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Guest Essay

The Value of an Education That Never Ends

By Michael S. Roth

Dr. Roth is the president of Wesleyan University and the author of “The Student: A Short History.”

For more than 15 years I have presided over my university’s Arrival Day, the time when families drop off their sons and daughters about to start their college career. Every year some parents will take me aside to say they wish they were starting college, and that they’d get a lot more out of the experience now because they’ve become better learners.

One mother laughingly called herself a “perpetual student.” She meant she pursued learning for the sheer joy of inquiry. But the term is usually one of gentle derision: someone who keeps taking more courses as a way to avoid holding down a job. In other words, a slacker, or a loser. I think that’s wrong. We should begin to see this sort of lifelong learning as a way for individuals to gain not just knowledge, but liberation. In its ideal form, being a perpetual student is not an act of avoidance but rather a path to perpetual self-determination and freedom.

The ideas of “freedom” and “student” were not always linked together. In pre-modern Europe, schools were few and far between, but there was learning nonetheless — learning that aimed at economic independence and integration with a community. Universities were founded in the medieval period, and as literacy became more culturally and economically advantageous, especially after the Protestant Reformation, basic schooling became more common.

For the 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, the student in pursuit of enlightenment was someone in the process of leaving behind “self-imposed immaturity” and learning to think for oneself. Some people, however, were said to exist outside the realm of learning altogether — at least the kind of learning meant to allow one to stand on one’s own feet. With intellectual contortions fueled by racism and economic self-interest, many supposedly enlightened Enlightenment thinkers and writers argued that enslaved people could not be students, that they did not have the potential to be free. States passed laws forbidding the education of enslaved people. Learning became an act of resistance.

Across the West in the 19th century, formal schooling became more widespread, and debates about education centered on preparing independent thinkers who could also be free citizens. But questions quickly arose: Are schools truly helping students think for themselves, or are they only indoctrinating them into the latest conventions? Will advanced learning lead to scientific gains that benefit society, or will it only create self-serving justifications for the inequalities produced by industrialization? By the mid 1800s Ralph Waldo Emerson would call on his fellow citizens to live more independently by being more open and creative. For him, the freedom of a student was not just an intellectual matter. It was bound up with opposing convention — and it shouldn’t end with school.

The connection between learning and freedom is presupposed in many criticisms of students today as censorious or relativist, illiberal or radical, coddled snowflake or warrior for social justice. As the 1990s boogeyman of political correctness has been transformed in the minds of its enemies into woke and cancel culture, one can see more clearly than ever that the idea of the student is a screen onto which folks (themselves long out of school) project their fears for the future and, perhaps, anxieties about themselves.

There are many ways to be a student. Some will strive to find balance and harmony by fitting into their educational context. Others build intellectual muscle by criticizing every move the teacher makes. In daring to be critical and competitive interlocutors with their instructors, they work harder and learn to think more deeply. Some students learn through imitation, eager to follow their classmates as well as their teacher. The core of all these approaches is developing the capacity to think for oneself by learning from others.

Ultimately, the true student learns freedom by developing curiosity, judgment and creativity in the service of one’s own good and the good of their communities. This flourishing is different from being trained by an instructor to do a task or earn a badge, and it is different from the satisfaction one gets through acquiring objects or experiences in the marketplace.

On campus, students do learn specific tasks and they do enjoy experiences, of course, but as students they are doing something more fundamental and more open-ended. They are learning freedom by learning who they are and what they can do (including how they might think). This almost always happens in concert with others. Students flourish in discovering and developing their capacities together.

That’s why it’s such a challenge to be a perpetual student — as our society becomes atomized and polarized, the informal educational spaces for adults to learn from people who have different points of view are fewer and farther between. And it gets harder to exercise the intellectual humility that being a student requires when one is supposed to have the authority, the certainty, of adulthood. Yet some people manage it at various points in their lives by finding fellow learners. This can happen in book clubs, online classes, Bible study or simply in stimulating interactions with co-workers.

There is a hunger for this. Roughly 200 people join my online Great Books humanities class each week on Coursera . During the pandemic, the number was more than 1,000, and millions around the world find other classes via Khan Academy and edX . The desire for learning is also a desire for connecting. It is not just the desire for a prize or a diploma.

For perpetual students, learning (as opposed to training) has no end. As they reach the end of one path of inquiry, they find themselves already on another. These paths develop their capacities and can’t be delimited in advance of the opportunity for exploring them. Every day is Arrival Day.

Perpetual students, like all of us, have the potential for freedom. They embrace this potential, exploring the world, absorbing its lessons and creatively responding to them.

To be a student is to be alive to the world and to oneself. Why would anyone want to graduate from that?

Michael S. Roth is president of Wesleyan University. This essay draws on his forthcoming book “ The Student: A Short History .”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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15 Values Education

Graham Oddie, Professor of Philosophy, University of Colorado, Boulder

• Published: 02 January 2010
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This article offers a metaphysical account of value as part of a general approach to values education. Value endorsements and their transmission are unavoidable in educational settings, as they are everywhere. The question, then, is not whether to teach values but which values to teach, in what contexts and how to teach them effectively. This article discusses the contestedness of value endorsements, the place for noncognitive value endorsements in education and the role of inculcating beliefs in education. The article also describes the rationalist and empiricist response problem of intrinsic motivation.

Moral education has received a great deal of attention in the philosophy of education. But morality is just one aspect of the evaluative, which embraces not just the deontic concepts—right, wrong, permissible, obligatory, supererogatory, and so on—but also the full range of concepts with evaluative content. This includes the so‐called thin evaluative concepts (e.g., good, bad, better, worst ); the thick evaluative concepts (e.g., courageous, compassionate, callous, elegant, cruel, charming, clumsy, humble, tendentious, witty, craven, generous, salacious, sexy, sarcastic, vindictive ); and the concepts that lie somewhere between the extremes of thick and thin (e.g., just, virtuous, sublime, vicious, beautiful ). Value, broadly construed to embrace the entire range of evaluative concepts, presents an educationist with some problems. Should values be part of the curriculum at all? If so, which values is it legitimate for educators to teach and how should they be taught?

1. The Contestedness of Value Endorsements

Philosophers disagree wildly about the metaphysics of value, its epistemological status, and the standing of various putative values. Given the heavily contested nature of value, as well as of the identity and weight of particular putative values, what business do we have teaching values? Perhaps we don't know enough about values to teach them (perhaps we don't know anything at all 1 ).

It might be objected to this argument against the teaching of values, from value's contestedness, that value theory is no different from, say, physics, biology, or even mathematics. There is much about these disciplines that is contested, but no one argues that that's a good reason to purge them from the curriculum. This comparison, however, is not totally convincing. True, philosophers of physics disagree over the correct interpretation of quantum mechanics, but there is little disagreement over its applications, its significance, or the necessity for students to master it. Similarly, even if there is disagreement over the foundations of mathematics or biology, few deny that we should give children a solid grounding in arithmetic or evolution.

The contestedness of value has been used to argue for a “fact/value” distinction that, when applied to educational contexts, leads to the injunction that teachers should stick to the “facts,” eschewing the promulgation of “value judgments.” Given the contestedness of values, an educator should pare her value endorsements down to their purely natural (nonevaluative) contents, indicating at most that, as a matter of personal preference, she takes a certain evaluative stance.

2. The Value Endorsements Informing the Educational Enterprise

Attempts to purge education of value endorsements are, of course, doomed. Value endorsements are not just pervasive, they are inevitable. The educational enterprise is about the transmission of knowledge and the skills necessary to acquire, extend, and improve knowledge. But what is knowledge—along with truth, understanding, depth, empirical adequacy, simplicity, coherence, completeness, and so on—if not a cognitive good or value? 2 And what is an improvement in knowledge if not an increase in cognitive value? Sometimes cognitive values are clearly instrumental—acquiring knowledge might help you become a physicist, a doctor, or an artist, say. But instrumental value is parasitic upon the intrinsic value of something else—here, knowledge of the world, relieving suffering, or creating things of beauty.

The enterprise of creating and transmitting knowledge is freighted with cognitive value, but episodes within the enterprise also express particular value endorsements. A curriculum, for example, is an endorsement of the value of attending to the items on the menu. It says, “ These are worth studying.” The practice of a discipline is laden with norms and values. To practice the discipline you have to learn how to do it well : to learn norms and values governing, inter alia, citing and acknowledging others who deserve it; honestly recording and relaying results; not forging, distorting, or suppressing data; humbly acknowledging known shortcomings; courageously, but not recklessly, taking cognitive risks; eschewing exaggeration of the virtues of a favored theory; having the integrity to pursue unwelcome consequences of discoveries. In mastering a discipline, one is inducted into a rich network of value endorsements.

The thesis of the separability of fact and value, and the associated bracketing of value endorsements, is not just tendentious (it precludes the possibility of facts about value) but also is so clearly unimplementable that it is perhaps puzzling that it has ever been taken entirely seriously. The educational enterprise is laden with value endorsements distinctive of the enterprise of knowledge and the transmission of those very endorsements to the next generation. Without the transmission of those values, our educational institutions would disappear. So, even if the value endorsements at the core of education are contested, the enterprise itself requires their endorsement and transmission.

3. The Place for Noncognitive Value Endorsements in Education

To what extent does the transmission of cognitive values commit us to the teaching of other values? It would be fallacious to infer that, in any educational setting, all and any values are on the table—that it is always permissible, or always obligatory, for a teacher to impart his value endorsements when those are irrelevant to the central aims of the discipline at hand. For certain value issues, a teacher may have no business promulgating his endorsements. For example, the values that inform physics don't render it desirable for a physicist to impart his views on abortion during a lab. Physicists typically have no expertise on that issue.

But it would be equally fallacious to infer that cognitive values are tightly sealed off from noncognitive values. Certain cognitive values, however integral to the enterprise of knowledge, are identical to values with wider application. Some I have already adverted to: honesty, courage, humility, integrity, and the like. These have different applications in different contexts, but it would be odd if values bearing the same names within and without the academy were distinct. So, in transmitting cognitive values, one is ipso facto involved in transmitting values that have wider application. 3 This doesn't imply that an honest researcher will be an honest spouse—she might lie about an affair. And an unscrupulous teacher might steal an idea from one of his students without being tempted to embezzle. People are inconsistent about the values on which they act, but these are the same values honored in the one context and dishonored in the other.

I have argued that there are cognitive values informing the educational enterprise that need to be endorsed and transmitted, and that these are identical to cognate values that have broader application. However, this doesn't exhaust the values that require attention in educational settings. There are disciplines—ethics, for example—in which the subject matter itself involves substantive value issues. In a course on the morality of abortion, for example, it would be impossible to avoid talking about the value of certain beings and the disvalue of ending their existence. Here, explicit attention must be paid to noncognitive values. There are other disciplines—the arts, for example—in which the point of education is to teach students to discern aesthetically valuable features, to develop evaluative frameworks to facilitate future investigations, and to produce valuable works. Within such disciplines it would be incredibly silly to avoid explicit evaluation.

4. The Role of Inculcating Beliefs in Education

Grant that there are noncognitive values, as well as cognitive values, at the core of certain disciplines. Still, given that there are radically conflicting views about these—the value of a human embryo, or the value of Duchamp's Fountain—shouldn't teachers steer clear of explicitly transmitting value endorsements? Here, at least, isn't it the teacher's responsibility to distance himself from his value endorsements and teach the subject in some “value‐neutral” way?

In contentious areas, teachers should obviously be honest and thorough in their treatment of the full range of conflicting arguments. Someone who thinks abortion is impermissible should give both Thomson's and Tooley's famous arguments for permissibility a full hearing. Someone who thinks abortion permissible should do the same for Marquis's. 4 However, even if some fact about value were known , there are still good reasons for teachers not to indoctrinate, precisely because inducing value knowledge is the aim of the course.

Value knowledge, like all knowledge, is not just a matter of having true beliefs. Knowledge is believing what is true for good reasons. To impart knowledge, one must cultivate the ability to embrace truths for good reasons. Students are overly impressed by the fact that their teachers have certain beliefs, and they are motivated to embrace such beliefs for that reason alone. So, it's easy for a teacher to impart favored beliefs, regardless of where the truth lies. A teacher will do a better job of imparting reasonable belief—and the critical skills that her students will need to pursue and possess knowledge—if she does not reveal overbearingly her beliefs. That's a common teaching strategy whatever the subject matter, not just value. 5

The appropriate educational strategy may appear to be derived from a separation of the evaluative from the non‐evaluative, but its motivation is quite different. It is because the aim of values education is value knowledge (which involves reasonable value beliefs) rather than mere value belief, that instructors should eschew indoctrination.

5. The Natural/Value Distinction Examined

In ethics and the arts, noncognitive values constitute the subject matter. But that isn't the norm. In many subject areas, values aren't the explicit subject matter. Despite this, in most disciplines it isn't clear where the subject itself ends and questions of value begin. Even granted a rigorous nonvalue/value distinction, for logical reasons there are, inevitably, claims that straddle the divide. It would be undesirable, perhaps impossible, to excise such claims from the educational environment.

Consider a concrete example. An evolutionary biologist is teaching a class on the evolutionary explanation of altruism. He argues that altruistic behavior is explicable as “selfishness” at the level of genes. His claim, although naturalistic, has implications for the value of altruistic acts. Suppose animals are genetically disposed to make greater sacrifices for those more closely genetically related to them than for those only distantly related, because such sacrifices help spread their genes. Suppose that the value of an altruistic sacrifice is partly a function of overcoming excessive self‐regard. It would follow that the value of some altruistic acts—those on behalf of close relatives—would be diminished. And that is a consequence properly classified as evaluative. Of course, this inference appeals to a proposition connecting value with the natural, but such propositions are pervasive and ineliminable.

