IS VALUE(S)-ADDED EDUCATION IN THE NATIONAL INTEREST? By Brian V. Hill Professor of Education,Murdoch University, Western Australia This is the Harold Wyndham Lecture in 1993 Thank you for your invitation to deliver the Harold Wyndham Memorial Lecture for 1993. I feel very privileged to have been invited to Sydney for this purpose. It was over thirty years ago that I once came to live for a time in this city. I arrived in the year the parliament was debating the introduction of the Wyndham Scheme. I recall it being reported that when the necessary legislation was eventually passed, the House stood to acclaim a somewhat portly gentleman who was watching from the gallery. And well they might, for the scheme was his. The year after this widely publicized event, I enrolled in an M Ed course offered by the University of Sydney. One evening, our lecturer arrived for the seminar in a rather bemused state. "Fame is fleeting", he said. "Last week I went to the annual conference of the Australian College of Education. A young woman was preparing name tags. She looked through me and said, 'Your name please.' I told her. She wrote 'Harold', and then asked, The lectures Wyndham gave to our Master's seminar always carried conviction. He knew his stuff, but he also had fire in the belly. He cared about education. He was directly involved in writing the Report that bore his name, and his liking for the grand turn of phrase was as evident there as in his lectures. The biggest issue his committee had to face was the need to adapt an elitist secondary school system to the needs of all adolescents. Even in that day, when the percentage of students hoping to go on to university was much lower than it is now, and when a situation of full employment took the risk out of being an early school leaver, the committee recognised nevertheless that the final years of schooling could not be reserved exclusively for university aspirants.1 Nor was it true, as was claimed by some who testified before the committee, that the quality of schooling at this level had declined. Such anecdotal claims were countered, then as now, with research evidence to the contrary. But apparently dinosaurs are more durable than we used to think, especially in universities modeled on Jurassic parks. In any event, the Committee saw the need to address the aims of secondary education in a more democratic spirit. It nominated eight components that were required for the rounded education of any individual . They were-
It was a magnanimous vision, calculated to drag a conservative society into the 'sixties. Few at that time, however, could have foreseen the shaking of the ideological foundations that was to come later in that decade, much less the emergence of structural unemployment in the late 'seventies. Nor were the technological advances and environmental concerns which fill the modern horizon apparent to the reformers of that time. Computers, for example, were in their clanking infancy and television was a flickering novelty, as yet unrecognisable as the advance guard of global telecommunications. Nor did the Report take cognizance of such events -contemporary with its writing at that - as the launching of Sputnik and the opening of the first nuclear power station. And of course it knew nothing of the problems associated with what we have come to recognise as the Greenhouse Effect. Given that such great changes have since intervened, may we not then consign the Report to history ash good step forward for that time, but proof that our forebears were, as we had always believed anyway, primitive in comparison with ourselves - if not Jurassic, certainly still immersed in the Age of Steam? A glance at the core curriculum recommended in the Report might seem to support this conclusion. It was the mixture as before, although with important changes to the second language requirements, and some overdue concessions to the concept of integrated "social studies." I will be maintaining, however, that in some important ways our educational vision has regressed, thanks to a latter-day return to the Dark Ages. Incidentally, to distinguish the present era of cultural vandalism from that earlier one, I will refer to it as the "Dawk Ages. Part of my case will hinge on an analysis of the motif of economic productivity which has become so dominant in recent educational policy. Incidentally, a friendly difference of opinion has emerged between the organisers and myself about the title of this lecture. I offered them the title, "Is value-added education in the national interest" I had in mind the language of economic rationalism, which expects education to add commercial value to the products of schooling by putting a greater emphasis on the development of specific vocational competencies. The organisers preferred the question, "Is values-added education in the national interest?" Now I take it they had in mind the debate about whether it is proper to engage in explicit values education in the state school. I am concerned about that issue too, but I suspect that the old debate has moved on, and the question today is not whether values should be taught, but which values. It is at this point that our two interpretations merge. Official policies strongly endorse work-place values and an economic definition of the national interest. Is that good enough? My argument will proceed on two fronts. First, I