Values and Values Education: Challenges for Faith Schools
Parents often choose faith schools because of their clear values, but it is not necessarily clear what this term means or how far the provision in faith schools is distinctive. This chapter explores key concepts and argues that values and values education represent both a major strength in and a major challenge to faith schools. Because of their consistent ethos and agreed framework of values, faith schools are able to provide sound and authoritative moral guidance to children (‘primary values education’), helping them to understand right and wrong and to behave in line with the shared values of their community. However, if young people are to make the values they learn in faith schools truly their own (‘secondary values education’), they need to learn to question their assumptions, to engage in critical thinking, to develop their moral imaginations, to be open to change and to learn the techniques of critical reflection and rational debate. These things may not come quite so easily to faith schools because of their reliance on authority and a clear, pre-determined framework of values, but without them young people may never attain moral maturity. Teachers in faith schools need to reflect carefully on their approach to values education to make sure they are developing students’ full potential and leading them towards personal and moral autonomy.
The Catholic school: non-confessional?
It has been contended by various authors that the Catholic school is confessional in the sense of being indoctrinatory and so there has been an attempt to provide a non-confessional programme. On the contrary, this article argues that the Catholic Church sees its schools as ‘confessional’ but not ‘indoctrinatory’. However, to envisage how this can happen entails the kind of philosophical framework that the Catholic philosopher, Bernard Lonergan, provides. The article aims to illustrate how an approach based on Lonergan has major promise in showing that the contemporary Catholic school is ‘confessional’, but at the same time, ‘truly educative’ [The Catholic School. 1977. Rome: The Sacred Congregation for Catholic Education., para 31] and not indoctrinatory.
Initial Teacher Training: the French view
ABSTRACT This paper, against the background of trends in the development of initial teacher training in Europe as a whole, identifies and explains some of the recent, radical reforms which were introduced in France by a socialist government. These include the need to raise the status and the competence of the teaching profession; the creation of new teacher‐training institutions of university status (Instituts universitaires de formation des maitres); the introduction of common entry qualifications at degree level for both primary and secondary levels; the harmonisation and the extension to 2 years of the post‐degree teacher‐training course and the increase in emphasis placed on professional training, both theoretical and practical. These reforms provoked a storm of protest and an examination of the reasons for this reveals a multiplicity of crucial questions which have far‐reaching implications.