lives.

Teachers implementing values clarification present students with values choices that prompt a careful consideration of and decision about potentially conflicting states of affairs. Teachers remain open and neutral with respect to students’ responses—and ensure that other students maintain a similar openness. Willing, feeling, thinking, and intending all inevitably occur as students determine their “values.” In fact, Raths, Harmon, and Simon operationalize the concept of values as that which emerges from this self-reflective thought/action process.

Critiques

Critics argue that claims for the effectiveness of values clarification have not been documented in research and that the strategy is not congruent with its stated theoretical roots in the philosophy of John Dewey. Like the proponents of values clarification, Dewey focuses on valuing and valuation as processes. However, Dewey sees these processes as transactional—between self and environment—rather than as self-referential.

It is the charge of moral relativism that has been most often—and most convincingly—leveled against values clarification. The fact that there seems to be, in principle, no common solution available to values conflicts implies an unacceptable relativism. Individual preference and/or social convention replace an a priori moral point of view. Some argue that the very possibility of the moral is devalued.

In a related critique, many condemn values clarification on the grounds that this is an atomistic rather than a relational approach to an intrinsically relational phenomenon. Values clarification is seen as so individualistic that it is self-referential and thus cannot, by definition, be moral. This criticism links us back to the question of its Deweyan roots, because Dewey’s moral self is a social self-constituted by and acting within relations with others and the world.

Alternative Moral Approaches

What of the other values education efforts noted at the outset share a focus on critical reflection in understanding the moral? How do they frame values, conceptualize the moral agent, respond to the specter of relativism, regard the role of reason, balance the process of valuation with its products, link value and action, and act for value determination and propagation?

Kohlbergian moral reasoning maintains the promise of universalizability but maintains the individual-in-thought as the unit of moral analysis. Fenton’s analytic approach to social studies, like contemporary approaches to the moral dimensions of the school curriculum, takes advantage of values clarification’s strengths, such as juxtaposition and interpretation, while avoiding the self-referential aspects by employing analysis with respect to texts and events. Nonetheless, it remains academic rather than action oriented.

Educators attempting to construct democratic classrooms and schools focus not on clarifying values as individual preferences, but on creating “publics” in the Deweyan sense. This results in what Alfie Kohn calls a “reasoned relativism,” where shared values are socially constructed in the process of lived action and communication.

Defined as an educational approach that combines meaningful community service with content instruction and reflection, service learning is widely touted as an approach that counters individualism, incorporates reflection, and results in community-building moral action. Still, as a moral education approach, it is agnostic on the question of universalizability.

Fritz Oser calls for “sensible universalizability” and maintains that a discourse approach such as values clarification can prompt moral growth by shedding light on a person’s moral sense and exposing conflicts between that and moral consensus. Such conflicts are the spaces out of which moral truth emerges. In both “sensible universalizability” and “reasoned relativism,” reasoning is required and simplistic relativism is rejected.

None of the approaches to values education noted above requires the kind of determined neutrality of the teacher that values clarification does; neutrality is not itself a value. Still, like values clarification, all seek a kind of epistemological fairness and openness.

In the end, this may be the key to understanding values education as it emerged in the 1960s and 1970s—as a locution to represent moral education efforts distinctively different from traditional moral inculcation in their focus on critical, democratic reflection.

Bibliography:

Boyd, D., & Bogdan, D. (1984). “Something” clarified, nothing of “value”: A rhetorical critique of values clarification. Educational Theory, 34(3), 287–300.
Dewey, J. (1939). Theory of valuation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McClellan, B. E. (1999). Moral education in America: Schools and the shaping of character since colonial times. New York: Teachers College Press.
Oser, F. (1986). Moral and values education: The discourse perspective. In W. Wittrock (Ed.), Handbook of research on teaching (3rd ed.). Chicago: Rand McNally.
Raths, L. E., Harmon, M., & Simon, S. (1966). Values and teaching: Working with values in the classroom. Columbus, OH: Merrill.

Simon, K. (2001). Moral questions in the classroom: How to get kids to think

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