will review quickly the case for saying that values education is unavoidable, and I will argue that we need to identify a clear and broad values agenda for propagation in our schools. Second, I will be maintaining that the agenda favoured by Dawk Age politicians is too narrow, and ultimately, therefore, not in the true national interest of Australia, 1 will then proceed to suggest some strategies we may adopt to drive the vandals out and raise up a more productive and responsible citizenry. At various stages in my argument 1 will draw comparisons between the curriculum components identified by the Wyndham Report and those being advocated today, in order to support my thesis that in some respects we may even have gone backwards since that time. THE INEVITABILITY OF VALUES TRANSMISSION First, let me deal briefly with the inevitability of values transmission. It was thirty-two years ago that I first argued in print that value-neutral schooling is a myth.5 The dominant cultural mood at that time was a confident positivism which vested its hopes in teaching facts that nobody could dispute. Today I do not feel as lonely as I did then. Philosophically, Thomas Kuhn, Peter Berger and the post-modernists have in various ways debunked the positivist paradigm. Culturally, the pressures of making multiculturalism work, of maintaining our democratic way of life in the midst of great social change, and of exercising environmental responsibility, have all combined to put values education squarely on the agenda. Originally, the myth of value-neutral schooling was invented to protect state schools from the charge of indoctrination, such as was believed to be occurring in church schools. It probably was occurring in them, but the state school curriculum was not less indoctrinative, particularly in its marginalising of the domains of religion, morality and politics, and its claim to be sticking to "the (so-called) facts." Actually, of course, the very decision to have schools - and state schools at that - is profoundly value-loaded, and requires to be justified in terms of some acceptable social philosophy. Thereafter, other value-judgments are involved in deciding what studies to include, and whether they shall be assigned to the core or remitted to the elective curriculum. Moreover the inclusion of some implies the exclusion - deliberately or by default of others. Students pick up value messages from this also, the more indoctrinative for-not being discussed in the included curriculum. Early interpretations of the neutrality doctrine were based on the assumption that teaching the three Rs and the recognised academic disciplines was an ideologically neutral activity, in comparison to teaching areas of opinion like religion and politics. But this whole way of viewing the map of knowledge reeks of bias. Marxist critique in the 'seventies showed how closely this policy was associated with maintaining the status quo and reinforcing the privileges of a dominant social elite. More recently, post-modernists have reinforced the message that schooling is unavoidably in the business of influencing how students perceive the social reality. Actually, such arguments almost prove too much. They tempt us to slide from the recognition that education is inevitably value-loaded, to the gloomy conclusion that all education is therefore indoctrination. This paradoxically then implies that we might as well go ahead and squeeze students into whatever value-mould we prefer, which is hardly a conclusion post-modernists would find congenial. There is certainly more than a hint of this sentiment in the Federal Government's incursions into school curriculum, and its pressure for vocationally oriented "performance outcomes." Goals associated with individual development and educational innovation are out; goals associated with higher productivity and so-called "enterprise education" are in. But to say that education is value-loaded is not to say that we cannot equip individuals to interrogate their own cultural conditioning and have a hand in shaping themselves. The Wyndham Report spoke in this connection of developing a "capacity for critical thought", though this was in the context of a heavily prescribed curriculum and pressure to conform to the value structures of the existing society. A similar approach characterised the coterie of educational philosophers grouped around Richard Peters in London a decade later. Their catch-cry was critical rationality. And yet, as Kevin Harris was one of the first to point out, the curriculum they endorsed was traditional grammar school to a fault. The problem was that the curriculum did not encourage interrogation of itself. For Peters, the student was the barbarian who needed to be brought within the gates.? Who put the gates there was not in question. I have personally preferred to talk about encouraging the ability to engage in transcultural critique; not disavowing the values curriculum but raising the consciousness of students as to what is being transmitted; enabling them, as I put it earlier, to interrogate their own cultural conditioning. To aim at developing this kind of critical self-consciousness, of course, is itself the expression of a value. Peters originally thought that in critical rationality he had found a neutral aim, but he was later forced to concede that it was a preferred value, albeit one inherently necessary