UNESCO Living Values Seminars Values Education in Schools, July - November 2000 For more information click here...

Living Values is about placing values education at the heart of our schools.
The Living Values team is working in partnership with twenty trial schools.  There are thirteen state schools and seven independent schools taking part in the project.  They were selected from the applications to ensure that a broad mix of types of schools was included - rural, urban, primary, secondary and schools of different philosophies and cultures.  There are ten schools in the Auckland region (including one in Northland), four in Wellington and six in Canterbury.  We are acting as facilitator and helper as those schools develop plans and actions to build their whole school community into a place where shared values provide the clarity and the commitment for becoming a meaningful and peaceful learning community.

• Involve all members of the school community in reflecting on values education in their school
• Identify the values that influence the work of the school - choose the ones that are wanted and identify those that are not wanted
• Set in place the goals and strategies that will promote the chosen values:
• For whole school development in partnership with parents and community
• For the development and support of staff
• For the development of students throught a holistic and comprehensive approach to values education.

What is Values in Education

There are two key understandings that go some way in answering this question.
The first is about the way young people learn values.
The New Zealand Curriculum Framework states.

No school is value free. Values are mostly learned through students experience of the total environment, rather than through direct instruction.

The Living Values approach emphasises this understanding and recommends whole school development to support and give meaning to 'direct instruction' programmes.

Secondly we need to understand what we mean by values education. What does it involve?

Values education broadly covers four areas of learning for students:

• Learning to value themselves.
• Learning to value relationships.
• Learning to value society.
• Learning to value the environment.

Values in education is about holistic education. This means that a child's total development - intellectual, physical, social, moral and spiritual - form the goals of education. These goals are all linked and all equally important to the work of a school.