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Educational research of the 1990s and beyond has challenged earlier conceptions concerned with the capacity of teachers, and formal education generally, to make a difference in the lives of students. Decades of apparently experimental research simply served to confirm time and again the view that the destiny of a student was fairly well fixed by heritage and that what was left of impacting agencies related more to issues like peer pressure, media, and disability than to the agencies of teacher and school. Countless studies were conducted by eminent figures such as the revered Talcott Parsons wherein the extent of research merely reinforced his fundamental belief that families were “factories which produce human personality” (Parsons & Bales 1955, p. 16). Against the potency of the family’s formative power, all else paled to insignificance according to the research findings, leading Christopher Jencks to sum up so aptly that “the character of a school’s output depends largely on a single input, namely the characteristics of the entering children” (1972, p. 256).

In July 2005 the then Australian Government Minister for Education, Science and Training, the Hon’ble Dr. Brendan Nelson MP, visited an independent school in Hamilton, a regional town in the State of Victoria. He was there to open a new science facility. It was an ordinary task of office undertaken by most ministers of education in most countries. However, on this occasion, in his address to the school community, the Australian Minister outlined a vision for education in Australia that highlighted a significant new focus he and the government were pursuing in their national education policy. The focus was on the role of schooling in values education.

South Africa’s formal transition to democracy in 1994 was an inspiring moment. However, it would be naive to assume that the task of transforming so evil a social order as apartheid can be accomplished in a moment. Many practices of the apartheid era persist, as do age-old vices such as murder and incest. Add to these, widespread corruption at all levels of the public service and apparently new vices such as a shocking spate of baby-rapes, and there may be good reason for moral outrage if not despair. Values education would seem to be an obvious place to begin to overcome these ills. A central aim of this chapter is to describe and evaluate South Africa’s approach to values education for an emergent democracy built on the foundations of a corrupt and divided society.

Much has been written about the need for both schools and leadership to be different from what they are today if they are to meet the challenges of the knowledge society (Hargreaves 2003; Mitchell & Sackney 2000; Sackney et al. 1999). The impact of globalization, new technologies and the need for a well-educated society has put pressure on educators to improve opportunities for student learning. Various restructuring attempts have been made with minimal success. Unfortunately, the traditional worldview of schooling, based on Newtonian science, does not seem to be getting the job done. Equally unfortunate are the conditions that foster and unnecessarily exacerbate human pain, fragility, injustice, frustration, and create disease in schools. In a fast changing world, sustainable and continuous learning is a “given” (Hargreaves & Fink 2005). In this chapter we outline an alternative worldview of leadership based on an ecological perspective to meet the challenges of a knowledge-based society and provide a critique of toxic leadership (egoism). Finally, we present some considerations for ethical and sustainable leadership in schools.

It is said that travel broadens the mind. Features of one’s home environment hitherto taken for granted are challenged by what one sees elsewhere. One begins to think differently and, almost inevitably, to behave differently. But as far as expanding one’s view of education is concerned, travel – whether actual, by visiting education institutions abroad, or virtual, by studying first-hand accounts, film, etc. – is unlikely to provoke a re-evaluation of core assumptions about the responsibilities of the student in a formal educational setting. In education systems worldwide, students are expected to learn what other people have decided they should be taught. Students are sometimes given a menu of curriculum options from which to choose, but if they would prefer to learn something completely different this predilection will seldom be catered to or even acknowledged. Student-initiated curricula – that is, curricula conceived and formulated by the students themselves – are very rare within formal education. Fundamental decisions about the content of the formal curriculum are normally taken by teachers, the school board, the local education authority, or central government.

From both ancient biblical times – where the motivation was the “desire for order and continuity” (Crenshaw 1998) – and the period from Aristotle and Socrates onwards, moral formation of children and the shaping of their character have always been regarded as a primary function of both parental nurture and formal education. The central concerns of ancient sages (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Israel) were about knowledge and religion. The aims of education, for Aristotle, were to teach the intellectual and moral virtues necessary for right action, the pursuit of what is noble and thus of happiness as the (natural end) of life (Hollinger 2002, pp. 46–49). At the beginning of the 19th century, “nearly everyone was persuaded that religion and morality were inseparable; so inseparable that moral education must be religious education, and that no sense of absolute obligation in conscience could be found apart from religion. That moral philosophers taught the contrary made no difference” (Chadwick 1975, p. 229).

The Australian Commonwealth Government is investing heavily in educational reform. Increasingly, a key feature of the projects undertaken as part of Australian Government programmes is the encouragement that schools work collaboratively to develop innovative approaches to teaching and learning. This approach is intended to improve student learning whilst at the same time strengthening both the member schools and the provision of education across Australia. This emphasis on collaborative clusters and learning networks is consistent with a number of international initiatives.

The continent of Australia in the south-eastern area of the Asia Pacific region has a population of 20.3 million spread over a huge, largely arid, land mass. The bulk of the population live along the coastline where cosmopolitan cities, industrial towns, and holiday locations are to be found. Founded as a penal colony by the British in 1788, Australia is yet to formally sever ties with mother England. From its initial uneasy coexistence with the indigenous population, Australia has become multicultural, with 23% residents born in another country and second- and third- generation migrants often retaining an affiliation with their parents’ or grandparents’ birthplace. Some 52% of marriages are between spouses from different birthplace countries.

The last decade has seen major education reform initiatives in Asia. There are some common emphases in these initiatives, such as school management reform in relation to school-based development, emphasising accountability especially in requiring school achievements be known to the public, redefinition of educational goals, aiming at quality and the assessment of quality, focusing on learning outcome rather than teaching performance, diverting the function of examinations from assessment and screening to assessment for learning and development, and – lifelong learning. These changes are not a single incidence, but are interlocking and build upon one another. They also reflect ideological shifts towards demands for efficiency, performativity, and measurability in education enterprises. In the face of more volatile economical situations and with a general elevation of education attainment in most countries, there are increased demands for public participation in educational provisions, including increased parental involvement in school activities and even policymaking and public participation in curriculum development. Lifelong learning is an area of educational provision that contains most of these elements in current educational reforms. It addresses educational needs for the volatile economies that would lead to quick turnovers in the types of jobs available because of quick turnovers in industries. To many, this type of economic situation is coined as the knowledge economy.

This chapter explores the lifelong learning implicit in the promotion and defence of inclusive democratic values particularly in relation to formal and informal forms of Adult and Community Education practice. It suggests that behind the values of an inclusive and courteous social democracy is an ideal that lives in a reflective, pragmatic, and critical imagination – i.e., an imagination that envisages inclusive democratic values as possible and desirable in human life which need to be visioned and revisioned constantly to meet changing circumstances. The specific learnings involved in renewing the inclusive imagination underpinning democratic values – how it can be fostered and what barriers exist to impede it – pose considerable challenges to educators and trainers of adults particularly where their educational work has been concerned largely with imparting information and skills. Although this chapter has an eye to adult education practice, it is largely concerned with contextual and curriculum themes so that many of the ideas and explorations may be of use in the world of schooling as well.