Here is an argument for the unsustainability of a clean natural/value divide among propositions. A clean divide goes hand in glove with the Humean thesis that a purely evaluative claim cannot be validly inferred from purely natural claims, and vice versa. Let N be a purely natural claim and V a purely evaluative claim. Consider the conditional claim C : if N then V . Suppose C is a purely natural claim. Then from two purely natural claims ( N and C ) one could infer a purely evaluative claim V . Suppose instead that C is purely evaluative. The conjunction of two purely evaluative (natural) claims is itself purely evaluative (natural). Likewise, the negation of a purely evaluative (natural) proposition is itself purely evaluative (natural). 6 Consequently, not‐ N , like N , is purely natural, and so one could derive a purely evaluative claim ( C ) from a purely natural claim (not‐ N ). Alternatively, not‐ V , like V , is purely evaluative. So, one could derive a purely natural claim (not‐ N ) from two purely evaluative claims ( C and not‐ V ).

Propositions like C are natural‐value hybrids : they cannot be coherently assigned a place on either side of a sharp natural/value dichotomy. Hybrids are not just propositions that have both natural and evaluative content (like the thick evaluative attributes). Rather, their characteristic feature is that their content is not the conjunction of their purely natural and purely evaluative contents.

Hybrids are rife among the propositions in which we traffic. Jack believes Cheney unerringly condones what's good (i.e., Cheney condones X if and only if X is good), and Jill, that Cheney unerringly condones what's not good. Neither Jack nor Jill knows that Cheney has condoned the waterboarding of suspected terrorists. As it happens, both are undecided on the question of the value of waterboarding suspected terrorists. They don't disagree on any purely natural fact (neither knows what Cheney condoned); nor do they disagree on any purely evaluative fact (neither knows whether condoning waterboarding is good). They disagree on this: Cheney condones waterboarding suspected terrorists if and only if condoning such is good . Suppose both come to learn the purely natural fact that Cheney condones waterboarding. They will deduce from their beliefs conflicting, purely evaluative conclusions: Jack that condoning waterboarding is good; Jill that condoning waterboarding is not good. So, given that folk endorse rival hybrid propositions, settling a purely natural fact will impact the value endorsements of the participants differentially because natural facts and value endorsements are entangled via a rich set of hybrids.

I don't deny that there are purely natural or purely evaluative claims, nor that certain claims can be disentangled into their pure components. I am arguing that there are hybrids—propositions that are not equivalent to the conjunction of their natural and evaluative components. The fact that we all endorse hybrid claims means that learning something purely natural will often exert rational pressure on evaluative judgments (and vice versa). An education in the purely natural sciences may thus necessitate a reevaluation of values; and an education in values may necessitate a rethinking of purely natural beliefs.

6. Intrinsically Motivating Facts and the Queerness of Knowledge of Value

I have argued that natural and evaluative endorsements cannot be neatly disentangled in an educational setting for purely logical reasons. Still, it's problematic to embrace teaching a subject unless we have a body of knowledge . For there to be value knowledge there must be knowable truths about value. A common objection to these is that they would be very queer —unlike anything else that we are familiar with in the universe.

The queerness of knowable value facts can be elicited by considering their impact on motivation. Purely natural facts are motivationally inert. For example, becoming acquainted with the fact that this glass contains potable water (or a lethal dose of poison) does not by itself necessarily motivate me to drink (or refrain from drinking). Only in combination with an antecedent desire on my part (to quench my thirst, or to commit suicide) does this purely natural fact provide me with a motivation. A purely evaluative fact would, however, be different. Suppose it's a fact that the best thing for me to do now would be to drink potable water, and that I know that fact. Then it would be very odd for me to say, “I know that drinking potable water would be the best thing for me to do now, but I am totally unmoved to do so.” One explanation of this oddness is that knowledge of a value fact entails a corresponding desire: value facts necessarily motivate those who become acoquainted with them.

Why would this intrinsic power to motivate be queer rather than simply interesting ? The reason is that beliefs and desires seem logically independent—having a certain set of beliefs does not entail the having of any particular desires. Beliefs about value would violate this apparent independence. Believing that something is good would entail having a corresponding desire . Additionally, simply by virtue of imparting to your student a value belief you would thereby instill in him the corresponding motivation to act. How can mere belief necessitate a desire? Believing something good is one thing; desiring it is something else.

One response to the queerness objection is to reject the idea that knowing an evaluative fact necessarily motivates. Let's suppose, with Hume, that beliefs without desires are powerless to motivate. A person may well have a contingent independent desire to do what he believes to be good, and once he becomes acquainted with a good he may, contingently, be motivated to pursue it. But no mere belief, in isolation from such an antecedent desire, can motivate. That sits more easily with the frequent gap between what values we espouse and how we actually behave.

This Humean view would escape the mysteries of intrinsic motivation, but would present the educationist with a different problem. What is the point of attempting to induce true value beliefs if there is no necessary connection between value beliefs and motivations? If inducing true evaluative beliefs is the goal of values education, and evaluative beliefs have no such connection with desires, then one might successfully teach a psychopath correct values, but his education would make him no more likely to choose the good. His acquisition of the correct value beliefs , coupled with his total indifference to the good, might just equip him to make his psychopathic adventures more effectively evil.

There are two traditions in moral education that can be construed as different responses to the problem of intrinsic motivation. There is the formal, rationalist tradition according to which the ultimate questions of what to do are a matter of reason, or rational coherence in the body of evaluative judgments. But there is a corresponding empiricist tradition, according to which there is a source of empirical data about value, something which also supplies the appropriate motivation to act.

7. The Rationalist Response to the Problem of Intrinsic Motivation

Kant famously espoused the principle of universalizability: that a moral judgment is legitimate only if one can consistently will a corresponding universal maxim. 7 A judgment fails the test if willing the corresponding maxim involves willing conditions that make it impossible to apply the maxim. Cheating to gain an unfair advantage is wrong, on this account, because one cannot rationally will that everyone cheat to gain an unfair advantage. To be able to gain an unfair advantage by cheating, others have to play by the rules. So, cheating involves a violation of reason. If this idea can be generalized, and value grounded in reason, then perhaps we don't need to posit queer value facts (that cheating is bad , say) that mysteriously impact our desires upon acquaintance. Value would reduce to nonmysterious facts about rationality.

This rationalist approach, broadly construed, informs a range of educational value theories—for example, those of Hare and Kohlberg, as well as of the “values clarification” theorists. 8 They share the idea that values education is not a matter of teaching substantive value judgments but, rather, of teaching constraints of rationality, like those of logic, critical thinking, and universalizability. They differ in the extent to which they think rational constraints yield substantive evaluative content. Kant apparently held that universalizability settles our moral obligations. Others, like Hare, held that universalizability settles some issues (some moral judgments are just inconsistent with universalizability) while leaving open a range of coherent moral stances, any of which is just as consistent with reason as another. What's attractive about the rationalist tradition is that it limits the explicit teaching of value content to the purely cognitive values demanded by reason alone—those already embedded in the educational enterprise—without invoking additional problematic value facts.

There are two problems with rationalism. First, despite the initial appearance, it too presupposes evaluative facts. If cognitive values necessarily motivate—for example, learning that a maxim is inconsistent necessarily induces an aversion to acting on it—then the queerness objection kicks in. And if cognitive values don't necessarily motivate, then there will be the familiar disconnect between acquaintance with value and motivation.

Second, rational constraints, including even universalizability, leave open a vast range of substantive positions on value. A Kantian's inviolable moral principle—it is always wrong intentionally to kill an innocent person, say—may satisfy universalizability. But so, too, does the act‐utilitarian's injunction to always and everywhere maximize value. If killing innocent people is bad, then it is better to kill one innocent person to prevent a larger number being killed than it is to refrain from killing the one and allowing the others to be killed. The nihilist says it doesn't matter how many people you kill, and this, too, satisfies universalizability. The radical divergence in the recommendation of sundry universalizable theories suggests that rational constraints are too weak to supply substantive evaluative content. Reason leaves open a vast space of mutually incompatible evaluative schemes.

8. The Empiricist Response to the Problem of Intrinsic Motivation

To help weed out some of these consistent but mutually incompatible evaluative schemes, value empiricists posit an additional source of data about value. They argue that detecting value is not a matter of the head, but rather a matter of the heart—of feeling, emotion, affect, or desire. It involves responding appropriately to the value of things in some way that is not purely cognitive. Many value theorists whose theories are otherwise quite different (Aristotle, Hume, Brentano, and Meinong, and their contemporary heirs) have embraced variants of this idea. 9

Different value empiricists espouse different metaphysical accounts of value, from strongly idealist accounts (according to which values depend on our actual value responses) to robustly realist accounts (according to which values are independent of our actual responses). What they share is the denial that grasping value is a purely cognitive matter. Responses to value involve something like experience or perception. That is to say, things seem to us more or less valuable, these value‐seemings are analogous to perceptual seemings rather than to beliefs, and value‐seemings involve a motivational component, something desire‐like.

What, then, are these experiences of value, these value‐seemings? According to the Austrian value theorists (Meinong and his descendents), evaluative experiences are emotions. So, for example, anger is the emotional presentation of, or appropriate emotional response to, injustice; shame is the appropriate emotional response to what is shameful; sadness to the sad, and so on. Emotions are complex states that are necessarily connected with value judgments, but also with desires and nonevaluative beliefs. A much sparser theory of value experiences identifies them simply with desires. 10 That is to say, to desire P is just for P to seem good to me. To desire P is not to judge that P is good, or to believe that P is good. Something might well seem good to me (I desire it) even though I do not believe that it is good. Indeed, I might well know that it is not good (just as a rose I know to be white may appear to be pink to me). Value‐seemings, whatever their nature, would provide the necessary empirical grounding for beliefs about value, while also providing the link between acquaintance with value and the corresponding motivations.

Imagine if you were taught the axiomatic structure of Newtonian mechanics without ever doing an actual experiment, or even being informed what results any such experiment would yield in the actual world. You might well come to know all there is to know about Newtonian mechanics, as a body of theory, without having any idea whether the actual world is Newtonian. But, then, why should you prefer Newton's theory to, say, Aristotle's, as an account of the truth? According to the value empiricist, values taught entirely as matters of reason alone would be similarly empty. By contrast, if value judgments have to be justified ultimately by appeal to some shared value data, and the value data consist of value experiences, then the job of a value educator would be, at least in part, to connect the correct evaluative judgments in the appropriate way with actual experiences of value.

9. The Theory‐Ladenness of Value Data and Critical Empiricism

If pure rationalism seems empty of content, then pure empiricism seems correspondingly blind. Notoriously, people experience very different responses to putative values. Indeed, the highly variable nature of our value responses is the root of the contestedness of value, and it is often the major premise in an argument to the effect that either there is no such thing as value or, if there is, it cannot be reliably detected. If values education goes radically empiricist, and experiences of value (affect, emotion, desire, etc.) are the empirical arbiters of value, then an uncriticizable subjectivism, or at best relativism, looms, and the teaching of values would amount to little more than the teacher, like a television reporter, eliciting from her students how they feel.

This criticism presupposes a rather naive version of empiricism, according to which experience is a matter of passively receiving theory‐neutral data that are then generalized into something like a value theory. A more promising model is provided by some variant of critical rationalism. Perceptual experiences are rarely a matter of passively receiving “theory‐neutral” data, as a prelude to theorizing but, rather, are themselves informed and guided by theory. Even if there is a core to perceptual experience that is relatively immune to influence from background theory, the information that one gains from experience is partly a function of such theory. An experience in total isolation from other experiences to which it is connected by a theory rarely conveys significant information. If someone who knows no physics is asked to report what he sees in the cloud chamber, say, then what he reports will likely be very thin indeed and hardly a basis for grasping the nature of matter. So, enabling folk to have the right kinds of experiences—informative and contentful—which can then be appropriately interpreted and taken up into a web of belief, is in part a matter of teaching them a relevant background theory that makes sense of those experiences. This might be more accurately called a critical empiricist approach.

Given value experiences, and a critical empiricist approach to knowledge of value, values education would be, in part, a matter of cultivating appropriate experiential responses to various values; in part, a matter of refining and honing such responses; and in part, a matter of providing a framework that supports those responses and that can be challenged and revised in the light of further value experiences. Further, if experiences of value are a matter of emotion, feeling, or desire, values education would need to take seriously the training of folk in having, interpreting, and refining appropriate emotions, feelings, and desires. This would not in any way diminish the crucial role of logic, critical thinking, and rational constraints like universalizability. But it would open up the educational domain to cultivation and refinement of affective and conative states.

10. The Agent‐Neutrality of Value and the Relativity of Value Experiences

The hypothesis of the theory‐ladenness of experience is, unfortunately, insufficient to defuse the problem of the radical relativity in value experiences. Compare value experiences with ordinary perception. It is rare for a rose to appear to one person to be red and to another blue. But it is not at all rare for one and the same state of affairs to seem very good to one person and seem very bad to another. If these radical differences in value experiences are to be attributed simply to differences in the value beliefs that people hold, then value experiences are too corrupted to be of any use. Experiences too heavily laden with theory cease to be a reliable source of data for challenging and revising beliefs.

This problem can be sharpened by a combination of an idea endorsed by many empiricist value theorists (namely, that value is not what is desired in fact, but what it would be fitting or appropriate to desire), with a popular idea endorsed by most rationalist value theorists (namely, the agent‐neutrality of real value). The fitting‐response thesis says that something is valuable just to the extent that it is appropriate or fitting to experience it as having that value. The agent‐neutrality of value thesis says that the actual value of a state or property is not relative to persons or point of view. So if something—a severe pain, say—has a certain disvalue, then it has that disvalue regardless of whose pain it is. It is bad, as it were, irrespective of its locus. These theses combined imply the agent‐neutrality of the fitting response to value . If a state possesses a certain value, then it possesses that regardless of its locus. And a certain response to that value is fitting regardless of the relation of a valuer to the locus of the value. Consequently, the fitting response must be exactly the same response for any valuer. So ideally, two individuals, no matter what their relation to something of value, should respond to that value in exactly the same manner. The responses of the person whose responses are fitting are thus isomorphic to value, irrespective of the situation of that person or her relation to the value in question. Call this consequence of fitting‐response and agent‐neutrality, the isomorphic‐response thesis .

Now, quite independent of the issue of theory‐ladenness, the isomorphic‐response thesis seems very implausible. Suppose that the appropriate response to valuable states of affairs is desire, and the more valuable a state of affairs, the more one should desire it. Then, the isomorphic‐response thesis entails that any two individuals should desire all and only the same states to exactly the same degree. But clearly the states of affairs that people desire differ radically. Consequently, either we are all severely defective experiencers of value or one of the two theses that jointly entail the isomorphic‐response thesis is false.

