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At present there is enormous interest in values issues and in the question of how we may attempt to resolve our differences over them. Accounts and details of what Thomas Nagel (1979) called the great “mortal questions”, such as the rights and wrongs of euthanasia, genetic cloning, and the tensions and possibility of reconciliation between different ethnic and religious groups in our societies, appear on the front pages of our newspapers and on the television almost daily. It is inevitable that students in our educating institutions will want help in coming to decide what they ought to think about these and similar issues, how they ought to judge, which way they ought to behave in respect of these and those other values issues “of great pith and moment”, with which their lives, and that of their community and its future health, stability and progress, are increasingly beset.

In his eye-opening book , the Canadian author William Gairdner writes in the chapter “Looking After Their Souls: Moral Values and Sex-Ed” about values education today:

In this chapter, I am recognising a body of normative scholarship under the label “lifelong learning theory”. Scholarship so labelled I consider to be either that which argues lifelong learning or that which provides a of lifelong learning as a concept of worth. Included are such works addressing the notion of “lifelong education”, rather than that of “lifelong learning”, and also those that are recognised in the scholarly literature of lifelong learning theory as being works importantly foundational to the theory but which are less explicitly working under the label of lifelong learning or lifelong education – such as the Club of Rome report (Botkin et al. 1979) and the UNESCO report (Fauré et al. 1972). That body of theory I see as presupposing and implying a particular ethic, which I have characterised elsewhere (Bagnall 2004) as an aretaic ethic with a teleology of optimising universal human flourishing through learning. It is an ethic that suffuses the character of social entities or individuals who practice lifelong learning – at least to the extent that they are true to the theory in that practice. It does not, in other words, lend itself to being compartmentalised into those aspects of individual or social action that in some sense pertain particularly or majorly to lifelong learning activities and those aspects that do not – if such were possible.

Schools in have traditionally been expected to reinforce the basic values of these societies and to initiate young people into traditions of critical thought. During the 1960s and 1970s there were new demands for what was variously called ; ; ; and . Among theorists there was an acute awareness of the problem of indoctrination and about the importance of “neutrality” or at least “impartiality” in the handling of moral and religious values. Thus, there was much stress on Values Clarification (e.g., Raths et al. 1966), Kohlberg’s “content free” approach to moral development (e.g., Kohlberg 1970) and the work of the Farmington Trust (Wilson et al. 1967).

We have become rather shy about stating aims of education. There is wisdom in this attitude. Discussion gets further if it deals with the known. Talking about defects to be removed is therefore more productive than talking about goods it would be nice to attain, because the defects are part of most people’s experience and so are known, whereas the goods for which we might strive are . not present and hence our picture of them is less clear (see further Popper 1966, Vol. 1, pp. 158–159, 284–285 [n. 9, Chap. 9, and text]). Modern schooling has some clear defects. To name just three, there are young people whose ability to do what they want is hindered by their lack of skills in decoding print, whose ignorance of simple mathematical operations makes them look foolish, or whose credulity leaves them open to exploitation. Nevertheless, it is sometimes useful to step back from the tasks of the moment and try to find a short formula which unifies and systematises the varied activities in which we are engaged. One such formula which has perhaps been too hastily dismissed as an aim of education is rational autonomy.

An ability to make wise moral decisions in the face of conflicting and competing ethical values is of paramount importance for a successful life. Cicero said that truly wise persons will never do anything they might regret and that every action that they perform will always be dignified, consistent, serious and upright (, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971, p. 95). He also observed that custom can give people the power to face pain and suffering, noting that, in the case of the Romans, false beliefs and dangerous habits had softened and weakened them (op. cit., p. 94). Cicero argued that a disciplined life in which persons had schooled their desires so that they were satisfied with a simple life would be happiest. Our natures, he observed, actually have only modest requirements and so going beyond these requirements is unnecessary and leads, in times of privation, to misery. In this respect, he mentioned the Spartans, a community who had habituated themselves to enjoy frugal living. The Persians, too, he said, enjoyed a moderate diet and life and by this means had sound bodies and unimpaired health (pp. 102–106). We do not wish to concentrate on the question of whether or not a frugal and simple life is better than a wealthy and extravagant life. We wish, rather, to focus on two propositions which underlie this claim, namely, that what matters to our happiness is what we have become habituated to; and that what reinforces and supports the commitment to the way of life to which we have become habituated is an appropriate habitat. Thus, the frugality and moderation of the Spartans was possible because it was reinforced by the Spartan community. Without the appropriate habitat to support good moral habits, especially in the formative years of a person, good moral habits will not be developed and so the bad habits into which they fall will rob them of a measure of their autonomy in moral choice, perhaps paradoxically.

Historically, not much of values education theory has been rooted in the neuro- and psychological sciences. Kohlberg’s enterprise was rooted in philosophy (Kohlberg 1981), Piaget’s in non-human biology (1932), Gilligan’s in psychoanalytic theory (Gilligan 1982), Shweder’s in cultural anthropology (Shweder 1993). Yet a prescription for moral or values education requires an up-to-date and frank assessment of human nature, needs, and possibilities (Flanagan 1991; McKinnon 1999). Like a chef, educators need to think about the nature of the ingredients with which they work and the potentials that lie within. In education, this requires having an empirically derived human psychology and an empirically grounded pedagogy. A smattering of each is provided here. After reviewing two main approaches to values education, I suggest new directions for values education more strongly rooted in recent findings of social sciences and in a Triune Ethics theory.

There seem to be two competing tendencies in values education of late in the West: character education based on virtue ethics; and citizenship education based on democratic values. In the formulation of two British scholars, McLaughlin and Halstead (1999, pp. 137–138), they are both embraced as character education, yet being called “nonexpansive” and “expansive” character education, respectively. The nonexpansive character education insists on the inculcation of transcultural moral values as moral basics, combining Aristotelian ethics and moral cosmopolitanism. It assumes that human beings, wherever they live, share roughly the same psychological makeup and a similar set of moral virtues and values. On the other hand, the expansive character education downplays the importance of transcultural moral values and virtues. Instead, combining liberal ethics and moral perspectivism, it emphasizes more expansive values of particular political systems, cultures or religions to advocate the cultivation of perspective-sensitive attitude as democratic virtue. It can be noted that, while the former is primarily concerned with the formation of an individual’s character via personal virtues, i.e., justice, honesty, or loyalty, the latter is focused on the inculcation of civic virtues, i.e., tolerance, social and moral responsibility, and political literacy.1

Teachers usually say that they would like to do moral and social education and that they would like to teach for autonomy and critical thinking and the like (cf. Patry & Hofmann 1998). In the curricula such goals are also very frequently formulated, although usually in the prefaces and not in the content sections. The parents claim that students should not only learn cognitive content knowledge; rather social learning, civic education and the like should be done as well as values education, although without interfering with the values defended at home. In educational policy and public debates, schools are frequently blamed for not doing social education.

Educational institutions have institutional identities that, in most cases, seem to have developed spontaneously. In numerous instances, there seems never to have been a conscious effort to purposely define the identity of the institution at the outset, i.e., to establish an institution with a deliberate process of defining sources of meaning for the institution on the basis of a set of religious, life-conceptual, philosophical or cultural attributes, and values that are given priority over other sources of meaning. For a collective social actor such as an educational institution (cf. Castells 1998, p. 6), there may even be a plurality of identities, the existence of some of which the institution may not be consciously aware of. In most cases, the identity of a particular educational institution, such as a school, college, or university, seems to have developed as a result of the way in which the individuals forming the totality of the institution strove for “success in action” (Blackburn 1996, p. 297).