My students and I were amongst the millions of Americans that watched President Obama’s Inaugural speech today. This part caught my attention:
Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends – hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism – these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths.
There is a huge focus in the blogosphere and 2.0 world on teaching 21st Century skills. This blog was started to document my path in teaching my kids “21st Century Skills.” Early on I pulled back on making that the focus. From the beginning of my research into how to integrate technology into class I noticed that something was missing–values. We could have teachers fully integrating technology into classrooms that lack values and we will successfully graduate a generation of students who lack the moral compasses to create a future worth living in.
Hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism.
We spend an awful lot of time focused on teaching 21st Century Skills. Should we also be focused on teaching 21st Century values?
8 responses so far ↓
Beautifully said on a day that is filled with hope and excitement for a nation that needs it. I, too, hope that we will move our focus from the test or the skills and to the child. If we stay focused on teaching kids then we will be successful at developing them as citizens, no matter the century.
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Paul,
You hit the nail on the head with this one! Much has been made of the “millenial generation” and how different it is from previous generations, but the truth is people are still people. The things that have helped people succeed in the past are the same things that will help them succeed in the future.
These are our values. Technology doesn’t change anything of substance. If anything, our values are simply amplified and spread around faster than ever before.
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I think those 18th Century values of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, etc. would be well worth teaching and bringing into this century.
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I agree wholeheartedly. Well written and thought out post. No amount of technology integration can replace humanity.
What value is it if man gain the whole world but loose his soul? It is the values that you mention make us human that make up the soul of humanity.
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Thank you for bringing us to what I think is the fundamental purpose of an education: the teaching of morality, which as you point out is necessary to citizenship. My friend, Ian Benson, writes in the UBC Law Review:
A deeper ground for moral education is both necessary to citizenship and largely missing from contemporary education of all sorts [...Unfortunately,] what now stands for moral education is a series of disconnected concepts (e.g. “tolerance,” “equality,” “self-esteem” and “rights”) that are themselves obscured by a loss of historic understanding of such concepts as “virtue” and the rise of a superficial language of “values.”…If citizens (religious and non) continue to attempt to speak to surrounding cultures in confused language (such as…by using the pseudo-moral language of “values” when they mean an objective category of truth and meaning), they will never succeed in communicating those matters that are deepest and most essential to citizenship and culture.
I think he’s right. And he helps me illustrate a problem you will run into if you try to teach the values of tolerance, curiosity and so forth.
The problem is that tolerance and curiosity and the other qualities you mention are not values. They are virtues. Values, by definition, are elective. In fact, they are not really things at all. If I say I value this blog of yours, what I am really saying is that it is important to me, that it has some worth–as far as I am concerned. Likewise, if I say I value hard work, I mean the same thing. True, most healthy-minded people will agree on valuing the latter. But they have no more reason to take it as a thing of value than your blog. In other words, we can’t say hard work is valuable simply because most people say they value it. The laws of supply and demand don’t apply to ideas or concepts because they are always in infinite supply.
We need to teach virtues, not values. We can think of virtues as distinctive or essential, positive qualities of things: human beings are by nature tolerant, curious, loyal and so on. Now, if that’s the case, then it follows that we all ought to–I mean that in a moral sense–cultivate those qualities. Of course, we may choose not to cultivate them, but that is not the same thing as saying they are elective, like values.
Now we will soon run into another problem, namely that we derive virtues from our beliefs about the fundamental nature of things–our metaphysical claims. That is another, long discussion, and I’d be flattered if you’d have a look at a paper I presented on that subject at conference on the humanities at Columbia University to years ago. Send me an email and I’ll pass the paper on to you.
Cheers & thanks for resurrecting a topic that is near and dear.
Brad O-C
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Oh, and lets’ not forget that those virtues/values are not 21st C things, but very ancient things.
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[...] ok if I re-comment. I keep coming back to this comment left by Brad Ovenell-Carter on a post a couple weeks ago and I think it is worth standing alone as a [...]
I’m not an educator; I found this site accidentally but stayed on it poking around as a parent.
I’ve had some similar thoughts about how, when, and the purpose behind teaching my kids about technology and what I interpret that you mean about living in a 21st century world.
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot more about the time I spend with them in regard to general parental support and confidence-building. As I see the challenges I face and other adults I know face, it seems that confidence and self-esteem trump all.
The connection, if it seems non-sequiter, is that I think personal self esteem in the foundation of hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism. Without an understanding and appreciation for yourself, how much will you really have to give?
So, as this article progressed from what *seemed* important to what is important – to me there is one additional step and that is personal, individual strength. That’s what I’m working at cultivating in my kids.
Thanks for indulging the post from an outsider.
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