to the preservation of a liberal democracy. And that is the point. Commitment to that value provides the justification we need for the derivative educational value. And an informed and critical self-consciousness is the middle way we need between a value-starved curriculum and an indoctrinated one. This is not a pipe-dream but an educational possibility. Values transmission is inevitable, but if this is one of the values transmitted, it will conduce to an educational result, compatible with both individual and national objectives. This finding frees us to proceed, with confidence, to discuss other values that might be on our curriculum agenda. THE MYOPIA OF NARROW VOCATIONALISM An obvious starting point is the current emphasis on economic priorities. Linked with this is another mythology, which has been manufactured in recent years. It says that educationists derailed the educational process in the post-war period, and are particularly blameworthy for our present economic woes. Oddly enough, educationists themselves have helped this myth along. The economic facts are clear. After the Second World War, Australia rode on a bow-wave of prosperity which disguised the fact that she was relying more on the export of raw materials than the development of value-added products. We bottomed with a thump in the late 'seventies, and Federal Governments have been preoccupied ever since with the need to re-orient the economy to more efficient, value-adding processes of production. Dawk Age politicians, ever quick to divert attention from their own previous myopia, looked for scapegoats, and found them in the school system. Teachers, they said, had become .so absorbed with the vision splendid of producing happy individuals with refined leisure tastes that they had failed to inculcate basic skills and vocational competencies. They had concentrated on teaching students, in Illich's words, to consume more educabon9, at the expense of preparation to earn a living. The arguments used in this myth-making often contradict each other, but it does not matter so long as teachers come out villains. Thus the curriculum has been too narrowly academic, but apparently it has also been too broad and permissive. Standards have been too low, yet attrition rates have been too high. Never mind that statistics are showing that the pool, of skills amongst the unemployed is growing all the time, simply because the jobs are not there, even for many graduates; blame the increasing rates of unemployment on the failure of schools to develop work skills. The remedy for all this, they say, is to turn the curriculum more towards vocational competencies. "Competencies" - now that is a big word for politicians. Where did they get it from? At this point, I repeat that our profession has not been entirely blameless in regard to the making of this myth. We gave it to them. Educational research in the behaviourist mode popularised the term. It postulated that we learn by acquiring cumulative bits of knowledge and skill, which can be assessed by counting up itemised, predictable and specifiable "performance outcomes." This paradigm has now turned round and bitten the hand that fed it. Or more accurately, in 1987 it fell into the hands of the Trade Union movement and immediately commended itself as a way of quantifying the award-restructuring process. Every profession now stands in peril of being defined as a composite of specific competencies which just happen to be exercised by humans. A pity. Rats would be more docile. Our profession might reply that it is not our fault, because we have now moved on from such a simplistic view of learning, particularly through the work of Polanyi on tacit knowing, Howard Gardner on multiple intelligences, and the cognitive scientists on the holistic nature of expertise - to name only a few. But this plea in extenuation sounds rather hollow when we then meekly submit to the demand for multiple, atomised, purportedly grade-related assessment profiles for the National Curriculum. In any case, who is listening to us? As my colleague Dr Cherry Collins pointed out when giving the keynote address at the national conference of the Australian Curriculum Studies Association in Brisbane last July, the Australian Education Council was at that moment meeting at the opposite end of the continent in Perth to decide on how to define needs experts? If we are to counter the myopia of narrow vocationalism, we must first explode the myth, and then re-establish a balanced view of educational priorities. I repeat, the myth says that educationists took the bit in their teeth and turned schooling into a professional indulgence which ignored market realities and failed to equip young people with the necessary skills for survival and employment. This is simply untrue. I grant that we have not done as much as we ought to have done to improve the life-chances of the early school leaver, thanks to our attachment to the upper end of the normal curve. But that is not what we are charged with. We are charged with losing sight of vocational aims in education. Bunkum! Revisit with me the Wyndham Report, whose comments on vocational priorities have been consistently echoed in public reports and curriculum statements since. Of the eight general aims listed in the Report, Vocational education is the one about which most is said. "Earning a living", says Wyndham with a