Handouts For Presentation

What is the most serious problem in schools? (from teachers' viewpoint)

1940

1. Children talking out of turn.

2. Chewing gam

3. Making noise

4. Running in halls.

5. Getting out of line.

6. Wearing improper clothing.

7. Failure to use waste basket.

1990

1. Drugs

• Six out of ten students in high school admit use of illicit drugs.

2. Alcohol abuse

• Over 90% of high school seniors have used alcohol.

3. Teenage pregnancy

• Despite a much smaller teen population and despite more frequent contraceptive use, about 1.1 million teenagers became pregnant in 1991 - roughly the same figure as for the last ten years. Forty percent of today's fourteen-year-old girls will become pregnant by the time they are nineteen.

4. Suicide

• Suicides among young people have risen by 300% over the last thirty years, and one in seven teens say they have tried to commit suicide.

5. Rapes

6. Robbery

7. Assault

• An estimated 525,000 attacks, shakedown, and robberies occur in public high schools each month. Each year nearly three million crimes are committed on or near school property - 16,000 per school day. About 135,000 students carrying a weapon of some type. 21% of all secondary school students avoid using the rest rooms out of fear of being harms or intimidated. Surveys of school children reveal that their chief school-related concern is the disruptive behavior of their classmates. Teachers have similar concerns. Almost one third of public school teachers indicate that they have seriously considered leaving teaching because of student misbehavior.

What is values clarification?

Through specific games and strategies, students clarify their own values (not the values of their communities or the values of Western culture). The role of the teacher is to engage students in activities that cause them to wrestle with such issues as war, family, and the whole range of human relationships and teacher themselves are supposed to remain neutral in discussions.

Social Background of the emergence of values clarification

A dramatic event promoted curriculum revision during the latter 1950s - Russia's victorious space lunch of Sputnik. American science curriculum and American values ( pride and opposition to communism) were directly challenged. A new science curriculum was inquiry- (or discovery-) oriented: it encouraged students to question existing knowledge, formulate new theories, search for and collect information relative to the theories before repeating the next cycle. Rather naturally, empirical verification and the accumulation of knowledge increased in importance and have become mainstream to the American way of life: truth comes by discovery, and discovery never ends. In this way, Sputnik and the subsequent curriculum changes may have contributed to change in "values in education" that were to came in the 1960's and 1970's.

Another factor was the Vietnam conflict, which illustrate the cognitive emphasis in American thought. Many American leaders approached the war with technical, managerial constructs, failing to take adequately into account such things as philosophy, politics, and other human factors. The value conflict between America's proponents of the war and large number of the public contributed to the value changed which took place in the 1960s and 1970s. One prevalent value in question which follows is, "Who can we trust?". The answer seems to have been, Ourselves, an answer consonant with a pluralistic society.

In 1970s, teachers shared with the rest of the nation much moral confusion over such issues as the limits of protest, the new sexual mores, and the meaning of patriotism. Imperceptibly but clearly, many teachers surrendered their moral authority and retreated to the role of technician. They restricted their efforts to the conveying of information and skills, and the concept of teachers as special people responsible for the character and moral development of young began to erode.

However, some teachers tried to find new ways to play a role in the moral development of their students. The academic community helped them along by providing three new approaches: values clarification, cognitive-developmental moral education, and ethical reasoning for children.

• Cognitive-developmental moral education, based on Lawrence Kohlberg's theory, is supposed to help children reach higher stages of moral thinking, largely thorough the discussion of moral dilemmas, and the teacher plays a relatively neutral role, merely presenting the dilemmas and helping the students to keep their discussions they are reaching; in and of themselves, the verbal activity are expected to propel students forward through the developmental stages. (However, the outcomes of subsequent research on the cognitive-developmental approach have been discouraging. The gains that students make are confined to the lower stages of moral development.

• Ethical reasoning is to teach students how to reason their way through moral problems. Developers created a variety of programs intended to help children work through moral problems in step-by-step, analytical way. These programs, in effect, teach ethics - which traditionally has been taught as part of the college-level philosophy sequence - to high school, and even elementary students. (This effort, though interesting, touched relatively few students. Its limited impact may have been because very few teachers prepared to teach ethics.
  

Characteristics of New Approaches

• These approaches are concerned with ideas, with intellectual skills, and with structures of thinking. There is little attention to doing --- to moral action or to how one ought to behave.

• The domain methods of these approaches emphasize process.

• Teachers are not to express their own views on moral issues or to urge certain positions or actions on their students.
  

Values Clarification: Pros & Cons

Pros

• Promote critical thinking, rational individual choice, and public affirmation.

