Value of Education

7 Key excerpts on "Value of Education"

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  Paying for Education

  Debating the Price of Progress

  • Peter Davies(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  It is also possible that parents are willing to pay for their child to be educated in a more ordered environment in which they will receive more individual attention from the teacher. Since there are also plenty of qualitative studies reporting that some parents have chosen schools on the basis of whether they thought their children would be happy (e.g. Coldron & Bolton, 1991; Bagley et al., 2001; Verger et al., 2016), it is reasonable to assume that parents place a substantial, though difficult to measure, value on children’s happiness at school. Conclusion This chapter has considered four ways of judging the Value of Education for individuals. These approaches draw upon different social science traditions and disciplines. Each approach tells us something about the value for individuals of becoming educated. Any account of the Value of Education which ignores one or more of these approaches is impoverished as a result. The value of a degree is not the same as the net difference in discounted future income. Analyses of the Value of Education which rigorously employ a single approach are critical to understanding the problem but they are not sufficient for generating policy responses. Young people considering applying to university in England express a wide range of motivations (Davies et al., 2013). Some individuals give more weight to future income, others to status and others to developing technical skill or serving society. But the educational choices of most individuals have multiple motivations. Treating the Value of Education only in terms of one of income, self-realisation or position in society is useful for developing theory. It is not so good at capturing the complex nature of the problem

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  Values in Health and Social Care

  An Introductory Workbook

  • Ray Samuriwo, Stephen Pattison, Andrew Todd, Ben Hannigan(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Jessica Kingsley Publishers

    (Publisher)

  I read the guide to the module called Social Work Skills, Values and Approaches, a compulsory first year module. The module is aimed at providing preliminary values, skills and approaches in social work. It commends values like competence, ethics, communication, reflective self-knowledge, recognising diversity and anti-oppressive practice.

  This person felt that the values commended and taught in the module were very much the same as for the course overall, so there was congruence there. However, it is likely that not everyone will find the same kind of value consistency running through courses and modules. And perhaps that is not a bad thing. Being exposed to different values and practices in a variety of ways might be seen as a valuable preparation for practice in a world of value diversity and, sometimes, contradiction.

    

  HOW EDUCATION AND TRAINING TAKE PLACE AND CONTRIBUTE TO PROFESSIONAL FORMATION

  You may have noticed that in this chapter the words ‘education’ and ‘training’ have both been used. These are worth exploring in more depth in relation to values:

  Education: the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press 2016) offers a number of definitions of ‘education’, including these:

  The culture or development of personal knowledge or understanding, growth of character, moral and social qualities, etc., as contrasted with the imparting of knowledge or skill. Often with modifying word, as intellectual education, moral education, etc.

  And:

  The systematic instruction, teaching, or training in various academic and non-academic subjects given to or received by a child, typically at a school; the course of scholastic instruction a person receives in his or her lifetime. Also: instruction or training given to or received by an adult.

  Note how, in the second definition, the word ‘training’ is included. Searching for Training

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  Higher Education, State and Society

  Comparing the Chinese and Anglo-American Approaches

  • Lili Yang(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  McMahon 2009 ).

  Values become public values only when they are accepted and practised by members of societies (Jørgensen and Bozeman 2007 ), which also rests on education including higher education through educating individuals. As Nixon (2011 : 32) states, ‘higher education is centrally concerned with how people develop their life projects, negotiate their life choices, and configure their life purposes. It is, first and last, concerned with human flourishing.’ The formation of these values requires knowledge creation in higher education. Many of the influential and widely accepted values in societies are proposed by thinkers who have connections with higher education, in addition to those values coming from government, media and think tanks. Compared to the situation in Anglo-American societies, thinkers connected with higher education are arguably more influential in the Chinese society. These thinkers either engage in higher education activities or work in higher education (see also Chapter 7 ).

  The contents of values are debatable in society and vary in different societies. Corruption of values may also happen (Marginson 2016 a). The growth of a virulent blood-and-soil form of nationalism in the twenty-first century is regarded by many scholars/researchers as a sign of the corruption of values (see, e.g., Brubaker 2017 ). Higher education as a public sphere is expected to provide a free space for critical reflection on public issues, including values. Ideally, as discussed, higher education-fostered and incubated reflexivity is an important reference point for decision-making by states and social and economic leaders (Pusser 2006 ). However, the marketization and privatization of higher education have resulted in the evacuation of values inside and outside higher education (Marginson 2006

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  Understanding Human Values

  • Milton Rokeach(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Free Press

    (Publisher)

  What is value education, and what ought it to be? To what extent should value education be value-free, and to what extent should it frankly try to inculcate students with certain values? Is it possible to make students aware of their values without at the same time modifying them? Who else besides teachers in educational settings can properly and improperly be concerned with value education? My purpose in this chapter is to propose a view of the functions of value education in various institutional settings in general and within educational settings in particular. This view derives from considerations about the role that social institutions play in inculcating and implementing various subsets of human values, as discussed in Chapter 3, and the social antecedents and consequents of individual values, as discussed in Rokeach (1973). It will differ in a number of respects from certain prevailing views about value education. More specifically, I will propose that value education within educational settings cannot and should not remain value-free, and that educators are not performing their educational functions unless they attempt to change certain values in certain directions, and unless they convey factual information to students about their own and about others’ values. To prepare the groundwork for my advocacy of such views, I will first discuss in a general way the major functions that I believe are served by all social institutions, and then consider in particular the main functions of educational institutions.

