The Importance Of Values Based Education

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Many communities such as schools, families and workplaces appear to be missing a shared common vocabulary, based on universal positive values which provide a vision about how to create a prosperous society and sense of direction.

‘A society holds together through the quality of its shared values (Virtues), which are produced through a shared conversation.’ (Sachs, 1997) .

Children can strive in developing their Personal, Social and Emotional development when they are in a learning environment based on positive values, such as; honesty, respect, compassion, unity, responsibility, care and justice. Through analysis of relevant research that I will continue to explore throughout this literature review, I will highlight evidence that having …show more content…

Defining a Values based Education

Dr Neil Hawkes, the founder of Values based Education (VbE), has pioneered a new vision of education which is practiced around the world. He differentiates the definitions between Vbe and ‘Values Education’. Values based Education is an educational philosophy occurring when universal positive human values underpin everything an educational setting thinks about or does. Its aim is to develop humane self-leadership, founded on the capacity to inwardly reflect about thoughts and consequent actions. This also means that all school policies are crossed-referenced against the school 's values. (Hawkes, 2015).

Values Education (VE) is any activity promoting understanding and enactment of positive values. This develops positive predispositions and skills of both adults and children in order to reflect values in their active roles of their community. VE has an explicit and implicit element; explicit refers to the planned experiential activities that enable the children to develop an ethical vocabulary based on the values words, which builds ethical intelligence. The implicit element refers to, for instance, the way that staff use the values vocabulary to reinforce learning e.g. "Well done Thomas and Katie for showing so much cooperation when you worked together". (Hawkes, …show more content…

Explicit values education is important to help children become responsible contributing members of society and reach full learning potential (Lovat & Toomey, 2007). The Australian National Framework for Values Education in Australia Education (DEST, 2005) was implemented to provide further focus on values. It comprises nine values underpinning our democratic way of life in the pursuit of multicultural and environmentally sustainable society (DEST, 2005). More recently, the Melbourne Declaration of Education Goals for Young Australians (MCEETYA, 2008) was released as a key guiding document that

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