Thinking Through Ethics and Values in Primary Education

Gianna Knowles, Vini Lander, Sally Hawkins, Carol Hughes, Glenn Stone, Linda Cooper, Barbara Thompson, Gianna Knowles, Vini Lander, Sally Hawkins, Carol Hughes, Glenn Stone, Linda Cooper, Barbara Thompson

• Publisher: Learning Matters
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857257345
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Elementary Education

Thinking Through Ethics and Values in Primary Education is an accessible text that encourages readers to explore deeply the ethics and values surrounding primary education. The text helps the reader to critically reflect on the principles that underpin education. Specifically written for education students in the later years of their course, the text draws on research and practice to explore the challenges and opportunities involved, while helping to develop the reader?s own critical thinking skills.

The book begins by asking ?what are ethics and values?? and goes on to explore social diversity and society and education. It considers ethics and values and the curriculum, school organisation and the classroom. A chapter on ethics, values and the teacher encourages the reader to examine their own thoughts about education. Throughout, practical guidance runs alongside structured critical thinking exercises to help the reader and reflect on both theory and practice.

About the Series

Thinking Through Education is a new series of texts designed and written specifically for those education students entering the second or final phase of their degree course. Structured around sets of specific ?skills?, each chapter uses critical thinking and reflective exercises to develop greater subject knowledge and critical awareness.

1 What are Ethics and Values?

Gianna Knowles

Chapter Focus

The critical thinking exercises in this chapter focus on:

• ⊙ analysing what form the underlying principles of the issues being discussed;
• ⊙ articulating what underpins your own approach to the issues being discussed;
• ⊙ challenging assumptions;
• ⊙ comparing a range of approaches and outcomes;
• ⊙ considering what ideas provide the most helpful way forward to resolving conflicting situations;
• ⊙ discussing the tensions between competing ideas;
• ⊙ experimenting with a range of solutions and situations;
• ⊙ exploring how issues can be approached in different ways;
• ⊙ imagining different solutions to the issues explored;
• ⊙ observing how different people deal with different issues;
• ⊙ synthesising different ideas to try to reach a way forward.

The key ideas discussed are: ethics, values, divine commands, reason, duty, consequences, absolutism, relativism and being of good character. This chapter is particularly relevant to Teachers’ Standards: 1, 2, 7 and 8.

Introduction

The study of ethics is about the study of what human beings believe to be right or wrong, or to be correct or incorrect ways of behaving. Therefore, ethics can be said to be the rules we use to help us decide what is the right or wrong thing to do in any given situation, or the correct or incorrect action to perform in that situation, while values are about those things we deem to be important. Therefore, if ethics is about knowing how to react or behave in particular circumstances values, in relation to ethics, are about those things we feel it is important to have rules about dealing with.

Key Idea: Ethics and values

What are Ethics and Values?

As human beings there are many things we deem to be important to us. Some of these will be personal preferences about what we feel is important - for example, it may be important to us that we never miss a certain programme on television. For whatever reason, that particular programme is of value to us, maybe because it gives us pleasure or educates and informs us.

However, usually there are things that as human beings we feel are of far more value than personal preferences about television programmes. For example, human life itself family honesty and living in a just society When discussing the notion of values, this book is concerned with exploring those values that fall into this second category

Of course personal views do impact on how we may think about values such as the importance of family, honesty and justice, and this is an issue central to this book. That is, I might know what is of value to me but what do I do in situations where other people have values different from mine - particularly in a school, where we are all supposed to work together for the good of the children and their families?

So, if values are the things that are of importance to us, ethics then are the sets of rules that help us know how to behave correctly in relation to those values. And similarly we know that just as different people value things in different ways, they will also have different rules that they use to guide their actions in relation to their values. These differences in rules are again something we will explore throughout this book.

Case Study

Anushka was at work when her best friend, Katy, rushed up to her and told her delightedly that she had just ‘found’ £50 on the floor in the corridor outside. Katy went on to say, ‘Wow, I could really do with this money right now - do you think I should keep it?'

This case study illustrates how often we need to draw on our own system of values and ethics. Situations like this happen frequently throughout the day Something happens that requires us, almost without thinking, to act on concepts that we believe to be of value. In this instance, Anushka needs to think about the value she places on friendship and also the value she places on concepts such as honesty and justice. However, the challenge Anushka faces is how she reconciles the tension between what she values more, friendship or honesty and how her values impact on what she then decides to do in the situation, that is, what she believes is ethically the right or wrong thing to do. Consider yourself in Anushka's position in this situation. You have probably been brought up with some quite straightforward guidance about what it means to be honest and about what should be done in situations like this. However, because this situation involves someone you are very close to and care about and, because whatever you say will impact on your relationship with this person, not to mention that you are aware of their particular circumstances, you may feel that you are less sure of what you should do.

It can be tempting when discussing concepts like ethics and values to think they are ideas relating only to high-flown abstruse philosophical thinking about particularly difficult issues. However, the reality is, ethics and values are about the sorts of day-to-day, minute-by-minute decisions we make about what to do in cases such as the one we are currently discussing. If a complete stranger had told us they had found the £50 we would probably give advice about where to take it so it could be claimed by its owner. But when our friend tells us they have found the money, it may be harder to give the same advice.

In day-to-day life, it may not matter that we are flexible in how we use our rules to guide our actions, depending on whom we are dealing with. But, in our role in school it may be that we have to consider not only what we are going to do in a particular situation, but how, through what we do decide to do, we are modelling to children what they too should do in similar situations. Consider this: you are working with a group of children when your hard-up friend comes up to you and says, delightedly ‘I've just found £50 outside in the corridor.’ The children look at you to see what you are going to do.