11. The Effects of Perspective, Shape, and Orientation on Perception

The fitting‐response thesis looks implausible if value experiences are analogous to perceptual experiences. There is an objective state of the world that is perceiver‐neutral, but perceivers have very different experiences of the world depending on how they are situated within it. First, there are perspectival effects: the farther away an object is, the smaller it will appear relative to objects close by, and that is entirely appropriate; objects should look smaller the farther away they are. Is there an analogue of distance in value space, and an analogue to perspective? If so, something might, appropriately, seem to be of different value depending on how far it is located from different valuers. Second, there are variable perceptual effects owing to the shape of objects and their orientation to the perceiver. An asymmetric object, like a coin, looks round from one direction but flat from another; but again, it should look those different ways. Is there anything in the domain of value analogous to shape and orientation?

Grant that pain is bad and that qualitatively identical pains are ( ceteris paribus ) equally bad. I am averse to the pain I am currently experiencing—it seems very bad to me. However, an exactly similar pain I experienced twenty years ago does not elicit such a strong aversion from me now. Nor does the similar pain I believe I will face in twenty years' time. I can have very different aversive responses to various pains, all of which are equally bad, and those different responses do seem fitting. The temporally distant pains are just further away, in value space, from me now. Time can, thus, be thought of as one dimension in value space that affects how values should be experienced.

Some people are close to me, and the pain of those close to me matters more to me than pain experienced by distant beings. If my wife is in severe pain, that appears much worse to me than if some stranger is in severe pain; and that response, too, seems appropriate. I know, of course, that my loved ones are no more valuable than those strangers, and I am not saying I shouldn't care at all about the stranger's pain. Clearly, the stranger's pain is bad—just as bad as my wife's pain—and I am somewhat averse to it as well. But suppose I can afford only one dose of morphine, and I can give it to my wife or have it FedExed to the stranger. Would it be inappropriate of me to unhesitatingly give it to my wife? Hardly. Someone who tossed a coin to decide where the morphine should be directed would be considered lacking normal human feelings. Persons are located at various distances from me, and since persons are loci of valuable states, those states inherit their positions in value space, and their distances from me, from their locus. And it seems appropriate to respond more vividly to states that are close than to those that are more distant.

Finally, we can think of possibility—perhaps measured by probability—as a dimension of value. Imagine this current and awful pain multiplied in length enormously. If hell exists and God condemns unbelievers to hell, then I am going to experience something like this for a very, very long time. That prospect is much worse than my current fleeting pain. And yet I am strangely unmoved by this prospect. Why? Because it seems very improbable to me. First, it seems improbable, given the unnecessary suffering in the world, that God exists. And if, despite appearances, a Perfect Being really exists, it seems improbable She would run a postmortem torture chamber for unbelievers. So, extremely bad states that are remote in probability space elicit less vivid responses than less bad states that have a higher probability of actualization. And that, too, seems fitting.

Of course, one might argue that these things should not appear this way to me, that the same pain merits the same response wherever it is located. But that's just implausible. As a human being, with various attachments, deep connections with particular others, and a limited capacity to care, it would be impossible for me to respond in a totally agent‐neutral way to all pain whatever its locus: the pain of total strangers; pains past, present, and future; and pains actual as well as remotely possible. It would also be bizarre if one were required to randomly allocate one's limited stock of care regardless of the distance of the bearers of such pains. So, if a value that is closer should appear closer, and desires and aversions are appearances of value, then it is entirely fitting that desires and aversions be more sensitive to closely located values than to distantly located values. 11

Distance is not the only factor affecting value perception. A valuer's orientation to something of value (or disvalue) may also affect perception. Take a variant of Nozick's famous case of past and future pain. You have to undergo an operation for which it would be dangerous to use analgesics. The surgeon tells you that on the eighth day of the month you will go into the hospital and on the morning of the ninth, you will be administered a combination of drugs that will paralyze you during the operation, scheduled for later that day, and subsequently cause you to forget the experiences you will have during the operation, including all the dreadful pain. You wake up in hospital, and you don't know what day it is. If it is the tenth, the operation was yesterday and the operation was twelve hours ago. If it is morning of the ninth, then you have yet to undergo the operation in twelve hours' time. So, depending on which of these is true, you are twelve hours away from the pain. Both are equally likely, given your information. You are equidistant from these two painful possibilities in both temporal space and probability space. You are, however, much more averse to the 50 percent probability of the future as yet‐unexperienced pain than to the 50 percent probability that the pain is now past. This asymmetric response seems appropriate. We are differently oriented toward past and future disvalues, and that can make a difference how bad those disvalues seem.

What about the shape of value, and the effect of shape together with orientation on perception? Should the value of one and the same situation be experienced by folk differently if they are differently oriented with respect to it? Suppose that a retributive theory of justice is correct, and that in certain cases wrongdoers ought to be punished for their wrongdoing; that such punishment is some sort of suffering; and that the punishment restores justice to the victim. The suffering inflicted on the wrongdoer is, then, from the agent‐neutral viewpoint, a good thing. Consider three people differently, related to the wrongdoer's receiving his just deserts: the wrongdoer himself, the wrongdoer's victim, and some bystander. It is fitting for the victim to welcome the fact that the wrongdoer is getting his just deserts. A neutral bystander will typically not feel as strongly about the punishment as the victim does, but provided she recognizes that the deserts are just, she should be in favor. What about the wrongdoer? His punishment is a good thing, but he has to be averse to the punishment if it is to be any sort of punishment at all. The difference in the victim's and the bystander's degree of desire for the just deserts can be explained by their differing distances from the locus of the value. But the differing responses of the victim and the wrongdoer cannot be explained by distance alone. Desire and aversion pull in opposite directions. Unless the wrongdoer is averse to his punishment, it is no punishment at all. Unless the victim desires the wrongdoer's punishment, it will not serve its full role in restoring justice.

Value is one thing, the appropriate response to it on the part of a situated valuer is another. The same value may thus elicit different responses depending on how closely the value is located to a value perceiver, the shape of the value, and the orientation of the valuer toward it. The thesis that the appropriate responses to value are experiences, which, like perceptual experiences, are heavily perspectival, defuses what would otherwise be a powerful objection to the agent‐neutrality of value. If the appropriate response to an agent‐neutral value were the same for all, then value would impose a wholly impractical, even inhuman, obligation on a person to effectively ignore his singular position in the network of relationships. Fortunately for us, experiences of agent‐neutral values can legitimately differ from one valuer to another.

Interestingly, these features of value experience help explain the attraction of Nel Noddings's ethics of caring, perhaps the most prominent contemporary educational ethic in the empiricist tradition. For Noddings, the prime value seems to be caring relationships and fostering such relationships through fostering caring itself. But one is not simply supposed to promote caring willy‐nilly, in an agent‐neutral way. Rather, one is supposed to be attentive to the caring that goes on fairly close to oneself. Consequently, it would be bad to neglect one's nearest and dearest even if by doing so one could foster more caring relationships far away. But it is not just distance in the network of care that is important. I am located at the center of a particular network of caring relationships, and my moral task is to tend not just to the amount and quality of caring in my network but also to my peculiar location in the network. So, it would be wrong for me to neglect my caring for those close to me even if by doing so I could promote more or better caring among those very folk. I should not cease to care for my nearest and dearest even if by doing so I could promote higher quality caring among my nearest and dearest. 12

12. Teaching Values on the Critical Empiricist Approach

Agent‐relative responses to agent‐neutral values are, thus, entirely appropriate on a critical empiricist conception of value. If this is right, it is not the job of an educationist to try to impose a uniform experiential response to all matters of value. Rather, it is to try to provide the necessary critical and logical tools for making sense of agent‐neutral values in the light of our highly variable agent‐relative responses, and to elicit and refine the fitting response to value in the light of a valuer's relation to it.

But this, of course, raises a difficult question for any would‐be value educator. How is it possible to teach appropriate responses to value and coordinate such responses with correct value judgments? Partly, this is a philosophical question involving the nature of value and the fitting responses to it, and partly, it is an empirical question involving the psychology of value experience and the most effective ways to develop or refine fitting responses.

Let us begin with a fairly uncontroversial case. It is not difficult for a normal human being to appreciate the value of her own pleasures or the disvalue of her own pains. A normal child will almost always experience her own pain as a bad thing. There is no mystery here, given empiricism, for the child's aversion to pain is part and parcel of the experience of the pain's badness. Indeed, it is through aversion to states like pain, or desire for pleasure, that a child typically gets a grip on the concepts of goodness and badness in the first place, since the good (respectively, bad) just is that to which desire (respectively, aversion) is the normal and fitting response.

Correct judgments on the goodness of one's own pleasures and the badness of one's own pains thus follow rather naturally on the heels of one's direct experiences of those pleasures and pains. What about judgments concerning more remotely located goods and evils? Provided one has some capacity to empathize, one also has the capacity to experience, to some extent, the disvalue of another's pain or the value of another's pleasure, albeit somewhat less vividly than in the case of one's own. Clearly, normal people do have an innate ability, perhaps honed through evolutionary development, to empathize with others in these crucial ways. 13 Recent research suggests that this capacity may be realized by the possession of mirror neurons and that these structures have played a crucial role in the evolution of social behavior. 14 With empathy in place, there is the capacity to experience values located beyond oneself.

What may not always come so naturally, and what might conceivably require some tutoring, is that the exactly similar pains and pleasures of others must have exactly the same value and disvalue as one's own. Even for a good empathizer, given the perspectival nature of value experience, another's exactly similar pain will seem less bad than one's own. And the more distant the pain is, the less bad it will seem. One has to learn, at the level of judgment, to correct for this perspectival feature of value experience. That will mostly be a matter of learning to apply principles of reason—specifically, that if two situations are qualitatively identical at the natural level, they must be qualitatively identical at the level of value. Presumably, knowledge of the agent‐neutrality of the goodness and badness of pain and pleasure will feed back into one's capacity for empathic response, enhancing and refining such responses. A defect in empathy may, thus, be corrected by becoming cognizant of the actual structure of value.

A person may, of course, have a very weak capacity for empathy, or even lack it altogether. This seems to be a feature of severe autism. Interestingly, an autistic person is often capable of using his experience of what is good or bad for him, together with something like universalizability, to gain a purchase on goods and evils located in other beings. His purchase on these more remote goods and evils lacks direct experiential validation, but he can still reason, from experiences of his own goods and evils, to judgments of other goods and evils. An autistic person may not thereby acquire the ability to empathize—just as a blind person may not be taught how to see—but he may still learn a considerable amount about value. 15 The value judgments he endorses will admittedly rest on a severely reduced empirical base, and that may never be enlarged by the theory, but the theory might still be quite accurate.

A more radical defect is exhibited by the psychopath, who seems to have no capacity to reason from his experience of his own goods and evils to goods and evils located elsewhere. 16 It is not clear how one might go about teaching value judgments or value responses to a psychopath. It might be like trying to teach empirical science to someone who has vivid experiences of what is going on immediately around him, but lacks any capacity to reason beyond that or to regard his own experience as a situated response to an external reality. Clearly there are limits to what can be taught and to whom.

13. Conclusion

Value endorsements and their transmission are unavoidable in educational settings, as they are everywhere. The question, then, is not whether to teach values but which values to teach, in what contexts, and how to teach them effectively. Clearly, the constraints of reason are crucial to the cultivation of a coherent set of value endorsements. But reason alone is insufficient. To access values we need some value data, experiences of value. And, to mesh motivation appropriately with value endorsements, value experiences have to be desiderative. This critical empiricist model of value knowledge suggests a model of values education that is richer and more interesting than either its rationalist or its naive empiricist rivals—one in which the cultivation and refinement of emotion, feeling, and desire and the honing of critical skills both play indispensable roles.

Of course, any teaching of values could go awry. That we are serious about teaching values, and that we attempt to do so with due respect for both reason and experience, does not guarantee that we will succeed. We ourselves may have got value wrong. Or, we might possess and try to pass on the right values, but our students reject them. Here, as elsewhere in the educational enterprise, there is always a risk that things might turn out badly despite our noblest intentions and sincerest efforts.

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Greater Good Science Center • Magazine • In Action • In Education

Our Best Education Articles of 2020

In February of 2020, we launched the new website Greater Good in Education , a collection of free, research-based and -informed strategies and practices for the social, emotional, and ethical development of students, for the well-being of the adults who work with them, and for cultivating positive school cultures. Little did we know how much more crucial these resources would become over the course of the year during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now, as we head back to school in 2021, things are looking a lot different than in past years. Our most popular education articles of 2020 can help you manage difficult emotions and other challenges at school in the pandemic, all while supporting the social-emotional well-being of your students.

In addition to these articles, you can also find tips, tools, and recommended readings in two resource guides we created in 2020: Supporting Learning and Well-Being During the Coronavirus Crisis and Resources to Support Anti-Racist Learning , which helps educators take action to undo the racism within themselves, encourage their colleagues to do the same, and teach and support their students in forming anti-racist identities.

Here are the 10 best education articles of 2020, based on a composite ranking of pageviews and editors’ picks.

Can the Lockdown Push Schools in a Positive Direction? , by Patrick Cook-Deegan: Here are five ways that COVID-19 could change education for the better.

How Teachers Can Navigate Difficult Emotions During School Closures , by Amy L. Eva: Here are some tools for staying calm and centered amid the coronavirus crisis.

Six Online Activities to Help Students Cope With COVID-19 , by Lea Waters: These well-being practices can help students feel connected and resilient during the pandemic.

Help Students Process COVID-19 Emotions With This Lesson Plan , by Maurice Elias: Music and the arts can help students transition back to school this year.

How to Teach Online So All Students Feel Like They Belong , by Becki Cohn-Vargas and Kathe Gogolewski: Educators can foster belonging and inclusion for all students, even online.

How Teachers Can Help Students With Special Needs Navigate Distance Learning , by Rebecca Branstetter: Kids with disabilities are often shortchanged by pandemic classroom conditions. Here are three tips for educators to boost their engagement and connection.