flourish," must be part of living a life." He continues: "With each year of adolescence, a complete separation between school and future occupation becomes not only unreal, but impossible." competencies. Who? What is needed he says, is a "sound general education" which helps students to discover all their potential abilities. Second, all subjects must build links with everyday life, and especially the work-place. Third, trained support staff must be available to offer career guidance. Fourth, students nearing the end of their schooling must be offered studies with a more pronounced pre-vocational bias to smooth the transition. And last, says Wyndham, schools must affirm the dignity of labour. Nor did this remain merely an expression of pious intent. Courses were modified, and careers advice did become a standard support service in high schools. Certainly, there have been continuing in-house criticisms of how well we are doing it, but that is a healthy sign that something is going on. So what is new about the current calls for vocational training, school-to work transition policies, and so on? What is new is the assumption that educators cannot be trusted to get this right, and the decisions must be made by politicians and bureaucrats. Moreover, from these sources also are coming demands for very specific job oriented skills which fly in the face not only of the latest theories of learning, which I touched on earlier, but also of the volatile state of the job market. Regarding this latter point, several cautions need to be sounded. For example, though it might' seem that very specific vocational skilling is the way to go, we know that new technologies are automating repetitive tasks, rendering many old crafts obsolete, and creating new roles which require higher levels of critical understanding. Also, the rate of new job creation is unlikely to come anywhere near to balancing out the rate of old job redundancies. In the foreseeable future, the option of work in thetraditional sense will not be available to many persons of all ages. In these circumstances, several educational priorities stand out. First, students must be helped to preserve their self-esteem in a rather cruel economic environment which is telling many of them that they are surplus to requirements and a drain on the public purse. This suggests that there must be a greater emphasis on life-skills, practice in interpersonal negotiations, the enhancement of a critical social understanding, and the encouragement of social concern. Second, flexibility and wide-band skilling should take precedence over one-track "pathways" to particular vocational destinations. One of the Schools Commission's last attempts to keep the initiative in its battle against the encroaching Dawk Ages was a report entitled In the Notional Interest, in which, at one point, it was concluded that "the knowledge and skills being sought [must be] general in scope and flow from a broad rather than a narrowly focused curriculum." Their analysis of market trends led them to warn against seeing the secondary school as the place to provide training for specific occupations." And third, a new reason now exists for taking seriously what the Wyndham Report says about education for the worthwhile use of leisure. Young people are being saddled with too much of it! I would want to add a fourth priority which did not receive much attention in the Wyndham Report, nor indeed has it been a popular theme in state school theorising, thanks to the doctrine of value-neutrality. This is the priority of empowerment through community service and political action. We have been rather individualistic in the past, because of our fear that the state school might be seen to be taking sides in public controversies. But this has encouraged many students to become self-pleasers who feel no special attachment to the common good. In recent years, however, it has become clear that Australia needs some common vision, if it is not to fragment into ethnic enclaves at the mercy of delinquents and criminal cartels in our sprawling cities. Some areas of the curriculum, particularly the social studies, have latterly become much more conscious of their responsibility for values education as well as skills development. Similarly, environmental concern has injected a new sense of social responsibility into science teaching, and the recent emphasis on second-language teaching through LOTE has been driven at least as much by concerns for multicultural integration as the need to understand how our trading partners in the Asian region think. The vision I am commending to you is not just for understanding, but involvement; nor even just for moral concern, but empowerment. This is a hard saying for teachers suckled on the doctrines of value neutrality and academic objectivity. It is even less likely to appeal to bureaucrats and politicians. This was demonstrated recently in the fate suffered by the Framework initially prepared for the National Curriculum area called "Studies of Society and the Environment." The initial design brief itself had a rocky path to acceptance, but eventually came out with a strong commitment to "social justice, ecological sustainability and democratic process." The successful tenderers then produced a Framework document - admittedly rather wordy - in the spirit of the brief. This was summarily rejected by the AEC curriculum