  INSTITUTIONAL VALUES

  A main point of departure is the premise that the major determinants of human values are culture, society, and society’s institutions. All societies can be conceptualized as having a more or less common set of social institutions—for instance, religious, economic, and educational institutions. And each institution can further be defined or conceptualized as specializing in the transmission of certain subsets of values from generation to generation, and as engaging in various activities designed to implement these values. Thus conceived, an educational institution is one that specializes in the transmission and implementation of a certain cluster of values that are called educational values, a religious institution is one that specializes in the transmission and implementation of another cluster of values that are called religious values. And so on for other social institutions. The total spectrum of human values has, in essence, been divided up among the various social institutions in order to facilitate their transmission and implementation. Presumably, such a differentiation of function or division of labor is functional, both for the society that makes various demands upon individuals, and for individuals that depend upon society to help meet their various needs.

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  Education

  With a Critical Introduction by Patricia H. Hinchey

  • John Dewey, Patricia H. Hinchey(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Myers Education Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER XVIII Educational Values

  The considerations involved in a discussion of educational values have already been brought out in the discussion of aims and interests. The specific values usually discussed in educational theories coincide with aims which are usually urged. They are such things as utility, culture, information, preparation for social efficiency, mental discipline or power, and so on. The aspect of these aims in virtue of which they are valuable has been treated in our analysis of the nature of interest, and there is no difference between speaking of art as an interest or concern and referring to it as a value. It happens, however, that discussion of values has usually been centered about a consideration of the various ends subserved by specific subjects of the curriculum. It has been a part of the attempt to justify those subjects by pointing out the significant contributions to life accruing from their study. An explicit discussion of educational values thus affords an opportunity for reviewing the prior discussion of aims and interests on one hand and of the curriculum on the other, by bringing them into connection with one another.

  1. The Nature of Realization or Appreciation

  Much of our experience is indirect; it is dependent upon signs which intervene between the things and ourselves, signs which stand for or represent the former. It is one thing to have been engaged in war, to have shared its dangers and hardships; it is another thing to hear or read about it. All language, all symbols, are implements of an indirect experience; in technical language the experience which is procured by their means is ‘mediated.’ It stands in contrast with an immediate, direct experience, something in which we take part vitally and at first hand, instead of through the intervention of representative media. As we have seen, the scope of personal, vitally direct experience is very limited. If it were not for the intervention of agencies for representing absent and distant affairs, our experience would remain almost on the level of that of the brutes. Every step from savagery to civilization is dependent upon the invention of media which enlarge the range of purely immediate experience and give it deepened as well as wider meaning by connecting it with things which can only be signified or symbolized. It is doubtless this fact which is the cause of the disposition to identify an uncultivated person with an illiterate person—so dependent are we on letters for effective representative or indirect experience.

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  Democracy and Education

  An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education

  • John Dewey(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Dover Publications

    (Publisher)

  Summary. —Fundamentally, the elements involved in a discussion of value have been covered in the prior discussion of aims and interests. But since educational values are generally discussed in connection with the claims of the various studies of the curriculum, the consideration of aim and interest is here resumed from the point of view of special studies. The term “value” has two quite different meanings. On the one hand, it denotes the attitude of prizing a thing, finding it worth while, for its own sake, or intrinsically. This is a name for a full or complete experience. To value in this sense is to appreciate. But to value also means a distinctively intellectual act—an operation of comparing and judging—to valuate. This occurs when direct full experience is lacking, and the question arises which of the various possibilities of a situation is to be preferred in order to reach a full realization, or vital experience.

  We must not, however, divide the studies of the curriculum into the appreciative, those concerned with intrinsic value, and the instrumental, concerned with those which are of value or ends beyond themselves. The formation of proper standards in any subject depends upon a realization of the contribution which it makes to the immediate significance of experience, upon a direct appreciation. Literature and the fine arts are of peculiar value because they represent appreciation at its best—a heightened realization of meaning through selection and concentration. But every subject at some phase of its development should possess, what is for the individual concerned with it, an æsthetic quality.

  Contribution to immediate intrinsic values in all their variety in experience is the only criterion for determining the worth of instrumental and derived values in studies. The tendency to assign separate values to each study and to regard the curriculum in its entirety as a kind of composite made by the aggregation of segregated values is a result of the isolation of social groups and classes. Hence it is the business of education in a democratic social group to struggle against this isolation in order that the various interests may reënforce and play into one another.

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  The Humanistic Teachings Of Earl S. Johnson

  • Earl S. Johnson, John D Haas(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In such an inquiry our students would find themselves confronted with the stark reality that different men want different values or at least that they want to obtain the same values by different methods. If making this point involves the risk of unsettling tender minds, that risk must not detain us. Where there is confusion there is also promise. All true education requires considerable reorganization, even to the point of first requiring disorganization.

  It is perhaps not too much to say that the type of general insight required above all others is an appreciation of a variety of values and a variety of ways of securing them. To the degree that those do not cancel each other out, what we know as human freedom may be said to exist. In any event, the process of consensus is a rugged one, and our students had better learn it sooner than later.

  I should now like to sketch, in very broad outline, the dimensions of a series of experiences in general social education. They would constitute two years' work. They would, in the main, involve an inquiry into (1) the degree that certain goal and implemental values exist in fact in the American community or selected segments of it; (2) what distribution these values have; and (3) how the several social processes have operated, and now operate, to effect any given distribution. Thus both the division and the unity of the labor of the various disciplines would be involved. The methods and data of the various disciplines would thus be drawn on and drawn together.

  Now some brief concern with values. I take it that the basic premise or cardinal value of democracy is the realization of human dignity in associations of mutual deference. In a democracy everyone is to have the best chance of being his best self.

  In such a social system the distinctive goal values would be power, respect, and knowledge.

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