How to Reduce the Stress of Homeschooling on Everyone , by Rebecca Branstetter: A school psychologist offers advice to parents on how to support their child during school closures.

Three Ways to Help Your Kids Succeed at Distance Learning , by Christine Carter: How can parents support their children at the start of an uncertain school year?

How Schools Are Meeting Social-Emotional Needs During the Pandemic , by Frances Messano, Jason Atwood, and Stacey Childress: A new report looks at how schools have been grappling with the challenges imposed by COVID-19.

Six Ways to Help Your Students Make Sense of a Divisive Election , by Julie Halterman: The election is over, but many young people will need help understanding what just happened.

Train Your Brain to Be Kinder (video), by Jane Park: Boost your kindness by sending kind thoughts to someone you love—and to someone you don’t get along with—with a little guidance from these students.

From Othering to Belonging (podcast): We speak with john a. powell, director of the Othering & Belonging Institute, about racial justice, well-being, and widening our circles of human connection and concern.

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The Role of Personal Values in Learning Approaches and Student Achievements

Kelum a. a. gamage.

1 James Watt School of Engineering, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK

D. M. S. C. P. K. Dehideniya

2 Department of Education, University of Peradeniya, Peradeniya 20400, Sri Lanka; moc.liamg@ayinedihedkpcs (D.M.S.C.P.K.D.); moc.liamg@anammagitayukas (S.Y.E.)

Sakunthala Y. Ekanayake

Associated data.

The data presented in this study are available on request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to privacy.

Personal values play a significant role when adopting learning approaches by individuals during their studies. Particularly in higher education, these values significantly influence the character that individuals play within their learning community and ultimately influence their academic achievements. The purpose of this paper is to investigate personal values in their choice of learning approaches and, subsequently, how it impacts one’s academic achievements. It also investigates the importance of developing an individual’s personal values as a part of their wider studies, while aligning these with graduate attributes and balancing them with knowledge and skills, to produce successful graduates in a society.

1. Introduction

Values are the fundamental beliefs, behaviours and attitudes that have been approved and accepted as what is good by society for a long time. In the most general sense, they are considered as the virtues that a person holds in his or her life. However, philosophers, researchers, practitioners and many others have defined and addressed values from different perspectives concerning the respective discipline or contexts. Generally, values are viewed as inner realities of an individual that are reflected through habits, behaviours, beliefs, expectations and relationships. Values lay the foundation for an individual’s pattern of thinking and way of acting. They play a vital role in how one makes decisions, choices and builds perceptions and attitudes. Additionally, various studies on personal values have shown that they often guide decision making in all aspects of life such as career, religion, social circles and self-identity [ 1 ]. Another aspect of personal values is that they can be viewed as desirable motivational goals and interests of an individual or the guiding principles in life. In addition, they have been seen as the non-existent mental entities and as the outcomes of mental development. Consequently, values can be seen as the perceptions of psychological expressions or frame of mind. Moreover, they are consequential issues that manifest the personality of an individual. Hence, the realisation of personal values by the self is crucial and determines the growth and the existence of the self in any situation. Conversely, understanding another person’s respected values is also important.

As a consequence of the constant transformation of society in terms of culture, economics and politics, value and value systems have been unusually changed and distorted. In favour of the same idea, Daniela et al. [ 2 ] justify this by arguing, “with modernity it is normal that personal value systems support changes to harmonize itself to current requirements”. Initially, some of the personal values may be determined by birth and later greatly influenced and molded by education, experiences, society, culture and many other factors. According to Matthews et al. [ 3 ], an alteration in lifestyle, cultural environment and economic circumstances, individually or a combination of these factors, can cause values to change. Personal value systems can be viewed as a relatively permanent framework that exists within an individual which decides what is good or bad for himself or herself and his or her companions. In addition, it shapes and influences the general nature of an individual’s behaviour. Researchers have found that personal values developed early in life may be resistant to change and may be derived from those of particular groups or systems, such as culture, religion and political party. However, personal values are not universal. Genetically inherited features and external factors including education may determine one’s personal values. Essentially, the antecedents of values are culturally embedded in society and its institutions [ 3 ] and are socially determined [ 2 ]. Although a personal value is an internal phenomenon, the motivating force to adopt the value is seen as emanating from a diverse range of external sources [ 4 ]. As values directly influence one’s entire lifestyle, a discussion of values and value systems, their place within changing socioeconomic contexts and how they affect individuals and society has universal relevance.

The value systems of a society always determine human activity in social life, education and professional life. Values are seen as a key component of organisational culture and are repeatedly defined as the principles accountable for the successful management of the organization [ 5 ]. Arambewela and Hall [ 6 ] support the same issue, stating [ 7 ]: personal values have long been considered an important variable in understanding consumer behaviour and decision making. As a result, the interest in knowing the drivers behind consumer attitudes and behaviour has encouraged marketing researchers to investigate human values [ 8 ] (Anana and Nique, 2014). Hence, many researchers have emphasised the need and advantage of studying the impact of personal values on the sustainable existence of an organisation.

Investigating the influence of values on assessments made by people on their career choices is another trending research area. In general, professions such as teaching, medicine and nursing are strongly attached and influenced by values. The results of a research study by Anana and Nique [ 8 ] has concluded that students choosing some careers are more typical, based on their values than others, and that some values are more typical of some careers than others. Thus, personal values have been taken as the main focus in the research in a variety of fields and academic disciplines ([ 3 ] cites Feather, 1975). In this regard, the need for identifying different scopes of human values is a timely requirement. Since professional values are also shaped and influenced by personal values, indeed a discussion on personal values can be regarded as an issue that unchanged over time.

There has been a growing concern over the erosion of values among youth during the past few years, and it is continually progressing. At the same time, the need for facilitating value development has become the greatest challenge ahead in the field of education. The effects of the value given to material comforts, money, fame and success are prominently reflected through the present younger generation. Hence, there is a considerable emphasis in this new century on the development of values: tolerance, social justice, open-mindedness, empathy and deep respect for others. Since realizing values and adopting and displaying them as one’s personality is closely associated with education, values education is given a greater emphasis today to ensure the continuity of societies. The functions of education in molding student’s moral, spiritual and sociocultural life are some of the areas that have received renewed attention in the recent past. In addition, they have long been considered important variables in understanding student behaviours, attitudes and achievements. Consequently, the outcomes of Branson [ 4 ] provide an insight into the benefits of value-based studies in educational management and administration. The realization of value can offer assistance in organizing the learning process by explaining and understanding students’ reactions to various situations and tailoring and evaluating the learning experience. Though students’ learning takes place within the self, it is not an isolated process. Research has confirmed that learning is affected by a variety of internal and external factors. Researchers have observed variations in students’ learning approaches, and furthermore, they have found qualitative differences in learning outcomes that were related to the approaches taken (Matthews et al. [ 3 ] refer Marton and Saljo [ 9 ]). Accordingly, if the personal values deal with the behaviour of a person, learning may also have influenced by personal values. Based on that assumption, a number of researchers study the composition and structure of students’ learning approaches and personal values [ 10 ] and their interconnections have been observed in various contexts. Research in this area confirms that values are related to different approaches to learning and they may change according to the circumstances. Considering the students’ behaviour in different academic situations, researchers have categorized the learning approaches into different groups. Furthermore, researchers have attempted to build up the connections between learning approaches and specific personal values. For example, as referred by Matthews et al. [ 3 ] and Tarabashkina [ 10 ], personal values such as achievement and power were related to the achieving approach, security and tradition values to the surface approach, and self-direction and universalism to the deep learning approach. In addition, this relationship was confirmed by a number of studies with some variations.

The values occupy a pre-eminent position on the agenda of researchers in education and many other domains as they impact behaviour, attitudes, expectations and all the other personal characteristics and constructs. Hence, this paper seeks to contribute by reviewing the available literature on the role of personal values concerning learning approaches and student achievements. The review centres on the following given objectives.

• To investigate the role of students’’ personal values in their choice of learning approaches;
• To investigate the impact of personal values on one’s academic achievement;
• To investigate the importance of developing individual’s personal values as a part of their academic life;
• To investigate how one’s personal values shape the learning community around that person and vice versa.

2. Background Literature

The background literature aims to synthesise the most relevant research outcomes for the main topic of study under the four main areas: personal values, personal value theories, value education and learning approaches. The concept of personal values is quite closely connected with value theories and value education. In reality, they are inseparable and cannot be treated separately since they are branches of the same root. About the very same idea, to define, describe and to understand personal values, several frameworks have been used by the researchers. Thus, the historical evolution of personal values can be identified through the presented frameworks. Moreover, as the literature suggests, through empirical evidence, there exists a relationship between personal values and students’ learning. Hence, uncovering the background literature through the above four areas are important for the total comprehension of the reader.

2.1. Personal Values

As a whole, personal values significantly influence all aspects of one’s life. It is also obvious that values contribute to the building of one’s personal and social identity. Understanding the concept of personal values is indeed a complex process. Over the past years, it has been viewed diversely analysing from the individual level and up to organisational, institutional, social and cultural levels [ 2 , 11 , 12 ], resulting in several definitions addressing different scopes.

Personal values or individual values are the values to which an individual is committed and which influences his behaviour [ 13 ]. As Ledden et al. [ 14 ] view, value perceptions are the result of a cognitive trade-off between benefits and sacrifices. According to Rokeach [ 7 ], a value is a long term belief that a certain path or purpose of existence is preferable from the social and personal point of view over another one in the opposite [ 2 ]. Furthermore, values can be referred to as interests, desires, goals, needs and standards of preference [ 3 ]. (Ros [ 15 ] supports the same concept and states, “a value is a desirable state, object, goal or behaviour transcending specific situations and applied as normative standard to judge and to choose among alternative modes of behaviour” [ 2 , 15 ].

Moving a little from the basic components mentioned in the previous definitions, Anana and Nique [ 8 ] say that a value is a reference people use to judge themselves and others or to influence the values, attitudes and actions of other people, such as children. People who use the features obtained through the sense organs in defining other beings can benefit from the impressions they have emotionally in attributing importance to that being and appraising it [ 16 ]. These emotion-based impressions are generally called “values”. Another definition suggests that values are systematic and, to some extent, precise ideas that ensure the interaction of an individual with the environment [ 17 ]). Regarding the concept of personal values, Mashlah [ 5 ] and Daniela et al. (2013) [ 2 ] refer to Schwartz and Bilsky’s [ 18 ] and Schwartz’s [ 19 ] definition of values as a combination of five main features: values are (a) concepts or beliefs (b) about desirable end states or behaviours (c) that transcend specific situations, (d) guide the selection or evaluation of behaviour and events and (e) are ordered by relative importance. Analytical observation on the definitions of values shows that they are more or less diverse in meanings. Basically, terms such as interests, beliefs, desires and behaviour have been used in common in definitions. However, when focused, it is evident that values have been defined as concerning the cognitive, affective and behavioural aspects of an individual.

In contrast to the above, Ledden [ 14 ] calls attention to another two important points referring to the relevant literature. Firstly, based on the literary evidence, researchers state that value’s loose definition and the diverse nomenclature used by authors have collectively led to some authors using the term value interchangeably with concepts such as satisfaction, quality and values, particularly with the personal values that guide human behaviour such as beliefs of right and wrong. Secondly, as Ledden states [ 14 ], despite the consensus on terms and definition of values, the literature evidences some confusion in differentiating between the concept of the value and the notion of values. The argument is supported with an important distinction between value (singular) and values (plural) marked by Holbrook [ 20 ], defining the former as a preference judgment and the latter as the criteria by which people make such preference judgments; thus, value is related to, but distinct from, the concept of values. In a general sense, this diversity possibly emerges through the variations in values referred to in different research domains.

Adhering to the research outcomes, Branson et al. [ 4 ] discusses the adoption of values by a person. As explained by values theory, a person’s values are dependent upon his or her consciousness and those values are unique to the person. Research shows that people do not learn values, but rather, they unconsciously adopt values. For example, values are adopted subliminally rather than being consciously selected and deliberately adopted by the individual [ 4 ]. Each person sees a unique and specific view of their world due to the influence of his or her conscious perceptions.

Turning to the historical traces of debates and discussions on personal values, values are abstract concepts that have been studied since ancient times [ 21 ] and can be traced back to the lessons from Aristotle, Plato and Socrates [ 15 ]. Evidently, research into value education has been carried out for almost centuries [ 3 ] and continues today. As a result, several definitions and models have been suggested and empirically studied over the past years. Despite the key components and focuses, several models are found frequently cited in the research literature. As Hanel, Litzellachner and Maio [ 11 ] suggested, the following are at the forefront of all the other individual value models.

• Spranger’s (1921)—Model of types of people;
• Rokeach’s (1973)—Instrumental and terminal values;
• Schwartz’s—The Schwartz (1992) theory of basic human values;
• Gouvela’s (2013)—Functional theory of values.

Value theories focused on values at the individual level as well values can also be described on a cultural level. As Hanel, Litzellachner and Maio [ 11 ] refer, three prominent approaches of this type were proposed by Inglehart, Hofstede and Schwartz [ 19 ].

Particularly for this article, Schwartz’s model of human values is adopted as the fundamental theory to discuss the issues highlighted in the objectives since it has been referred to as the theoretical ground of a number of recent research studies on personal values in a variety of contexts. Specifically in the studies which examined how the basic values relate to various attitudes, opinions, behaviours, personalities and background characteristics. In addition, it has been used in hundreds of studies that assessed value transmission and development in an individual from childhood to adolescence and value change over time. Moreover, the theory itself concerns the basic values that people in all cultures recognize [ 19 ]. Thus, it can be accepted as universally applicable without any bias. Additionally, considering the very diversity of meanings of the construct of values, the sociopsychological aspects of values are focused on throughout this article.

2.2. Personal Value Theories—Schwartz Theory of Human Values

Values can range from the simplest forms, such as punctuality and kindness, to pretentious forms such as self-direction, universalism and conformity. Over the past years, various value models have been proposed and empirically supported [ 11 ]. All of them have often defined human values as abstract ideals that guide people’s behaviour and are crucial for explaining social and personal organizations and tracing their changes due to various factors. Among the different value models that have been suggested, the Schwartz [ 18 ] theory of basic human values is found frequently cited in the literature.

