Politics and public education
By Peter Sellick
The Federal government plans to spend 29.7 million dollars on promoting values education in our schools. These plans are outlined in a document available on the web entitled ‘National Framework for Values Education in Australian Schools’. 1.
The reason for this initiative is not explained in the document, but the idea is that if only we could teach the young values then our society would again be set on firm foundations.
Anxiety about the character formation of the young is common to most civilizations. In all cultural breakdown the stories and myths at the centre of that culture have been gradually forgotten. Cultures survive when their stories and myths describe human reality, and when they are rehearsed with the young.
Our central stories and myths come from the Judeo/Christian tradition, and the decline of the churches means that these stories are no longer rehearsed with the young. Indeed, the separation between church and state almost demands that they are not. Our insistence on giving equal airtime to all religious traditions further alienates them from us.
My first response to the National Framework for Values Education in Australian Schools was that it looked like a massive dismissal of the much-touted separation between church and state. While any influence of the churches on the state is loudly protested against, it seems that when the state encroaches on the business of the Church we hear hardly a whimper.
The document states: “Schooling provides a foundation for young Australians’ intellectual, physical, social, moral, spiritual (my emphasis) and aesthetic development”. As the influence of the churches further weakens in our society it seems that governments feel duty-bound to pick up the pieces. This ignores the fact that the Church is the bearer of a long history of thought and experience concerned with what it means to be human - spiritual matters.
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Do they really think that the great men and women of history became what they were thanks to values education? No, they were caught up in a motivating narrative - for good and evil.
Without the narrative of the Fatherland and the ascendancy of the Arian race Germany would not have gone to war, and ruin, a second time. The same is true of the Soviet Union.
Secular attempts to provide character formation for citizens run the risk of simply being ignored. Students
it is not the function
of governments to engineer
the values and character
of their citizens
When such attempts are motivated by a narrative based on nationhood they can cause vast misery and suffering.
I would have thought that the bloody history of the 20th Century would have taught us that it is not the function of governments to engineer the values and character of their citizens.
Our problem is not that we don’t know the difference between good and evil - we learn that in kindergarten. Our problem is that our characters are now formed by popular narratives of lifestyle and material progress.
It is the inherent nihilism of these narratives - their shallow narcissism - that produces the anomie that leads to drug and alcohol abuse. It is ridiculous to think that a course in values could compete with the expensive, subtle, seductive advertising campaigns of multimillion-dollar corporations.
Home Truths
This document is peppered with words whose origin lies in various sociological, psychological and educational movements. This is a document written by a committee, with each ‘stakeholder’ adding their bit. Concerns for students’ self esteem, resilience, responsibility, compassion, caring, fair play etcetera are rife.
This is the cherry-picker approach to ethics and the good life. But there is no cohesion; there is no underlying narrative that illustrates the nature of our life in the world. This is the sort of document that no one in their right mind could object to; it is all about “best practice”.
No mention is made of the Judeo/Christian tradition or of any religious tradition. Managerialism has already produced a language of its own for ‘appropriate’ and ‘committed’ speech.
the great men and women
of history were caught up
in a motivating narrative
- for good and evil
But a thin veneer of morality - which is all that we will get from values education - is liable to result in a false piety behind which evil and corruption will breed. This is the sort of behaviour that is condemned in the New Testament and is the opposite of freedom.
The problem is that these values (gleaned from bits of Australian history, as if we have a monopoly on “a fair go”) are to be dumped on students in the absence of a motivating narrative that could put fire in their bellies.
The people who produced this document are naïve in thinking that they can skim off values from the narratives that have forged our society and serve them up to be taken like medicine for bad character and behaviour. Character is not formed like that.
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The imposition of values will do nothing for the person who lives without hope; without a rich narrative that tells them who they are, where they came from, and why they are here.
Character - and the behaviour that derives from it - cannot be developed simply by asserting values. Character is born of passion. We may think that democracy came from the Greeks but a much broader base for democracy is to be found in the New Testament.
Our egalitarianism comes from the teaching that every person is made in the image of God. The character of our forbears was formed out of biblical narrative which dramatically - in story and song and poetry and legend - fired the imagination and the belly.
In contrast, values education is a poor thing, a weak attempt at social engineering aimed at making us ‘better’.
The Revd Peter Sellick is Senior Research Officer at The Auditory Lab, Dept of Phyusiology, University of Western Australia.
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