+Values/Character Education: Traditional or Liberational

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+Position 1: Teach Traditional Values

+Primary Argument!

“Schools should provide a firm education in ethical principals that help youth sort, analyze, and evaluate behaviors and values expressed in popular culture. This is character education, designed to instill and inspire good character-morally grounded behaviors and attitudes.”

+Supporting Points

Students still need to learn right from wrong NOT the fact that it “depends” on a persons religion or upbringing what behaviors are acceptable and what are not.

Students need to receive solid messages not mixed ones regarding behavior.

All of these different liberal view points only confuse children.

+Liberation Through active value inquiry

+The Basics

Everything schools do and decide not to do reflects a set of values

Schools provide values and character education through a variety of forms whether intended and thoughtful or not.

Students come to school with a collection of values and opinions on what is good and bad

+Liberation = Education

Educations primary purpose is liberation. Liberation from ignorance is the foundation beneath freedoms from slavery, dictatorship, and domination.

Knowledge is the basis for: Participation in a democracy Justice and equality A healthy and satisfying lifestyle Providing the same opportunities to others

Inquiry requires freedom We cannot impose traditional values on schoolchildren and

not allow criticism of those values.

+School Decisions About Values Education

The question is not whether schools should teach values, but rather what kind of values.

Should Produce Thinkers Current materials are devoted to producing docile, passive

students who will be unlikely to challenge the status quo or raise questions even in the face of unreasoned authoritarianism.

+Liberation Education and Critical Pedagogy: Values Inquiry

Examine social problems and conflicting values No teaching techniques, lesson plans, or textbook Liberation is the emancipation of students and teachers

from the blinders of class-dominated ignorance, conformity, and thought control

Students inquire into basic moral concepts, apply them to disparities in society’s values, examine alternative views, and arrive at a valid and usable set of ethical guidelines.

+What Should be Taught

Engage students in critical study of society and its institutions with the dual purpose of liberating themselves from blinders that simply reproduce old values that continue such ethical lights as greed, corruption, and inhumanity

Ideology – the study of ideas Strip away layers of propaganda and rationalization to

examine root causes. Using a dynamic form of dialectic reasoning opens topics to

examination.

+Reactionary Indoctrination and Cultural Reproduction

Conservatives and liberals expect indoctrination (instruction in biased beliefs) and impose their dominant views through schools.

Cultural Reproduction (each generation passes on to the next the dominant cultural ideology) in the US: The positive beliefs that the US is a chosen country, with

justice and equality fro all and the best economic system. The negative belief that any view raising troubling

questions about American values is automatically anti-American.

Majority of students never come across radical materials or automatically reject them because school has effectively sealed their minds to new ideas.