As Schwartz described, there are six main features of values according to the theory [ 18 , 19 ]: values are beliefs linked inextricably to affect, values refer to desirable goals that motivate action, values transcend specific actions and situations, values serve as standards, values are ordered by importance relative to one another and the relative importance of multiple values are guides to action. These six features apply to all values. Furthermore, theory distinguishes ten basic values (value types) which encompass the range of motivationally distinct values recognized across cultures. These values are likely to be universal because they are grounded in universal requirements of human existence. However, they differ in their motivational content. The definitions of the ten values in terms of the broad goals they express in Table 1 .

Values and the motivational goals—the Schwartz theory of personal values.

He presented the structural model of basic values which takes the form of a circle. Complementary values, i.e., values that are similar to motivational content, are located side by side on this circle while competing values are located at opposing sides [ 18 , 19 ]. The closer any two values in either direction around the circle, the more similar their underlying motivations; the more distant, the more antagonistic their motivations [ 19 ]. It seems that the whole set of ten values relates to each other closely or distantly and by that mean they may interrelate with any other variable such as behaviour, attitude, age, etc. ( Figure 1 ).

Theoretical model of relations among ten motivational types of values.

2.3. Value Education

The concept of values has been defined differently in the literature depending on the contexts and the situations. However, along with the rapid changes in the world, the concepts of values and value education have gained renewed attention due to the increased social immorality [ 21 ]. Value education can address different forms and definitions. In religious senses, it is most possibly defined as moral and spiritual development. To sociological concepts, it can be termed as the part of socialisation and personality development or the transmission of cultural elements. In the dimension of education, it is addressed through citizenship education. However, in the most general sense, value education stresses the process by which people develop moral values and transfer them through factors such as social relationships, religion and education.

The values, attitudes and personal qualities of young people and the role of the school in spiritual, moral, social and cultural development have received renewed attention in recent years [ 21 , 22 , 23 ]. As education is a personality-building process [ 24 ], school education is challenged by preparing students to face the complexities of future life. Rapidly changing socioeconomic structures and their consequences in terms of patterns of work, family life and social relationships requires an educational response. In that context, experts have recognised the 21st century school curriculum as the most influential mode of transferring values to the younger generation other than the family and other immediate social units. Sahin [ 16 ] suggests that implicit or planned values education in schools plays an active role in transferring values from society to society. By its definition, value education refers to those pedagogies that educators use to create enriching learning experiences for students and addresses issues related to character formation [ 25 ] and moral development. Moral values are the values that make individuals distinguish between what is good or bad and right or wrong and simply it gives the ideas about the good personal and social life. Halstead and Tylor [ 21 ] refer to a discussion document on Spiritual and Moral Development and highlight that the moral values that school should promote are telling the truth, keeping promises, respecting the rights and property of others, acting considerately towards others, helping those less fortunate and weaker than ourselves, taking personal responsibility for one’s actions and self-discipline. Moreover, schools reject bullying, cheating, deceit, cruelty, irresponsibility and dishonesty.

Sahin [ 16 ] has identified the four main characteristics of values education as:

• To raise individuals’ awareness of universal (ethical), cultural values, and their importance;
• To relate democratic attitudes and tolerance to multiculturalism;
• To evaluate all values with the criteria of improving people’s living conditions and facilities;
• To turn life into knowledge and/or knowledge into life considering concrete problems related to ethical values.

Sahin [ 16 ] views the main purpose of values education as to make values permanent behaviours in students. Providing students with the knowledge and insight into values and beliefs that enables them to reflect on their experience in a way that develop their spiritual awareness and self-knowledge, teaches them the principles which distinguish right from wrong and teaches students to appreciate their cultural traditions and the diversity and richness of other cultures are among the basic functional aspects of value education provided through the school education [ 21 ]. Accordingly, the particular theme of value education is directly related to inculcating moral values in students, and it can be identified as another phase of personal value development since the same aspects are named and described in personal value models and frameworks in more or less similar terms. For example, the features that institutions wish to promote through moral or value education are discussed in the ten basic values in Schwartz theory of basic values under the themes of conformity, benevolence, tradition, security and universalism. As Schwartz [ 19 ] views, benevolence and conformity values both promote cooperative and supportive social relations and both values may motivate the same helpful act, separately or together. Traditional values imply one’s affection towards religious beliefs and respect for tradition and customs while security values inspire one’s need for safety and harmony. Hence, through value education, it develops values such as conformity, security, universalism and benevolence.

In developing values in individuals, it is widely recognised that schools are not the only nor are they the greatest influence on the values, attitudes and personal qualities of young people, but parents, communities and other agencies are also influential [ 21 ]. The early-stage value development through the family, neighbours, practice of religion, culture and nursery forms the foundation for the personal values system that one holds. It can be further sharpened through the formal and informal educational and cultural practices in the school or any other institution.

2.4. Learning Approaches

Approaches to learning mainly focus on how children engage in learning referring to the use of skills and behaviours. In addition, they are discussed incorporating emotional, behavioural and cognitive domains. Learning is a process of changing behaviour through experiences and is relatively a permanent product. Hence, it is important to understand student learning approaches to improve and maintain the quality of the learning experience. Beyaztas and Senemoglu [ 26 ] define learning approaches in terms of how a learner’s intentions, behaviours and study habits change according to their perception of a learning task to the context which the learner regards.

According to Lietz and Matthews [ 27 ] two major perspectives have guided theory and research into student learning: The first is The Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) rooted in North America, and the second is The Students’ Approaches to Learning (SAL) that is prominent in Europe and Australia/Southeast Asia. In parallel to that, Matthews et al. (2007) [ 3 ] cite Biggs’ [ 28 ] findings on Asian student learning approaches, and according to it, learning is based on two types: the Information Processing Approach and the Contextually and Experientially Based Learning Approach. The above findings specifically refer to the geographical region and it is reasonable to pose the argument that the variation patterns in learning approaches are existing to the sociogeographical factors such as country, region and culture.

Biggs [ 29 , 30 ] specified three distinct approaches (see Table 2 ) to learning namely, The Surface, The Deep and The Achieving approaches to learning [ 3 , 27 ]. In addition, each approach is composed of a motivation that directed learning and a strategy for the implementation of the learning approach [ 3 ].

Motivations and strategies in student approaches to learning.

Note. MNNote. Matthews et al. (2007) [ 3 ] following Biggs [ 29 ] and Murray-Harvey [ 31 ].

Li’s [ 32 ] perspective on student learning approaches is quite different from the above and states that students are smart in different ways and have different learning approaches. According to Na Li, the two major perspectives of learning are the constructivist and student-centred learning approaches: Inquiry-based learning, Problem-based learning, the Situated and embodied cognition model, Self-regulated learning and Cognitive apprenticeship model and Technology-enhanced learning approaches.

Research into learning approaches has focused on studying the impact of background factors such as gender, sociocultural backgrounds, discipline area, personal values and the learning culture of students. As highlighted by Lietz and Matthews [ 27 ], Cano-Garcia [ 33 ] has shown that older female students tended to score higher on the deep and achieving approaches to learning than younger male students. In addition, studies of Jones et al. [ 34 ] and Smith and Miller [ 35 ] reflected strong relationships between learning approaches and academic disciplines. Beyaztas and Senemoglu [ 26 ] reveal another dimension of research on learning approaches in relation to the examination on students’ learning and studying behaviour towards exams and exam types. Results of these interventions revealed that students’ learning approaches change according to the examination type they were preparing for and Ramsden [ 36 ] has proposed strategic learning approaches for students who have more exam-oriented study behaviours.

Another major area that researchers concentrated is changes in the learning approach over time. A number of cross-sectional and longitudinal studies have investigated changes in learning approaches over time [ 3 , 10 , 37 ]. Both Lietz and Matthews [ 27 ] and Tarabashkina and Lietz [ 10 ] refer to the same group of studies that investigated changes in learning approaches over time. As they arranged into the chronological order the earliest, Watkins and Hattie’s [ 38 ] study on a sample of undergraduate students found that the longer students had studied, the more they displayed characteristics of the deep approach to learning. Contrary to the results of their first study, Watkins and Hattie’s longitudinal study [ 39 ] showed no evidence of students’ deep learning approaches intensifying over time. However, Biggs [ 29 ] reported a general decline in the deep approach from the first to final year of study in a sample of undergraduate students in Australia. However, no significant changes were observed for other learning approaches. In the study by Gow and Kember [ 40 ], results showed that older students used the deep approach significantly more often than younger students. In addition, students at the beginning of their studies appeared to prefer an achieving approach compared to students who were further advanced in their studies. In addition, the more time that had elapsed since leaving school, the fewer the number of students who displayed characteristics of the surface approach. In another study by Kember [ 41 ], it was uncovered that younger students showed a preference for a more superficial approach in a comparison of first, second and third-year students. In contrast to the results of his study in 1990 [ 40 ], he found that first-year students showed significantly higher scores on the deep approach to learning than second and third-year students. Zeegers’s [ 42 ] study on a class of chemistry students over 30 months has shown a significant decline in the achieving strategy and a significant increase in the surface strategy over the time of the study. For the deep approach, no statistically significant changes emerged over time. Another study carried out by Matthews [ 3 ] on the same issue discovered that students’ approaches to learning generally became deeper over time. In contrast, Cano’s [ 33 ] study observed a significant decline from junior to senior high school with regards to the deep and surface learning approaches both in boys and girls.

In general, preference for a deep learning approach has emerged as the major concern of all studies, and there is no specific pattern of applying a particular approach for learning among the students. Hence, there may be some other background factors influencing the selection and application as well as the changing of a specific approach to learning. In the point of factors affecting students’ learning approaches, Beyaztas and Senemoglu [ 26 ] summarize the 3P model (Presage, Process and Product), and according to it, prior knowledge, abilities, preferred ways of learning, values and expectations, teaching context (including the curriculum) and teaching methods affect the student’s selection.

As revealed through the research studies, approaches to learning are probable to change in response to gender, ability, formal teaching authority, time, personal values [ 3 , 27 ], the requirements of and as an adaptation to new environments, the learning culture and the academic discipline and its nature [ 10 , 27 ]. Additionally, as Beyaztas and Senemoglu [ 26 ] state, referring to an early study of Ramsden [ 36 ], students’ perception of their teachers and departments also have important effects on their learning approaches. In addition, the curriculum and sociocultural environment also may have an effect on selecting the learning approach. Thus, it can be concluded that students’ preference for learning approach is influenced by several factors and they may be inborn or situational. In other words, learning approached may be a result of a combination of several internal and external factors including personal value traits.

3. Methodological Design

This research is based on a systematic review of the literature with a narrative summary that exclusively depended on online databases. The predetermined selection criteria, which are given in Table 3 , were applied during the database search screening of the text titles, abstracts and whole texts.

Inclusion and exclusion criteria.

Following the above-mentioned criteria, full texts that were reported within 20 years were purposely selected due to the availability of a limited number of accessible resources to retrieve the literature. In relation to the year of publication, the search action was conducted with the use of online databases. As the main sources of data, Google Scholar, JSTOR and Elsevier were used. The ResearchGate database was also used for the search of resources.

The comprehensive search resources were completed based on a wide range of key terms and phrases including “values”, “personal values”, “learning approaches”, “learning communities” and “learning approaches—academic achievement and value education”. However, similar terms that are often used interchangeably in the literature were also used. In particular, with regards to the concepts of personal values and value education, they have also been searched through the terms “humanistic values”, “soft skills”, “social skills” and “moral education”.

As the search action resulted in a limited number of appropriate and accessible sources, the reference section of the found texts were studied in the search for more relevant texts. After the exclusion of sources that did not satisfy the criteria in Table 3 , 38 texts were selected for analysis. The content of the selected resources was studied and analysed in detail. Then, the required data were organized under four main themes following the study objectives.

4.1. Objective 1: To Investigate the Role of Students’ Personal Values in Their Choice of Learning Approaches

In the most general sense, approaches to learning describe what a student does when he/she is learning and why he/she should do it. In other words, it is the way that students perceive and value the learning process and how they behave during the process. As suggested by the aforementioned facts and information, education correlates with personal values. Hence, a considerable number of educational studies have been carried out to examine the composition and structure of personal values and their relationships with learning approaches. Values are considered to be precursors as well as predictors of behaviour [ 3 ]. In the same way, studies have proven that a tendency towards certain types of behaviours depends strongly on the structure of one’s values. Conversely, learning can be seen as a type of individual-specific behavioural pattern. In that respect, it is justifiable to accept that there is a relationship between personal values and the learning approaches of students. In addition, the values are believed to be influenced by background factors such as religion, culture, political factors, age and many others. Assuming that they also definitely influence in preference of a student’s learning approach, research into learning approaches has focused on a variety of backgrounds. According to Lietz and Matthews [ 27 ], research studies have focused on studying the differences in choice of learning approach and personal values relationships depending on gender, discipline area of study, prior performance and the experiences of students, especially the students who undertake higher education in another country. With regards to personal values, researchers in this context have confirmed that values are correlated with different learning approaches.

The influence of personal values on life goals are better described as follows: “values refer to desirable goals that motivate action” [ 19 ]. Wilding and Andrew’s [ 43 ] study results of “Life goals, approaches to study and performance in an undergraduate cohort” can be discussed taking that as the ground. According to them, the deep approach and the surface approach are the two main approaches to studying that have been distinguished by several researchers. In addition, an achieving or strategic approach employs either deep or surface strategies, depending on the demands of the task. The research aimed to investigate factors contributing to the choice of the preferred study approach at university and relations between these factors and academic performance. Based on the results, as the researchers state, this study has shown that approaches to study are related to wider attitudes to life or the general life goals and relations were found to be consistent with the deep approach being associated with altruistic life goals and the surface approach being associated with wealth and status life goals. The achieving approach was related to both types of life goal, but more strongly to wealth and status life goals.