committee, which sacked the old team forthwith and appointed a new one. It also nominated several specific phrases for deletion. The main criterion for their deletion seemed to be that they smacked of political radicalism. As the original writing team pointed out, some of these phrases were direct borrowings from the design brief, suggesting that in a climate of growing political conservatism even the original brief itself was now felt to be too conducive to political activism. At this very moment, of course, our political masters are somewhat in disarray. I refer not merely to the Federal budget hiatus, but to the opposition from some states to aspects of the National Curriculum process. This presents an opportunity for our profession to renegotiate educational priorities and to get out of the behaviorist pit we ourselves helped to dig. But for that we must become more ideological, and more politicised. This also means that we must look for allies. My remaining headings will therefore be: • Affirming an Australian Value-Base • Moderating the National Curriculum • Bringing Our Natural Allies On-side AFFIRMING AN AUSTRALIAN VALUE-BASE First, then, we must move out of the neutral corner and unapologetically affirm an Australian value-base. It is interesting to see how diffident Wyndham was about doing this. In his chapter on aims, he prefaced his list of eight by asking what constituted a worthwhile life. 'This question",he said, "is asked at the risk of becoming involved in a discussion of personal philosophies of life." In the event, he did not risk it. The most he was prepared to do was to hint that the community would probably agree on the importance of "spiritual values" (undefined) and the ultimate significance of "relationship with God." That section of the report would not cut much ice today, which is not to deny that several cogent arguments can be advanced for giving attention in the curriculum to spiritual values and religious studies. But if the spiritual context is vaguely defined in the Report, the social context is even worse off. Apart from one passing use of the adjective "Australian" - ironically in reference to the pursuit of leisure - it is not even possible to deduce from the chapter that it was written in and for an Australian context! Nor is the word "democracy" mentioned at all, though the plausibility of the whole chapter rests implicitly on acceptance of the value system of a western liberal democracy. We, however, freed from the obligation to appear neutral, can do a lot better than that; and indeed, pressed by many political, multicultural and environmental dilemmas, we must. The lucky country, having prospered for a surprisingly long. time on the philosophy of "She'll be right, mate!" cannot expect to go on doing so. We must make our students aware of the historical developments which made us what we are, warts and all. We must induct our students into the value-base underlying the kind of liberal democratic, multicultural and environmentally responsible society Australia aspires to be. And through transcultural critique, we must encourage them to own that vision for themselves. It has been interesting to see state authorities beginning to grasp the nettle and generate value charters along these lines. The West Australian Social Education Syllabus started a trend in 1985 by producing a shopping list of values. Many of these were echoed in the 1989 South Australian document Our Schools' Values and the Queensland Social Education Framework of that same year.13 Another step in the evolution of this kind of document was the New South Wales booklet The Values We Teach, which groups values under educational, interpersonal and civic headings, and relates them explicitly to the kind of society we have in Australia." That is good. What such documents lack, however, is a future perspective. They attempt to crystallise current understandings of the matter, and to establish social justice goals which will remove discrimination. But they do not theorise about future directions for Australian society. This is again a gesture to the old chestnut of value-neutrality, and leaves the curriculum vulnerable to take-over by partisan groups. By contrast, our economic rationalist leaders at the present time are far from value-neutral, deeming it quite acceptable to discourage political dissent and propagate competitive, materialistic objectives. I commend to you the outcomes of a recent project which attempted to identify desirable futures for Australia. It was conducted by the Queensland branch of the World Education Fellowship. As reported in the December '92 edition of New Horizons in Education, they developed a set of national goals using the Delphi technique, and then derived specific curriculum targets from them.1s In the business of providing a values-base, I am saying that we need more than rights statements, which are protective; we also need vision statements which invite participation in building Australia's future. We must, of course, make sure that such exercises are not just token gestures, a veneer spread over a curriculum basically oriented to either the academic disciplines or to job-skill objectives. The health of the body politic as well as the individual depends on a well-grounded respect for the traditions which protect and unite us. One important implication of these remarks is that we must