Building kids with character: School values

Orange slip a quick lesson in playing fair

By BROWNWYN SELL and THERESA GARNER

Teacher Helen Platford bursts into the library of Te Papapa School in Onehunga, her blue eyes bright with enthusiasm, her hands clutching a dozen stamped orange slips.

These are powerful pieces of paper, indicating a shift in attitude at the school that is beginning to influence the way our education system works.

They are called "chances" and they are given to children whose behaviour embodies the values of the school - "be kind to ourselves, be kind to our environment, be kind to each other and be in the right place."

It's a simple idea that has the children hooked - as much for the books they have a chance of winning at the end of each week as for the encouragement and recognition.

Robert Harris, who turns 10 today, got a chances award a few days ago for being a good role model while playing cricket.

"Many people get angry if they get out," he explained. "I gave the bat to the next person straight away when I got out."

Schools have always taught values, most of them implicitly and with varying success. But like dozens of others, Te Papapa School has decided they are too important to leave to chance.

It is one of 20 public and private schools testing the Living Values Project, which helps schools to determine the values children need to learn so they know how to live together.

Mrs Platford said the school's decision to teach values explicitly was producing a more positive and peaceful environment.

"You can see it's worked in these kids. The children respond to it, and it gets easier and easier to teach them."

Living Values director Judy Lawley says the problems of our young people and their lack of positive values have caused much public worry.

The project, which started last year, aims to turn the concern and rhetoric into practical support for schools.

It takes a more focused view of values than other programmes because it distinguishes between values and virtues. Values education encourages students to value themselves, their relationships, the environment and society. Virtues education promotes such concepts such as honesty and tolerance.

"Together we can build an education system that gives children a full sense of their own courage and competence, and values that will support them through the huge challenges they face behind and beyond the school gate," said Judy Lawley.

"People are wanting heaps and heaps of praise and encouragement, but it means a culture change in New Zealand - of saying that's not soppy or sappy.

"That's what I hear from talking to the kids. They're starting to say, 'It's okay to be nice to each other, and it's okay to praise'."

Judy Lawley says students, schools and communities must be allowed to decide their own values rather than having a common set forced on them.

Children need to develop their thinking to understand and accept concepts such as diversity and tolerance.

This, she says, takes more than "just talks at assembly, and a virtue a month posted on the wall and in the newsletters telling them to be good."

Education Minister Trevor Mallard agrees.

"You can't impose values centrally. We all have different values, and if it's not handled carefully, parents might think a school is trying to impose a particular set of values on the kids. There's clearly a danger in that."

A Massey University College of Education researcher, Dr Mollie Neville, says the values must be shared in each community.

"They have to stand the test of being examined by everybody, and they should reflect the values of the community.

"Different communities have different values."

She says schools, like families, can be dysfunctional and it can take a lot of work to fix this.

Mr Mallard supports incorporating values in education.

"I have no doubt schools play a very important role in setting the values of young people, and it is important they do that in an informed way, not by default."

But he is making no promises yet of further support for programmes such as Living Values, which is running out of money.

The debate for incorporating values into schooling has been around for decades. Its supporters believe the idea's time has finally come - they just need to convince the lawmakers and the rest of the country.

Brother Patrick Lynch, a New Zealand spokesman for the United Nations education branch, Unesco, is involved in the drive "up to my ears" and supports the Living Values project.

He says a lot of support for values education comes from parents of the present generation of schoolchildren.

"I don't think the issue is any longer, 'Should we do it?' The issue is how do we do it?"

Brother Lynch, who is also director of the Catholic Education Office, says public education has had a gaping hole in it since schools became secular under the 1877 Education Act.

He is not advocating a return to religious education, but says that if our society is to remain coherent, we have to acknowledge "the spiritual dimension as human beings."

Another voice in the debate is that of the Quality Public Education Coalition, which is organising a conference to discuss how the vague concepts of values outlined in the curriculum can be delivered.

Spokesman Professor Ivan Snook says the old jibe about public schools being valueless is not true.

"There's a lot going on," he says, "but a lot more could be going on.

"There does seem to be more demand from parents for something that they rather obscurely call 'values.'

"There's a tendency to think they can be found only in a private school organised by a religious denomination."

Quality Public Education suggests five abstract moral principles: look for fairness, do as much good as you can, try to avoid as much harm as you can, respect the truth and encourage people's freedoms as much as possible.

He says these are not rules, but would have to be discussed and worked on within schools and communities.

One of the few values education proponents who suggests a common prescription for values is John Heenan, a retired Southland principal who leads the New Zealand Foundation for Values Education.

He advocates a set of cornerstone values, or virtues, of honesty and truthfulness, kindness, consideration and concern, compassion, obedience, responsibility, respect and duty, and has introduced the foundation's programme in some South Island schools.

He would like to bring the programme to Auckland, but needs money.

"It's very easy to get funding, I would imagine, for a programme of drug intervention or rehabilitation, but it is more difficult for something like this because you're dealing with a more abstract concept."

Judy Lawley hopes to get all the groups advocating values education together in a series of forums, starting in July, to seek consensus on how values should be determined and taught.

Mr Mallard says it is valuable that the debate about values education is being re-opened, and wants it to go wider than schools.

"A lot of us need to keep on examining how our decision-making, how our approach to life, is being informed by our values, and checking back that that's okay."

* Herald e-mail contacts are: bronwyn_sell@herald.co.nz

theresa_garner@herald.co.nz