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 Neglected Role of Religion and Worldview in Schooling for Wisdom, Character, and Virtue
From both ancient biblical times – where the motivation was the “desire for order and continuity” (Crenshaw 1998) – and the period from Aristotle and Socrates onwards, moral formation of children and the shaping of their character have always been regarded as a primary function of both parental nurture and formal education. The central concerns of ancient sages (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Israel) were about knowledge and religion. The aims of education, for Aristotle, were to teach the intellectual and moral virtues necessary for right action, the pursuit of what is noble and thus of happiness as the telos [τeλος] (natural end) of life (Hollinger 2002, pp. 46–49). At the beginning of the 19th century, “nearly everyone was persuaded that religion and morality were inseparable; so inseparable that moral education must be religious education, and that no sense of absolute obligation in conscience could be found apart from religion. That moral philosophers taught the contrary made no difference” (Chadwick 1975, p. 229). Key questions for philosophers, theologians, and educationists have always been: “What is good for men and women?”, “What does it mean to be fully human?”, “Why be moral at all?”, and “Why might one virtue, disposition or action be deemed more valid than another?” Naturalistic or anthropocentric answers to such questions lead to quite different ethical foundations for behaviour, than theistic ones. The former approach is typified by Protagoras’s well-known statement that “Man [sic] is the measure of all things.” Any values resulting from this worldview will draw on the compendium of human wisdom (such as the “Great Books” or “values clarification” approaches), and thus be subject to the relativism of ideological, temporal, political, and cultural forces. The logical end of this anthropocentric approach, however, is nihilism, for if there is nothing transcendent outside of ourselves “in which to ground standards of conduct and morality, then there can be no good and evil”. In the chilling words of Dostoevsky, all things become permissible and totalitarian darkness awaits (Charles 2002, p. 100). This is the problem with the “values clarification” movement, where there are no “right” answers and where “feelings, attitudes and preferences guide the student in the proper process of arriving at decisions” or
Review of Literature on Probability of Detection for Magnetic Particle Nondestructive Testing
Abstract : A critical review of the available literature concerning the minimum reliably detectable defect size aNDI for magnetic particle testing (MPT) in aerospace applications is presented. Four probability of detection (POD) studies relevant to detection of fatigue cracks in aircraft components were found over the period 1968 to 2011. As the statistical methods used in these four previous studies were either outdated or otherwise deficient, the original data were reanalysed using currently accepted techniques. A meta-analysis of the results is presented, with emphasis on statistical inferences for the defect size expected to be detected with 90% POD. It is shown that the minimum reliably detectable defect size aNDI = 2.0 mm currently specified by the Royal Australian Air Force for wet fluorescent magnetic particle inspection using the continuous method is consistent with estimates of the average performance of MPT derived from the reanalysis of the literature.