put ethics in the forefront of the democratic curriculum. By ethics 1 mean the study and practice of discourse about rights and values. The evolution of the integrated approach called "Social Studies"16 provides a case in point. Earlier this century, it came in as a tool of values transmission in the comprehensive school. It was not highly regarded by the disciplinarians, and even the reference to it in the Wyndham Report was no more than lukewarm. At that stage it suffered from the double handicap of lacking either disciplinary rigour or a clear values mandate. The need for more rigour was addressed in the 'sixties by claiming that it should be based on "social science." The emphasis therefore shifted to objective "social enquiry methods" and the development of social science skills. This was thin gruel for students seeking relevance in their studies Social Studies teachers in the 'eighties moved to adopt a four-fold objective involving Understandings, Skills, Values, and Action.18 What I have not found in this documentation, however, is any clear recognition that this would require as much dependence on the philosophical and normative disciplines - especially ethics - as on the social sciences. In the current National Curriculum exercise, those disciplines barely figure. One might suppose that the area originally designated "Health" might. pick them up, given the emphasis in its design brief on personal development. But they were not mentioned in that context, and the skewing of the subsequent Framework statement towards mainly physical health concerns, symbolised by the addition of the words "and physical education" to the title of the area, made it an even less natural 'venue for these kinds of study. I tremble at the implication of what I am saying, namely, that the other most convenient home for them in the National Curriculum's view of the world is Studies in Society and the Environment. At last count, I identified more than 12 major disciplines just in the social sciences which could be regarded as foundational to this area, let alone what I am calling the normative disciplines. If I had my "druthers", I would bid for a ninth curriculum category gathering up the disciplines which explicitly examine rights and laws, normative discourse and world-views. .But at the least, I will make a strong bid for an approach to Social Studies which plants it firmly on the twin foundations of social science and ethics. This has obvious implications for the training of teachers in the social studies. Many know how to develop enquiry skills, and some have even had some practice in "values clarification" - American-style. But how many can help students to get beyond self-interest or mere feelings in their attempts at values negotiation and justification? By default, the emotive theory of ethics usually wins the day. To summarise this section, I have been advocating that we identify the value base on which our form of multicultural democracy is based, and explicitly promote it. Earlier, I protected this proposal from the charge of indoctrination by arguing that one of the values inherent in it is the development of a critical self-consciousness, equipping students to engage in trans-cultural critique. If these propositions are accepted, then we have considerable catch-up to do in teacher education, for the paradigm of neutral science has unfitted us to engage in the justification and advocacy of moral and cultural goals. MODERATING THE NATIONAL CURRICULUM Next, I want to comment briefly on the need to moderate the national curriculum. Subject as it has been to barely hidden political agendas, some of the rhetoric has sounded disturbingly hollow. We may applaud, nevertheless, the attempt to identify common national purposes in education, and to remove unnecessary obstacles to the portability of previous studies between state systems. It also makes good sense to establish minima in key learning areas, provided that they subserve not only economic needs but personal and cultural aspirations. Recent Framework and Assessment statements, however, are hardly minima. There appears to have been great pressure, not only to put the national interest before regional and community interests, but also to achieve a high degree of convergence on what shall be taught. I have also suggested in previous comments tonight that the eight learning areas identified in the National Curriculum partition the map of knowledge in a clumsy way. In particular, they shortchange the distinctive importance of normative discourses and what, in several states, are called "personal development studies." Furthermore, the epistemology underlying the assessment profiles is decidedly narrow. In saying that we need to "moderate" the National Curriculum, therefore, I am suggesting that this national moderating device itself needs moderating, and keeping in its place. Logically speaking, it is to some extent running counter to that other tide in educational affairs called "devolution", and it could have the effect of sabotaging attempts to fit the curriculum to the child in its local context. When one is living in the Dawk Ages, cynicism is hard to resist. Both the National Curriculum exercise and the thrust towards devolution can be seen as faces of economic rationalism. The first originated in the drive to prescribe vocational performance outcomes across Australia. The second -notwithstanding the rhetoric of "community involvement"- has been a privatising strategy to reduce the education budget of central governments, and to extract more direct financial support from local communities. And yet, both trends create an opportunity for professional educators to have an impact. Already, the Hobart goals have emerged as more magnanimous in scope than Mr. Dawkins originally foreshadowed. Likewise devolution, rightly handled, could create strong partnerships at community level that are resistant to interference from centralized bureaucracies. This thought leads naturally into my last heading - Bringing Our Natural Allies On-Side. BRINGING OUR NATURAL ALLIES ON-SIDE When I said that we need to become more politicised, I did not only mean that we should bring more pressure to bear on our political overlords through our professional associations. This has, to some extent, been attempted already, and the bureaucratic reaction has been to reduce our status in the consultative process while at the same time telling the public we are to blame for all the present woes of society. We need allies, and our most natural allies, logically speaking, are parents. They, like us, have a primary concern for the welfare of their children. They look to the school to improve their children's life-chances and develop their abilities. They do not want them to be treated merely as industrial fodder or a national skills bank. And nor do we. One would expect the arguments I developed earlier for a more liberal and personalised view of educational goals to enlist the support of parents too. Yet close co-operation between teachers and parents has been relatively rare in the Australian tradition. There is not a whisper of it in the Wyndham Report, even though a considerable number of Parents' and Citizens' Associations made submissions to the committee. The experts were firmly in the saddle, and at that stage, they were still being listened to by the politicians. , The traditional reluctance of Australian teachers to listen to parents may be due in part to their struggle to command respect for their profession in the face of the anti-intellectualism and resentment of authority which commentators associate with many areas of Australian life. Feeling threatened in the face of legitimate questioning, they tend to treat parents as clumsy amateurs, whom they put down by invoking esoteric jargon. A recent article in a Perth newspaper rightly questioned the motives of the school which allowed a five-year old child's ability in "reading" to be described in the end-of-term report by the phrase: "Uses an appropriate range of different strategies to make meaning from text."19 A report on that school might reasonably read: "Uses an appropriate range of different strategies to keep meaning from parents." The route to a more healthy relationship with parents starts with the recognition that while we may be experts in matters relating to classroom management and curriculum process, we are citizens - no more, no less - in the area of values determination; and so are parents. It poses no threat to bur expertise to take them into our confidence and to work out together with them the values charter that shall legitimate the activities of the school community. Indeed, their support enhances our effectiveness. We also stand to gain from an exchange of our mutual hopes and evaluations of their children. Teachers who presume to ignore or negate the influence of parents on children are flying in the face of ample evidence that they will generally come off second best. By contrast, fostering a partnership of concern between parents and teachers - and in the later years, the students themselves - holds great promise of important educational gains. At a practical level, when the community is invited to be involved in the decision-making levels of school management, the important thing is to spell out specific terms of reference for each of the contexts in which parents and teachers will interact, so that the sensibilities of each party are respected, and the aspirations of power seekers are held in check. I say again, parents are our natural allies in the education of the young. Where social planners have sought to divide in order to rule, we should unite in order to rescue our children from their excesses. I would also want to suggest that the business world is less enchanted with economic rationalism than we might be inclined to think, and constitutes another potential pool of allies. Recent talk about quality management practices has moved many business enterprises away from assembly-line models of production, in which workers are cogs in the machine, to an emphasis on worker participation and a sense of personal fulfillment in the delivery of services. While performance outcomes are still important in these models, they are seen to be linked with a higher level understanding of the total task, and a notion of service to the client. This is good soil for dialogue on the aims of education. If we want this to work, however, we must promise to forgo our jargon and learn to explain our craft in plain language. An industrial representative on one of the committees I chair often shares with me her bewilderment and irritation with the eduspeak we are prone to generate. And I take her point. She is no fool. CONCLUSION In conclusion, then, in responses to the