Values/Character Education: Traditional or Liberational

1. Values/Character Education: Traditional or Liberational Brought to you by: Two Chicks and a Guy!

3. Position 1: Teach Traditional Values

4. 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.”

5. 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.

6. Liberation Through active value inquiry

7. 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

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. 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.