Key Idea: Differences

How do we Reconcile Tensions between Different Approaches to Ethics and Values?

Although we have only just begun to explore the notion of ethics and values and how they relate to primary education, we have, very quickly, run into more questions than we seem to have answered. For example, it seems:

• there can be a variety of rules – or ethics – about what we should or should not do in particular situations;
• that even our own set of rules may differ depending on the situations we find ourselves in;
• that whatever our ethics and values, our role in school may require us to model particular ethics and values in ways that we had not previously considered;
• our role in a school may require us to consider our ethics and values alongside those of the wider school community and mean we need to be able to deal with situations where our ethics and values might be at odds with the ethics and values of others in that community.

As we begin to explore these issues, it is worth bearing in mind, as Campbell (2003) states: the point of ethics is not to moralise or to dictate what is to be done (2003, p.9), but rather it is about finding some tools for thinking about difficult matters, recognizing from the start - as the very rationale for ethics, in fact - that the world is seldom so simple or clear-cut (p.9).

Further Thinking about what Ethics Mean

Critical Thinking Exercise 1

Consider the following comment:

“While teachers as professionals may agree on the objective principles of fairness and honesty, for example, they may, within the context of their own individual schools and classrooms, interpret them differently in the course of their daily practice.” (Campbell, 2003, p.19)

1. Consider what Campbell means by principles of fairness and honesty.
2. Do you agree with Campbell, or challenge her assumption that individual teachers may interpret fairness and honesty differently?
3. Imagine you are a child in a school where different teachers have different interpretations of fairness and honesty. What might be the impact on you as a child?

Comment

At the beginning of the chapter it was suggested that when we are discussing ethics we are concerned about the rules we use to guide us in knowing how to act in ways that are correct in particular situations. One of the interesting things about ethics is that behaviour is very public. That is, it is possible to know something about a person through the way they behave and, therefore, to be able to gain some understanding about their ethics, the rules they live their life by since ethical standards are inherently public; they define what we do to, for, and with one another (Campbell, 2003, p.16). So while you may have been thinking you have no particular set of rules that you live by, as soon as you act in response to an ethical situation it is very clear to those around what your rules are. Let us go back to the issues of the ‘found £50'. What would the way you thought about dealing with the situation say to others about the ethics you live your life by?

Key Idea: Values

How do we Know what should be of Value?

For us to know how to behave in particular situations we need to have some understanding of the importance we, as individuals, and possibly as a society, attach to the different aspects of a given situation. If we once again return to our ‘found £50’ situation, we can see that the situation only merits discussion and an examination of what is right and wrong, or ethical, in the situation because the situation contains within it a requirement to act and a range of possible actions that we could take. Some would be the correct way to act and other actions would be viewed as being incorrect. Similarly, that we need to consider different ways of acting in the situation shows that, in this instance, we attach value to the notions of honesty justice, friendship and fairness. Otherwise, if we did not value these concepts we would not be anxious about doing the correct thing in the situation and seeking both to help our friend and ensure we do so in ways that do not damage the notion of honesty and justice.

Critical Thinking Exercise 2

In the previous critical thinking exercise you were asked to consider the concepts of fairness and honesty. These are abstract concepts, that is, they do not exist in the same concrete way as a chair or a table can be said to exist. You cannot touch fairness, but you can see it happening in practice - or where it is absent from a situation. Therefore, while we can give an actual monetary value to a concrete object, such as a chair, we cannot give a value in terms of money to something like fairness. But this does not detract from the fact we find it has value. We do seem to feel that fairness is something we would not want to lose or have damaged, because it has a value to us and to society a value other than that which can be represented in purely financial terms.

1. Consider what abstract values form part of our thinking about the case of the ‘found £50'.
2. Analyse why you believe society might regard these concepts as having value. For example, what would we, as a society lose if we did not value these concepts and protect them through our actions?
3. Experiment with thinking about how society protects and behaves with regard to these values and what might society be like if we did not have some values we held in common and all thought were important. For example, what if you behaved in a way that was fair, but others did not?

Comment

What we are using to guide us in deciding where the right and wrong is in this situation is the value we give to some of the abstract concepts implicit in the situation. That is to say, however much we love our friend and wish them to have the money, we know the money is not theirs. A concept of a higher value comes into play; we know that, at best, it would be unfair to the actual owner of the money if it was not returned to them. Our dilemma is, are we more loyal to our friend or to preserving the notion of justice and fairness? And our own beliefs about the importance of preserving notions of justice and fairness are even more challenged when we are called upon to demonstrate them in front of children, since, as Campbell (2003) states: students learn lessons about morality through their experiences with teachers (2003, p.23).

Audi (2007) suggests that when we think of value in this way it is because we are considering something that we feel positive about, and indeed, something that may generally seem to increase wellbeing not only for ourselves but for everyone. That is, just as we may feel we would deliberately act in one way, rather than another, so too we may choose one action above another because we believe it to be for the best. What is challenging in this situation is that we are bein...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Introduction
• 1 What are Ethics and Values?
• 2 Ethics, Values and Social Diversity
• 3 What does Society want from Education – what does it Value about Education?
• 4 Ethics, Values and the Curriculum
• 5 Ethics and Values in School Organisation – how should Schools be Led and Managed?
• 6 Ethics and Values in the Classroom – Classroom Management and Managing Behaviour
• 7 Children and Young People
• 8 Ethics, Values and the Teacher
• References
• Index