question, "Is value-added education in the national interest?" the answer clearly depends on what you mean by the terms on both sides of the expression. If "value-added" points to a focus on highly specific job-skills and performance outcomes, then even if we accept the narrow economic rationalist interpretation of what is meant by "the national interest", this may not produce the adaptability and competence that is hoped for. Both an inadequate theory of learning and an inadequate view of market realities undermine the case. But in any case, the assumption that economic prosperity will solve all ills and guarantee quality of life is manifestly false. The national interest also depends on our willingness to pursue the common good and uphold democratic traditions. We must add other values to the educational process to do justice to the diverse powers of human beings, and their search for meaning. We cannot just rely on these rubbing off, as we have tended to do in the past. Changing social patterns and multicultural mixing oblige us to become much more explicit in the values we promote through schooling. The need to add higher values to the economic priorities now receiving so much attention is well-demonstrated by the enthusiastic answer I once marked in a paper requiring students to discuss Australia's wool industry and the competition from synthetics. One budding economic rationalist, substituting hope for fact, rejoiced that the CSIRO had apparently been able to breed a moth that will only eat synthetic fibres. After that, who needs ethics! Endnotes 1. Report of the Committee Appointed to Survey Secondary Education in New South Wales (The Wyndham Report), Sydney: Government Printer, 1957, 40. 2 Page 41. Cf. the rabid denunciation by P. Samuel, "Australia's Education Scandal: We're Turning Out Millions of Dunces", The Bulletin, 15 May 1976, which was clearly refuted by the empirical survey conducted by the Australian Council for Educational Research, summarised thus by its director, Dr Barry McCaw: "Comparison of the 1975 and 1980 results on the various tasks involved reveals either no change in level of achievement or an improvement. There was no evidence of a decline. The press treated the results with conspicuous silence." See B. McCaw and L. Chipman, Quality Schooling: What is it?..Who gets it? Perth: Murdoch University, 1986 Pages 47-50. 4 1 have developed this comparison further in Brian V. Hill, Life in the Dawk Ages, Perth: Australian College of Education, Western Australian Chapter, Occasional Paper No. 1, Dec. 1991. 5 My first try was Brian V. Hill, "State Education for What?" The Australian Journal of Higher Education, Nov. 1961, 74-78. I was discussing in particular the Wyndham Report and the Interim Report of the Secondary Schools Curriculum Committee, Perth: Education Department of Western Australia, 1959, a document possibly more avant garde for its time than the Wyndham. See also Brian V. Hill, "Politics and Educational Reform: An Appraisal of the Wyndham Report and Scheme", The Forum of Education, 32, Sept. 1973, 153-159. C. K. Harris, Education and Knowledge: The Structured Misrepresentation of Reality, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979, 69- 7 R. S. Peters, Authority, Responsibility and Education, London: George Allen and Unwin, 3rd ed.,1973,104. 8 The great back-down on his part was tucked away in R. S. Peters, "Democratic Values and Educational Aims", Teachers College Record, 80, 3, Feb. 1979, 464-482. 9 Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, New York: Harper and Row, 1970. 10 Cherry Collins, "Competencies: For and Against", paper as pct unpublished, by permission. There seems to be a rule at work here. See Hedley Beare, "The Impact of Economics on Education" in Austin Hukins (ed.), Educating for Profit? People-centred Education in a Market-driven Age, Sydney: ATCF Books, 1993, 24f. 11 Commonwealth Schools Commission, In the National Interest: Secondary Education and Youth Policy n Australia, Canberra: Commonwealth Schools Commission, 1987, 9. 12 "Rob Gilbert, et al., "Love's Labours Lost? - Writing a National Statement", Curriculum Perspectives - Newsletter Edition, November 1992, 25-27. 13 Social Studies K-10 Syllabus, Perth Curriculum Branch, Education Department of Western Australia, rev. ed., 1985, 39; Moral Education Working Party, Our Schools' Values, Adelaide: Education Department of South Australia, 1989; and P-10 Social Education Framework, Brisbane: Department of Education, Queensland, 1989, 5. 14 The Values We Teach, Sydney: New South Wales Department of School Education, rev. 1991. See New Horizons in Education, 87, Dec. 1992. 16 The story is told more fully in Brian V. Hill, Teaching Secondary Social Studies in a Multicultural Society, Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, in press. 17 E.g. Colin J. Marsh and Murray N. Print, The Social Sciences: Skills and Teaching Methods, Perth: Bookland, 1975. 18 E.g. Social Education Association of Australia, Social Education in the 'Nineties: A Basic Right for Every Person: A Rationale and Framework for Social Education, Special Issue of The Social Educator, March 1990. 19 In The West Australian, Monday July 26, 1993, 2. 20 1 have suggested some operational parameters in Brian V. Hill, Values Education in Australian Schools, Melbourne: Australian Council for Educational Research, 1991, 101-108. |