Values clarification - which emphasizes critical thinking, rational individual choice, and public affirmation - seems a sensible and essential remedy against authoritarian leadership wherever it might appear.

• Responsible decision making.

Traditional indoctrination is inadequate in today's culture.

These valuing process in making decisions would lead more personally satisfying.

• Individual value development & Better equipped to adapt to society.

Through values clarification, human reason will best lead to individual value development anyway, and the child becomes better equipped to adapt to the changing cultural norm.

Cons

• "Values-neutral"

It is morally or ethically irresponsible to remain neutral while determining values.

• Indoctrination of ethical subjectivism and relativism.

Values clarification is indoctrinating students in their position of ethical subjectivism and relativism.

• "Personal values"

Values are personal (at least to some extent) in a psychological sense. However, whether or not they are personal (that is, subjective and relative) in a philosophical sense is entirely different question.

• "Likes and dislikes clarification"

Values clarification simply assumes the relativity and subjectivity of all values and ignores the important distinction between moral and nonmoral values, it tends to equate the term "moral values" - a matter of obligation - with the term "personal difference" - truly a matter of free choice.

• The right to privacy.

Values clarification threatens the right to privacy of students

and their families.

Traditional moral education until 1950s and values clarification are not really counterparts but complementary to each other, because moral and value education , as well as other traditional subject matter, have two dimensions, that is, content, which emphasized in the former, and content, which emphasized in the latter.

The Fall-Out Shelter Problem

"Your group are members of a department in Washington D.C, that is in charge of experimental stations in the outposts of civilization. Suddenly the Third World War breaks out and bombs begin dropping. Places all across the globe are being destroyed. People are heading for whatever fallout shelters are available. You receive a desperate call from one of your experimental stations, asking for help.

"It seems there are ten people but there is only enough space, air, food, and water in the fall-out shelter for six people for period of three months - which is how long they estimate they can safety stay down there. They realize that if they have to decide among themselves which six should go into the shelter, they are likely to become irrational and begin fighting. So they have decided to call your department, their superiors, and leave the decision to you. They will abide by your decision.

"But each of you has to quickly get ready to head down to your own fall-out shelter. So all you have time for is to get superficial descriptions of the ten people. You have half-an-hour to make your decision. Then you will have to go to your own shelter.

"So, as a group you now have a half-hour to decide which four of the ten will have to be eliminated from the shelter. Before you begin, I want impress upon your two important consideration. It is entirely possible that the six people you choose to stay in the shelter might be the only six people left to start the human race over again. This choice is, therefore, very important. Do not allow yourself t be swayed by pressure from the others in your group. Try to make the best choice possible. On the other hand, if you do not make a choice in a half-hour, then you are, in fact, choosing to let the ten people fight it out among themselves, with the possibility that more than four might perish. You have exactly one half-hour. Here is all you know about the ten people:

• A 16-year-old girl of questionable IQ; a high school drop-out; pregnant.

• A policeman with a gun (which cannot be taken from him), thrown off the force recently for brutality.

• A clergyman, 75.

• A woman physician, 36, known to be confirmed racist.

• A male violinist, 46, who served seven years for pushing narcotics.

• A 20-year-old black militant, no special skills.

• A former prostitute, female, 39.

• An architect, a male homosexual.

• A 26-year-old law student.

• The law student's 25-year-old wife who spent the last nine months in a mental hospital, still heavily sedated. They refuse to be separated.
  
  
  

Source: "Values Clarification - A Handbook of Practical Strategies for Teachers and Students" by S.B. Simon, L.W. Howe, and H. Kirschenbaum.

- sold more than 600,000 copies.

References

Baer, Richard A., Jr.

"Teaching Values in the Schools", American Education; Vol.18, No.9, P.11-17, Nov. 1982.

Hodge, R. Lewis

"A Myriad of Values: A Brief History", 1989.

Kilpatrick, William

"Why Johnny Can't Tell Right from Wrong", Simon & Schuster, New York, 1992.

Kirschenbaum, Howard

"A Comprehensive Model for Values Education and Moral Education"

Phi Delta Kappan; Vol.73, No.10, P.771-776, Jun. 1992.

Lickona, Thomas

"The Return of Character Education", Educational Leadership; Vol.51, No.3, P.6-11, Nov. 1993.

Ryan, Kevin

"The New Moral Education", Phi Delta Kappan; Vol.68, No.4, Nov. 1986.

Simon, Sidney B., Howe, Leland W., & Kirschenbaum, Howard

Values Clarification - A Handbook of Practical Strategies for Teachers and Students", Hart Publishing Company, Inc. New York,

1972.

Copyright 1998: Taku Ikemoto. All Rights Reserved.