posted on 2004-01-01, 00:00authored byScott Webster
There appears to be increasing interest among certain educational institutions to include values as a prominent feature of their practice (Buckley & Erricker, 2004). One recent example is the Victorian Curriculum Assessment Authority (VCAA) who released a discussion paper earlier this year, which indicates that values are to play a much greater role in government schools. However, endeavouring to promote values as common standards can be criticised to be problematic in our pluralist society, because not all values are necessarily valuable.
This paper reviews the VCAA paper and attempts to respond to Nietzsche’s (1998) challenge to question the value of our values, by offering guidance as to how the educative value of values might be determined. Such an examination is expected to identify a potential tension between a particular civic education and that of a more philosophic and universally educative perspective. In order to do this, a differentiation between a value (noun) as ‘objective fact’ and value (verb) as a ‘subjective relation’ is made. This paper will adopt an existential perspective by drawing upon consequentialism, intentionality and the works of Kierkegaard and Dewey, to argue that emphasis should be placed on the subjective aspects of educative valuing without fostering an objective/subjective divide.
History
Pagination
1 - 12
Location
Melbourne, Victoria
Open access
Yes
Start date
2004-11-26
End date
2004-11-28
Language
eng
Notes
Reproduced with the specific permission of the copyright owner.
Publication classification
E1.1 Full written paper - refereed
Copyright notice
2004, PESA
Title of proceedings
PESA 2004 : Education and values : Proceedings of the 2004 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia conference