The most frequently referred research of Matthews [ 3 ] on sojourner students in Australia has found interesting relationships between values and learning approaches. From the three pairs of canonical variables that emerged out of the analysis the first pair of variables illustrated that students with clearly defined value structure had equally well-defined learning motivations and strategies. The second pair of variables showed that students who had low integrity values showed a higher preference for surface or superficial learning. In contrast, the third pair of variables indicated that students who had a lesser emphasis on values associated with the Confucian ethos showed a strong preference for the deep strategy [ 3 ].

In the study of “Values and Learning approaches of students at an international University”, Matthews, Lietz and Darmawan [ 3 ] relate the ten values postulated by Schwartz et al. [ 18 ] to Biggs’ [ 29 ] six subscales and the relationships between values and approaches to learning has been estimated by canonical correlation analysis. It has revealed that values can be linked to learning approaches even in a situation where students have left their home countries to undertake tertiary studies in a new social, cultural and educational environment. There, the results have been interpreted to the higher-order values: self-aggrandisement, conservatism, self-directedness and benevolent change, which were initially termed as self-enhancement, self-transcendence, openness to change and conservation, respectively, as proposed by Schwartz [ 18 ]. Four distinct pairings between values and learning approaches were established: (a) self-aggrandisement (Achievement and power values) is linked to the achievement learning approach, (b) conservatism (universalism and benevolence values) relates to the surface learning approach, (c) self-directedness (self-direction and stimulation values) is linked to the deep learning approach and (d) benevolent change (conformity, tradition and security values) is related to the learning strategies variables were emerged as the results.

In terms of the main research question, the impact of students’ personal values on learning approaches and changes in them over time of Lietz and Matthews [ 27 ] longitudinal study on “The Effects of College Students’ Personal Values on Changes in Learning Approaches” has given mixed results. The three-year study results have shown no changes within students in the deep and surface approaches to learning but a significant decline for the achieving approach, particularly for students who previously experienced a more formal teaching authority. As they described, the students who identified to a greater extent with the achievement, hedonism and security values have demonstrated a higher achieving approach to learning at the start of their higher education. Conversely, but in line with expectations, students who valued having fun and a good time more than other students have displayed fewer characteristics of the achieving approach to learning. However, none of the personal values were found to influence how the achieving approach to learning changed over time. Based on the research outcome they have concluded that, while personal values appear to explain differences in learning approaches at one point in time they do not seem to contribute to explaining changes in learning approaches over time. In that case, as explained in a similar study by Matthews (2007) [ 3 ] students are likely to change both their personal values and learning approaches due to the influence of the new environment or it may result to pursue their education.

Parallel to the theme of the above studies, Tarabashkina and Lietz [ 10 ] carried out a longitudinal research study on “The impact of values and learning approaches on student achievement: Gender and academic discipline influences” using a cohort of international students who started their three-year Bachelor of Arts or Bachelor of Science degrees in September 2004 at a university in Germany. According to the results, hedonism and achievement were consistently related to the achieving approach over three years, whereas the achievement value probably had a large positive effect on the achieving approach, and hedonism (that is, the tendency to have fun) was negatively related to this approach across all occasions. Hedonism was also consistently and negatively linked to the deep approach throughout all years, whereas self-direction had a positive impact on this approach over a two-year period. Self-direction emerged as a constant predictor of the surface approach, although in the opposite direction to this effect for the deep approach.

Accordingly, the reported literature provides insights that the personal values and learning approaches are two components that occur at the same time with parallel construction. In addition, it establishes the relationship regarding how personal values are linked with different learning approaches and how these interrelationships change over time.

4.2. Objective 2: To Investigate the Impact of Personal Values on One’s Academic Achievement

Personal characteristics such as skills, abilities and values, academic adaptability, concern on learning objectives, decision making, innovation and communication are some of the main features of any valid evaluation criteria. When elaborating on the state of personal values in line with its impact on one’s academic achievement, knowledge as a human-specific activity is in direct relation with the way a person through his values perceives the world, the phenomena and events Daniela et al. [ 2 ]. The values favoured by different individuals can be more or less equal or different. Similarly, within each unique and specific view of the world, each person attributes different values to the same experience or the same value to different experiences [ 4 ]. Accordingly, the existing similarities and differences in values cause much diversity in behaviour. Typically, human beings tend to adapt their values according to the circumstances. In addition, it can be assumed that the values do reflect themselves through all the activities of individuals. Identifying the worth of studying these variations, in addition to exploring the link between values and learning approaches, the relationships between personal values and academic achievement, including the effect of factors such as gender and academic discipline, has been carried out by scholars. As the literature notes, the achievement motive and achievement goal are different in their nature, but they both share a commonality in terms of the role that individuals’ values may play as their underlying antecedents [ 44 ]. The argument is further confirmed citing Kaplan and Maehr [ 45 ], and they contend that individuals’ achievement goals are associated with their values. Similarly, values are considered desirable goals and individuals work hard to pursue them. Hence it is justifiable to say that in the academic setting students personal values or their personal goals substantially influence the academic achievement of the students.

Among the several research studies made to study the impact of values on academic achievements, Bala [ 46 ] discusses the values and adjustment problem of high achievers and low achievers based on a sample of 100 students from two senior secondary schools. There, the researcher has considered values in terms of theoretical, economic, aesthetic, social, political and religious values and adjustments related to social, health and emotional, school and home values. Achieving one of the specific objectives to determine the nature of the values of High and Low achievers, it arrives at several conclusions: (a) Higher achievers are more theoretical and social in comparison to low achievers and they have a dominant interest in knowledge, learning and believe more in kindness, charity and love; (b) High achievers and low achievers are similar as far as religious value is concerned; (c) Low achievers are more economic in comparison to high achievers. They believe more in materialistic life than high achievers; (d) High achievers are more political in their approach in comparison to low achievers; (e) Low achievers are superior on the aesthetic value in comparison to high achievers.

There has been little research to study the effect of a school’s disciplinary climate on improving students’ learning and academic achievement. However, the available past and present research support the view that student learning is immediately affected by the nature of the school’s disciplinary climate [ 4 ] as it controls students’ conduct by restricting the engagement in misbehaviour during school time and, thus, enhance student learning.

According to Ma and Willms [ 47 ], research findings based on a sample of grade 8 students in the US, the two most important disciplinary factors that affect academic achievement pertain to whether students were concerned about class disruptions, the proportion of students who talked to a school counsellor or teacher about disciplinary matters and the effect of the teacher–student relationship. As they revealed, with respect to the effects of indiscipline on academic achievement, the disciplinary measure that had the strongest relationship to academic achievement pertains mainly to classroom disruption. Additionally, they say that the effect of behaviour concern, which is a more traditional indicator of disciplinary climate, was negatively related to academic success. As they have found that students’ indiscipline has a significant detrimental effect on their academic achievement, to improve academic achievement from the perspective of a disciplinary climate, providing an orderly classroom environment has been suggested as a remedy.

Research conducted at the individual level has consistently shown a correlation between low cognitive ability, poor academic performances, learning disabilities, delinquency and particularly the relationship between academic performances and discipline [ 47 ]. In schools where advantaged students are concentrated, there will be fewer discipline problems and higher achievement levels as they completely target academic success rather than other issues, whereas schools serving disadvantaged students will have even worse discipline problems and lower levels of academic achievement. Ma and Willms [ 47 ] support that claim with Hawkins and Lishner [ 48 ], who have framed the relationship between academic performance and discipline as a circular process. School misconduct in the early elementary grades, combined with low ability or learning disabilities, are antecedents of poor academic performance in the late grades; poor academic performance in the late elementary grades leads to a low commitment to educational activities, disaffection toward school and an association with delinquent peers. These factors lead to dropping out or to delinquent behaviour. Value education is another concerned faculty that is gaining much concern in education. The results of a study on students attending character education and some of which did not have shown that the scores of those who underwent character education were higher than the scores of others [ 49 ]. As a whole, according to these authors, schools’ or any other learning community’s disciplinary climate acknowledges that better-behaved students generally are higher academic achievers. On that basis, as highlighted in the aforementioned discussion, if personal values are considered as abstract ideals that guide people’s behaviour, then there should be a correlation between delinquent behavioural patterns, cognitive ability level, academic performance and the personal values of an individual.

Liem et al. [ 44 ] examined the relationships between values, achievement motives, achievement goals and academic achievement among Indonesian high school students. There, in terms of the relationships between values and achievement motives, findings indicate that security and conformity values are positive predictors of the social-oriented achievement motive; self-direction is a positive predictor of the individual-oriented achievement motive, whereas hedonism is a negative predictor of both achievement motive orientations. There is also evidence for the direct effects of values on academic achievement. How personal values influenced students’ learning approaches and in turn, how they related to students’ achievement has been examined several times, and they have resulted in more or less similar results, as in Liem et al. [ 44 ]. Accordingly, Wilding and Andrew [ 43 ], based on their study cohort behaviour, have observed that those with less interest in wealth and status life goals produced better academic results. In other words, the successful students would seem to apply themselves more (or more effectively) to the immediate task rather than wider ambitions. Hence, they concluded the two variables associated with better performance were a self-reported achieving approach to learning, reflecting good organization and a systematic programme of study and a lower emphasis on wealth and status achievement in life. Furthermore, they stress that Biggs’ achievment approach to learning has consistently been shown to be positively related to academic performance, but neither the surface approach nor the deep approach has shown any such consistent relation. In contrast to that, the results of a study on a sample of university students by Tarabashkina and Lietz [ 10 ] showed that specific combinations of values were related to each learning approach and their relationship with the academic achievement of students over three years. In general, certain consistencies of these relationships have been observed throughout the study period. The deep and achieving learning approaches were associated with higher achievement, whereas students who displayed more characteristics of the surface learning approach had lower academic performance. Through statistical analysis, they built up the positive and negative relationships between personal values and learning approach: (a) Achieving learning approach—self-direction, achievement and hedonism; (b) Deep learning approach—self direction and hedonism; (c) Surface learning approach—conformity and self-direction. As they found, if the deep and achieving learning approaches were associated with higher achievement, then it can be assumed that self-direction, achievement and hedonism values are consistently associated with academic achievements, affecting them negatively and/or positively.

Similarly, the research findings of the study on learning approaches of successful students done using freshman students ranked in the top one percent portion in a university placement exam (2013) in Ankara by Beyaztaş & Senemoğlu [ 50 ] were supported with the similar research literature and has shown that students can enhance their level of success by increased use of the deep learning approach and decreased use of the surface approach. Furthermore, references made in Watkins’s [ 51 ] meta-analysis of 60 studies addressing learning approaches and academic achievement found a negative relationship between academic achievement and surface learning approaches in 28 studies, a positive relationship between academic achievement and deep learning approaches in 37 studies and a positive relationship between academic achievement and strategic learning approach in 32 studies. Additionally, in a study by Senemoğlu [ 52 ] a positive and meaningful relationship was found between Turkish and American students’ perceived level of success and learning approaches. This study reported that students who perceived themselves to be successful tended to adopt deep and strategic learning approaches, whereas students who thought they were less successful used surface learning approaches in both countries. According to the outcomes of the above-mentioned research studies, any consistent assumptions cannot be made about the correlation between the effectiveness of the learning approaches and students’ academic achievements or about how learning approaches influence academic performance. As emerged in the previous research literature, students’ learning behaviour along with personal values may change according to the circumstances and, in turn, it makes a direct effect on the students’ academic achievement.

4.3. Objective 3: To Investigate the Importance of Developing Individual’s Personal Values as a Part of Their Academic Life

Education is a combined process in which the advancement of knowledge, development of skills and the acquisition of beliefs and habits progress from an earlier age. Education providers, especially schools, play an important role in helping young people to develop and manage their physical, social and emotional well-being, and to live and work with others in different contexts. Specifically, they are partly responsible for enlightening an individual in both personal and professional areas. In that sense, personal value development is given a prominent place in most of academic interventions since they are considered as the concepts of beliefs that guide behaviours, attitudes and social norms. Education is naturally and inevitably directly related to a person’s goals and values [ 53 ]. The objective of developing an individual’s personal values as a part of academic life has been discussed, mainly concerning the theme of value education in many of the studies. In general value, education occupies an impressive place in contemporary society and school education is the most influential means of developing an individual and the schools are meeting places of value and are also full of values [ 54 ].

Values education itself has been defined simply as a purposive attempt to teach what is good or bad. As Iscan and Senemoglu [ 49 ] define it, values education is an open initiative aimed to provide instruction in values, value development or value actualization. According to the definition underpinning the Value Education Study, Australia [ 55 ], ‘Values education’ is broader and refers to any explicit and/or implicit school-based activity to promote student understanding and knowledge of values and to inculcate the skills and dispositions of students so they can enact particular values as individuals and as members of the wider community. Beena [ 56 ] says that value education given at schools is much concerned with striving for personal wholeness as well as generating a responsible attitude towards others and an understanding of wrong and right behaviour. For Thornberg and Oguz [ 57 ], all kinds of activities in schools in which students learn or develop values and morality are often referred to as values education. It seems that through the value education at school, children are encouraged to explore the powers of good and bad while unconsciously setting appropriate limits to behaviour. In relation to the Schwartz theory of personal values, the school value education promotes the values (benevolence, universalism, tradition, conformity, security) that primarily regulate how one relates socially to others and affects their interests. Security and universalism values are boundary values primarily concerned with others’ interests, but their goals also regulate the pursuit of their own interests [ 19 ]. Particularly, schools being sites for ethical practices, it seems that they focus much on social value development rather than personal development. According to Kunduroglu & Babadogan [ 53 ], that may be because the values students get with values education affect firstly their families and circle of friends, then their acquaintances and at the end, all the community.

As Thornberg and Oguz [ 57 ] emphasize, referring to several studies, value education is accomplished in two distinct ways such as explicit values education (schools’ official curriculum of what and how to teach values and morality, including teachers’ explicit intentions and practices of values education and implicit values education (associated with a hidden curriculum and implicit values, embedded in school and classroom practices). Bergmark [ 54 ] also mentions that schools are full of implicit and explicit values which shape school leaders’, teachers’ and students’ perceptions and actions. Furthermore, Thornberg and Oguz [ 57 ] mention two general approaches to values education as described in the literature. The first is the Traditional Approach: adult transmission of the morals of society through character education, direct teaching, exhortation, and the use of rewards and punishments. The aim is to teach and discipline students to develop good character and virtues (being honest, hardworking, obeying legitimate authority, kind, patriotic and responsible) and to conform to the dominant values, legitimate rules and the authority of society. In contrast, the Progressive or Constructivist Approach emphasises children’s active construction of moral meaning and development of a personal commitment to principles of fairness and concern for the welfare of others through processes of social interaction and moral discourse. Reasoning and explanations, deliberative discussion about moral dilemmas and participation in decision-making processes are viewed as typical methods for this approach. The aim is to promote moral autonomy, rational thinking, moral reasoning skills and democratic values and competence among the students.

Values education has always been a part of the school curriculum in many countries aiming to inculcate religious beliefs, moral values, duties and social responsibilities as the social values are of crucial importance for an individual’s life [ 53 ]. Therefore, the personal value development of students is important as it is beneficial for the individual in academic, professional and social life. Academic development achieved without personal value development is worthless because individuals who are not disciplined find it difficult to survive in the long run of professional and social life. They lack positive qualities such as punctuality, flexibility, the willingness to learn, a friendly nature, an eagerness to help others, sharing and caring and many more. In addition, they do not believe in themselves and others and lack self-confidence, self-efficacy and self-courage, which are considered the main components of personal development. Obviously, educating people on an only cognitive level is incomplete and not functional [ 53 ]. Henceforth, academic growth must be supplemented with personal value development to strengthen the individual to fit in the competitive society and do away with negative behavioural traits. That gives the sense that better personalities yield positive results in academics, social and professional life.

The research study by Iscan and Senemoglu [ 49 ] on the effectiveness of values education curriculum for fourth graders to equip students with the values of “universalism” and “benevolence” on students’ value-related cognitive behaviours, affective characteristics and performances has resulted in important findings. The experimental group of the study has shown higher values-related cognitive behaviour acquisition level and used more expressions reflecting values in the interviews during and after the implementation of the program. Additionally, the experimental group has displayed a larger number of positive value-related behaviours during the study than the control group. In parallel to the particular study, Iscan and Senemoglu [ 49 ] highlight the the importance of value-based educational interventions. As they revealed, exposing students to such experiences may make them aware of moral issues, establish empathy with others and understand their moral values, decreasing bullying and violence. Furthermore, they have made students more tolerant, polite, compassionate and forgiving, and [ 58 ] it has led to positive changes in students’ respect and responsibility levels along with a decrease in unacceptable behaviour. A similar study on “Values Education Program Integrated with the 4th Grade Science and Technology Course’’ [ 53 ] has revealed that at the end of the 6-week intervention period, students in the experimental group improved their perspective on the values, being more open-minded, unbiased and scientific. In addition, they have interrogated values concepts and developed positive behaviours for the relevant values.

As a whole, it proves that value education is an essential component in the general teaching-learning procedure since it highly encourages positive personal quality development and value gain which in turn benefit the whole community, society and the world.

4.4. Objective 4: To Investigate How One’s Personal Value Shape the Learning Community around That Person and Vice-Versa

Definitions for learning communities that have been given by a variety of journals, top universities and educational experts indicate a common set of characteristics. Considering them all together, a learning community can be defined as the same groups of students taking the same subjects or studying in the same class together. In addition, they see and meet each other frequently, share the same learning experiences, work across boundaries, spend a considerable amount of time together and engage in common academic activities in two or more classes as a specific unit. Additionally, they hold common goals, characterize collaboration, peer review and relationship building.

Sometimes the learning community can be the whole class or a group of students. Otherwise, it can be the whole learning institution: a school, university or any other institution where the individuals of the community develop their intellectual and professional skills and abilities while improving socioethical values. In addition, they work collaboratively as a single unit for achieving a set of common academic goals, sharing and bearing all kinds of similarities and differences [ 58 ]. In a more formal sense, according to the literary evidence, developing and implementing an intentional learning community (LC) has emerged as a popular method for improving the quality of the undergraduate experience at a range of higher educational institutions. Learning communities have a long history in higher education, dating from the 1920s when Alexander Meiklejohn introduced the “Experimental College” at the University of Wisconsin [ 59 ].

It is known that, from early ages, pupils are greatly influenced by their peers [ 21 ], and this has been empirically studied. Zhao and Kuh [ 58 ] state that students who actively participate in various out-of-class activities are more likely to connect with an affinity group of peers, which is important for student retention, success and personal development. Peer communities sometimes encourage and sometimes discourage value development as the students encountered different learning activities. Ma and Willms [ 47 ] view peer relationships are associated with delinquency in early adolescence. So, the potential role of peers as an influential factor on others in the process of values formation at the schools has been studied several times. In this respect, the study of Garnier and Stein [ 60 ] confirms that peer groups in which people interact and share norms and goals are another significant matter that affects the personal values of an individual. One important source of values is that of a ‘pivotal’ person: a person observed as displaying values that would produce advantageous benefits for the observer [ 4 ]. In a learning community, there is a possibility of a friend or friends becoming a pivotal person or persons other than the teacher or the instructor. Hence, it is evident that learning communities trigger personal value development through peers, their behaviours and attitudes and all the personal attributes.

To address the above features through the teaching and learning process, different approaches have been taken by the educational practitioners to figure out the best way to teach their students, and many have failed. However, some have succeeded and are still on the ground with alterations and developments. Among them, the cooperative learning strategy has continued to be developed and used by the teachers at all levels. Hence, by exposing students to collaborative or cooperative learning experience, they are encouraged to work together with colleagues to achieve common targets. As the word sense, it is not just group work but a very dynamic strategy [ 61 ] that provides room for students to experience different personalities, to promote social interaction, to identify sociocultural dynamics, to transfer ideas, and to develop group leadership skills among students. Cooperative learning is a teaching practice that breaks students into groups of three to four, with each student having a particular role within the group [ 61 ]. However, collaborative learning goes beyond working together, and it inspires self-management, self-monitoring and self-directed earning while developing a core skill required for employment [ 62 ]. In that sense, when comparing the intended outcomes of collaborative and cooperative learning approaches with the Schwartz’s [ 19 ] categorisation of values, they enhance values such as self-direction, achievement, benevolence and universalism.

Zhao and Kuh [ 58 ] refer to several studies, and according to them, most learning communities incorporate active and collaborative learning activities and promote involvement in complementary academic and social activities that extend beyond the classroom. Such approaches are linked with such positive behaviours such as increased academic effort and outcomes such as promoting openness to diversity, social tolerance and personal and interpersonal development. In parallel to that, Stassen [ 59 ] points out the results of the empirical studies collectively and show that “living-learning communities have a significant positive effect on several student outcomes, including: student gains in autonomy and independence, intellectual dispositions and orientations, and generalized personal development and socialization”. Stassen [ 59 ] mentions that students in learning communities show greater institutional commitment, greater intellectual development and opportunities to analyse and integrate ideas, greater tolerance for difference and appreciation for pluralism and demonstrate higher persistence and academic performance as measured by college grade point average.

Taken together, by taking classes together and/or engaging in peer-to-peer learning as a learning community, students get to know each other better, learn from each other and support each other. Along with that, students experience more social relationships. A connected learning environment increases the potential for academic success while creating more opportunities for students to adapt themselves to the individual needs of each other, to adjust their schedules and to work with diverse groups since learning groups are a mixture of different intellectual abilities, academic interests and goals and learning styles. Then again, social relationships established as a result of learning communities will continue through the end of the academic experience and will last even after promoting social harmony. As explained in Schwartz’s [ 1 ], benevolence values provide an internalized motivational base for voluntarily promoting the welfare of others. Equally, conformity values promote prosocial behaviour to avoid negative outcomes for oneself. Hence, both benevolence and conformity values motivate the same helpful act of promoting cooperative and supportive social relations, separately or together. As discussed above the learning communities also directly or indirectly enrich the development of values such as benevolence and conformity in learners, since they support the natural integration of academic life with social life providing opportunities to interact with a variety of individuals. In turn, the learning community will be benefited or disturbed by the certain characteristics of the personal values held by the individual.

5. Discussion & Conclusions

Based on the above literature on the themes of personal values and related directions, it is clear that there is no universally accepted definition for personal values. However, despite the diversity and gaps in the definitions, values and personal values have been viewed basically as the concepts or beliefs which are depicted through behavioural patterns, selections and personal goals. Furthermore, intrinsic and extrinsic factors including family, social and economic background, neighbourhood, religion and education have been identified as the influential factors on value formation and development. Their effect on the life of a person alternate according to the circumstances. Jardim et al. [ 63 ] identified this nature of values as the two main functions: as a motivator (materialist or humanitarian law) or as guidance (personal, social or central). Furthermore, based on the different attributes of values and priorities given to them in different contexts, they have been defined, named and grouped in various ways with more or fewer similarities to each other. However, both Schwartz [ 19 ] and Jardim [ 63 ] explained the similarities of values and value systems. As they state values have a basic universal structure and character which make them to be believed as the judgment of truths. The emphasis given to values in many areas has resulted in a number of theories and frameworks, and they have been used as the theoretical grounds to evaluate the research outcomes. According to the search results of this particular study revealed that Schwatrz theory of personal values has been frequently used in many of the recent education-based research studies in comparison to the other theories.

The study of personal values can provide greater insight into the entirety of human behaviour. Therefore, it has been studied concerning a variety of disciplines including education. Although there are a limited number of educational studies dealing with values, attempting to explore the relationship between personal values and learning approaches, personal values and academic achievement, influence of one’s personal values on learning community and vice versa and value education are important trends that emerged in educational research. Those studies mainly focused on identifying students’ preferred learning approaches at different stages of academic life and underlying values that are likely to influence the preference. In addition, the positive and negative behaviours of the underlying values with the learning approaches over time and the changes were aimed at. When concerned with the learning approaches that are found frequently in studies, the deep, surface, achieving and strategic approaches are prominent. According to Wilding and Andrews [ 43 ], the two main approaches to studying are the deep approach and the surface approach, as distinguished by several researchers. In addition, an achieving or strategic approach employs either deep or surface strategies, depending on the demands of the task. Contrastingly, Matthews et al. [ 3 ] and Lietz and Matthews [ 27 ] cite Biggs [ 29 ], and he has specified three distinct approaches to learning, namely, The Surface, The Deep and The Achieving approaches to learning. The classification of Biggs’ [ 29 ] learning approaches appeared in many of the studies related to personal values, learning approaches and academic achievements. Research by Matthews et al. and Lietz et al. [ 3 , 27 , 37 ] based on personal values and their effect on students’ preference for learning approaches have revealed similar relationships and their changes over time, mainly related to the underlying values along with the other factors. In fact, revealing the correlation among value, learning approach and academic achievement is extremely important for educational practices. However, as they conclude, there is no consistency in those changes, and it has been further revealed that one learning approach is influenced by several value attributes. In general, deep and strategic learning approaches are found to be positively related to the academic achievement of successful students, whereas the surface learning approach is reported with less successful students. Self-direction and achievement values were identified as the most influential in students’ success through the above approaches. Collectively, the above study results offer potential insights that may be useful when designing new academic courses or in any teaching-learning intervention. Furthermore, though personal values are not the sole determinant of educational or career choice, the correct understanding of values is useful in addressing the arising needs and issues in any discipline. Especially to address a wide range of issues relating to schooling and any educational outcomes such as academic achievement, retention, participation, dropping out, discipline and career selection.

With regard to today’s transforming society, value education has identified a crucially important requirement. Both the cognitive and affective domains of a child need to be developed through education. Kunduroglu and Babadogan [ 53 ] stressed that the purpose of education is to furnish students with affective behaviours. Mainly, schools and other educational institutions are the places where students continue their value education process, which begins at home. One of the objectives of values education in schools is to develop a healthy, consistent and balanced personality in students [ 16 ]. In that sense, formal educational interventions are better focused on enhancing the values that children have already started to develop and help children to reflect, understand and implement their own values accordingly. At this point, direct or indirect inclusion of themes such as moral, religious, civic, democratic, national, personal and social goals and issues in the school curricula has been stressed as important. Furthermore, the need of treating value education as a high priority in terms of ensuring the continuity of society and cultural transmission at a personal level also highlighted in many studies. The effectiveness of curricula including value education has been studied several times, and the results revealed the robust links between value education, student disciplinary conduct and academic achievements. Additionally, the consideration given to the respective roles of formal and informal education, learning communities, peers, parents and other institutions and agencies in making sense of values and forming personal values is emphasized in much of the value-education-based research.

Another concept that emerged as important in the dimension of personal values is its close relationship with the learning community and vice versa. The peer group influence on shaping academic behaviour and personal behaviour have long been studied by scholars over different perspectives. Concerning that, many researchers have focused on cooperative/collaborative learning interventions as the means of establishing social relationships and value development.

In general, when analysing the contents of research studies, it was notable that research related to personal values and learning approaches have been the major focus of many scholars in comparison to the other directions. A few studies found online databases discussing the relationship between personal values and academic achievement. Study reports directly focusing on the correlation of personal values and learning community and vice versa and the importance of personal values as a part of academic life are found lacking in online databases. Methodologically, it was found that many of the studies tend to apply mixed method designs and only a few have taken qualitative and quantitative research as their main research method. Other than that, literature-based reports are also available as useful academic resources. In the data collection process, questionnaires and interviews were found as the most commonly used instruments.

The discussion of personal values includes many distinct dimensions and can be approached through numerous perspectives: education, personal and social life, professional world, culture, political, religion and so on. It is realized that focusing only on a part of it cannot result in a holistic study of the concept but still it would be important to understand the depth of the concept. Depending on online resource availability and the time period set for the selection of resources for the current review may have resulted in the exclusion of some valuable research outcomes and directions. However, the comparative analysis based on available literature would probably shed light on the variety of interpretations, findings and research tendencies.

Finally, as the research literature reveals, the insight gained through the results of value-related studies facilitate the clear identification of the role of value in personal life and partly as a deciding factor of academic life. If one is not clear of his or her own values, then he/she is not clear with aims and is ineffective in controlling their life. Hence, further investigation on value-related topics over the wide range of its interrelated dimensions would give a more holistic and profound view of the role of personal values in education.

6. Recommendations

Based on the above discussion, it is apparent that still there is much room for future research studies on the theme of personal values since they affect all the avenues of human life, individually or in common as a group or a community. Conversely, several factors influence personal values and their changes. Therefore, a detailed further examination of the complex interplay of factors influencing personal values and how personal values influence an individual and in common to the whole human community seems to be valuable.

According to the analyses presented in this article, it is implied that the topic of personal values is very much important in the field of education to identify students’ behaviours, life goals and expectations, learning styles and how these change over time. Furthermore, increased attention is given to value education since values are considered as essential social or soft skills that one must acquire and practice in the 21st century world. Therefore, education, regardless of the level of junior, secondary, tertiary or professional, should aim at making human life better not only through professional or economic enhancement but also through social, moral and spiritual strengthening. At present, schools and other educational providers have adopted several co-curricular programmes that uplift values in students, such as peer support systems, community service projects and student action teams. These interventions provide students with opportunities to develop a sense of responsibility, empathy, unity, appreciation of others and their views, lifestyles and cultures and work with others to resolve the problems. These programmes have been recorded with notable achievements. This is a common feature of almost all the educational contexts that ensure values are incorporated into teaching programmes across the key learning areas to develop students’ civic and social skills. Thus, there is a need for a realistic and balanced curriculum in which the programs that inspire the value acquisition and internalisation of socially beneficial skills and behaviours are emphasized. In addition, the integration of such features into the disciplines in the curriculum is also important. Along with that, research studies to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses and the positive and negative aspects of such programmes need to be continued. According to the general and most practiced procedure, during or at the end of the academic experience, cognitive behaviours are always tested, but testing effective behaviours is always neglected. Hence, it is a noteworthy point to mention the importance of assessing processes for the progress of value development in students.

Finally, the current study based on the available literature has shown that students probably tend to adjust their approaches to a specific learning strategy due to several factors: learning environment, subject area, expectations, curriculum, teacher and teaching style, origin and cultural context, gender, religion, etc. Furthermore, there is no significant pattern of selecting learning approaches such as deep, surface or achieving, etc., at different levels of the context of learning. Therefore, deep study into how learning approaches are changed, on what basis and what the most influential motives for such alterations are will be beneficial to understanding students’ learning behaviours. Hence, research studies further investigating such dimensions would probably useful and needed at present and in future.

Author Contributions

Conceptualisation, K.A.A.G.; methodology, D.M.S.C.P.K.D. and K.A.A.G.; formal analysis, D.M.S.C.P.K.D. and S.Y.E.; investigation, D.M.S.C.P.K.D. and K.A.A.G.; resources, K.A.A.G.; writing—original draft preparation, D.M.S.C.P.K.D.; writing—review and editing, K.A.A.G.; supervision, K.A.A.G. and S.Y.E.; project administration, K.A.A.G. and S.Y.E. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

This research received no external funding.

Institutional Review Board Statement

Not applicable.

Informed Consent Statement

Data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Globalisation and Current Research on Teaching Values Education

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Part of the book series: Globalisation, Comparative Education and Policy Research ((GCEP,volume 20))

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This chapter discusses current and dominant models employed in teaching values education in schools. It offers researchers, teachers and students with an insight as to why values education should be incorporated in classroom teaching. It is suggested that values education, in addition to focusing on moral education, is connected to democracy, active citizenship education, social justice and human rights education. Drawing on current research, various curriculum and pedagogical approaches are offered as to how to improve the effectiveness values education in classroom pedagogy. The chapter concludes that values education to be meaningful, engaging and authentic must involve a greater sense of active citizenship education, social constructivist pedagogy, and more emphasis on cultural diversity, critical thinking and a deeper and critical understanding and knowledge of democracy, equality, human rights and social justice for all.

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Zajda, J. (2020). Globalisation and Current Research on Teaching Values Education. In: Zajda, J. (eds) Globalisation, Ideology and Education Reforms. Globalisation, Comparative Education and Policy Research, vol 20. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1743-2_7

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Importance of Value Education

• Updated on  
• Jan 18, 2024

What is Value Education? Value-based education emphasizes the personality development of individuals to shape their future and tackle difficult situations with ease. It moulds the children so they get attuned to changing scenarios while handling their social, moral, and democratic duties efficiently. The importance of value education can be understood through its benefits as it develops physical and emotional aspects, teaches mannerisms and develops a sense of brotherhood, instils a spirit of patriotism as well as develops religious tolerance in students. Let’s understand the importance of value education in schools as well as its need and importance in the 21st century.

Here’s our review of the Current Education System of India !

This Blog Includes:

Need and importance of value education, purpose of value education, importance of value education in school, difference between traditional and value education, essay on importance of value education, speech on importance of value education, early age moral and value education, young college students (1st or 2nd-year undergraduates), workshops for adults, student exchange programs, co-curricular activities, how it can be taught & associated teaching methods.

This type of education should not be seen as a separate discipline but as something that should be inherent in the education system. Merely solving problems must not be the aim, the clear reason and motive behind must also be thought of. There are multiple facets to understanding the importance of value education.

Here is why there is an inherent need and importance of value education in the present world:

• It helps in making the right decisions in difficult situations and improving decision-making abilities.
• It teaches students with essential values like kindness, compassion and empathy.
• It awakens curiosity in children developing their values and interests. This further helps in skill development in students.
• It also fosters a sense of brotherhood and patriotism thus helping students become more open-minded and welcoming towards all cultures as well as religions.
• It provides a positive direction to a student’s life as they are taught about the right values and ethics.
• It helps students find their true purpose towards serving society and doing their best to become a better version of themselves.
• With age comes a wide range of responsibilities. This can at times develop a sense of meaninglessness and can lead to a rise in mental health disorders, mid-career crisis and growing discontent with one’s life. Value education aims to somewhat fill the void in people’s lives.
• Moreover, when people study the significance of values in society and their lives, they are more convinced and committed to their goals and passions. This leads to the development of awareness which results in thoughtful and fulfilling decisions. 
• The key importance of value education is highlighted in distinguishing the execution of the act and the significance of its value. It instils a sense of ‘meaning’ behind what one is supposed to do and thus aids in personality development .

In the contemporary world, the importance of value education is multifold. It becomes crucial that is included in a child’s schooling journey and even after that to ensure that they imbibe moral values as well as ethics.

Here are the key purposes of value education:

• To ensure a holistic approach to a child’s personality development in terms of physical, mental, emotional and spiritual aspects
• Inculcation of patriotic spirit as well as the values of a good citizen
• Helping students understand the importance of brotherhood at social national and international levels
• Developing good manners and responsibility and cooperativeness
• Promoting the spirit of curiosity and inquisitiveness towards the orthodox norms
• Teaching students about how to make sound decisions based on moral principles
• Promoting a democratic way of thinking and living
• Imparting students with the significance of tolerance and respect towards different cultures and religious faiths

There is an essential need and importance of value education in school curriculums as it helps students learn the basic fundamental morals they need to become good citizens as well as human beings. Here are the top reasons why value education in school is important:

• Value education can play a significant role in shaping their future and helping them find their right purpose in life.
• Since school paves the foundation for every child’s learning, adding value-based education to the school curriculum can help them learn the most important values right from the start of their academic journey.
• Value education as a discipline in school can also be focused more on learning human values rather than mugging up concepts, formulas and theories for higher scores. Thus, using storytelling in value education can also help students learn the essentials of human values.
• Education would surely be incomplete if it didn’t involve the study of human values that can help every child become a kinder, compassionate and empathetic individual thus nurturing emotional intelligence in every child.

Both traditional, as well as values education, is essential for personal development. Both help us in defining our objectives in life. However, while the former teaches us about scientific, social, and humanistic knowledge, the latter helps to become good humans and citizens. Opposite to traditional education, values education does not differentiate between what happens inside and outside the classroom.

Value Education plays a quintessential role in contributing to the holistic development of children. Without embedding values in our kids, we wouldn’t be able to teach them about good morals, what is right and what is wrong as well as key traits like kindness, empathy and compassion. The need and importance of value education in the 21st century are far more important because of the presence of technology and its harmful use. By teaching children about essential human values, we can equip them with the best digital skills and help them understand the importance of ethical behaviour and cultivating compassion. It provides students with a positive view of life and motivates them to become good human beings, help those in need, respect their community as well as become more responsible and sensible.

Youngsters today move through a gruelling education system that goes on almost unendingly. Right from when parents send them to kindergarten at the tender age of 4 or 5 to completing their graduation, there is a constant barrage of information hurled at them. It is a puzzling task to make sense of this vast amount of unstructured information. On top of that, the bar to perform better than peers and meet expectations is set at a quite high level. This makes a youngster lose their curiosity and creativity under the burden. They know ‘how’ to do something but fail to answer the ‘why’. They spend their whole childhood and young age without discovering the real meaning of education. This is where the importance of value education should be established in their life. It is important in our lives because it develops physical and emotional aspects, teaches mannerisms and develops a sense of brotherhood, instils a spirit of patriotism as well as develops religious tolerance in students. Thus, it is essential to teach value-based education in schools to foster the holistic development of students. Thank you.

Importance of Value Education Slideshare PPT

Types of Value Education

To explore how value education has been incorporated at different levels from primary education, and secondary education to tertiary education, we have explained some of the key phases and types of value education that must be included to ensure the holistic development of a student.

Middle and high school curriculums worldwide including in India contain a course in moral science or value education. However, these courses rarely focus on the development and importance of values in lives but rather on teachable morals and acceptable behaviour. Incorporating some form of value education at the level of early childhood education can be constructive.

Read more at Child Development and Pedagogy

Some universities have attempted to include courses or conduct periodic workshops that teach the importance of value education. There has been an encouraging level of success in terms of students rethinking what their career goals are and increased sensitivity towards others and the environment.

Our Top Read: Higher Education in India

Alarmingly, people who have only been 4 to 5 years into their professional careers start showing signs of job exhaustion, discontent, and frustration. The importance of value education for adults has risen exponentially. Many non-governmental foundations have begun to conduct local workshops so that individuals can deal with their issues and manage such questions in a better way.

Recommended Read: Adult Education

It is yet another way of inculcating a spirit of kinship amongst students. Not only do student exchange programs help explore an array of cultures but also help in understanding the education system of countries.

Quick Read: Scholarships for Indian Students to Study Abroad

Imparting value education through co-curricular activities in school enhances the physical, mental, and disciplinary values among children. Furthermore, puppetry , music, and creative writing also aid in overall development.

Check Out: Drama and Art in Education

The concept of teaching values has been overly debated for centuries. Disagreements have taken place over whether value education should be explicitly taught because of the mountainous necessity or whether it should be implicitly incorporated into the teaching process. An important point to note is that classes or courses may not be successful in teaching values but they can teach the importance of value education. It can help students in exploring their inner passions and interests and work towards them. Teachers can assist students in explaining the nature of values and why it is crucial to work towards them. The placement of this class/course, if there is to be one, is still under fierce debate. 

Value education is the process through which an individual develops abilities, attitudes, values as well as other forms of behaviour of positive values depending on the society he lives in.

Every individual needs to ensure a holistic approach to their personality development in physical, mental, social and moral aspects. It provides a positive direction to the students to shape their future, helping them become more responsible and sensible and comprehending the purpose of their lives.

Values are extremely important because they help us grow and develop and guide our beliefs, attitudes and behaviour. Our values are reflected in our decision-making and help us find our true purpose in life and become responsible and developed individuals.

The importance of value education at various stages in one’s life has increased with the running pace and complexities of life. It is becoming difficult every day for youngsters to choose their longing and pursue careers of their choice. In this demanding phase, let our Leverage Edu experts guide you in following the career path you have always wanted to explore by choosing an ideal course and taking the first step to your dream career .

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Your Article is awesome. It’s very helpful to know the value of education and the importance of value education. Thank you for sharing.

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Value education is the most important thing because they help us grow and develop and guide our beliefs, attitudes and behaviour. Thank you for sharing.

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Best blog. well explained. Thank you for sharing keep sharing.

Thanks.. For.. The Education value topic.. With.. This.. Essay. I.. Scored.. Good. Mark’s.. In.. My. Exam thanks a lot..

Your Article is Very nice.It is Very helpful for me to know the value of Education and its importance…Thanks for sharing your thoughts about education…Thank you ……

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Home  >  News & Articles  >  Importance of Value Education: Aim, Types, Purpose, Methods

Samiksha Gupta

Updated on 06th January, 2023 , 8 min read

Importance of Value Education: Aim, Types, Purpose, Methods

Importance of value education overview.

Value-based education places an emphasis on helping students develop their personalities so they can shape their future and deal with challenges with ease. It shapes children to effectively carry out their social, moral, and democratic responsibilities while becoming sensitive to changing circumstances. The importance of value education can be understood by looking at its advantages in terms of how it helps students grow physically and emotionally, teaches manners and fosters a sense of brotherhood, fosters a sense of patriotism, and fosters religious tolerance. 

What is Value Education?

"Value education" is the process through which people impart moral ideals to one another. Powney et al. define it as an action that can occur in any human organization. During this time, people are assisted by others, who may be older, in a condition they experience in order to make explicit our ethics, assess the effectiveness of these values and associated behaviors for their own and others' long-term well-being, and reflect on and acquire other values and behaviors that they recognize as being more effective for their own and others' long-term well-being. There is a distinction to be made between literacy and education.

Goals of Importance of Value Education

This notion refers to the educational process of instilling moral norms in order to foster more peaceful and democratic communities. Values education, therefore, encourages tolerance and understanding beyond our political, cultural, and religious differences, with a specific emphasis on the defense of human rights, the protection of ethnic minorities and vulnerable groups, and environmental conservation.

Importance of Value Education

Value education ought to be integrated into the educational process rather than being considered a separate academic field. The value of value education can be understood from many angles. The following are some reasons why value education is essential in the modern world-

• It aids in making the right choices in challenging circumstances, enhancing decision-making skills.
• It cultivates important values in students, such as kindness, compassion, and empathy.
• Children's curiosity is sparked, their values and interests are developed, and this further aids in students' skill development.
• Additionally, it promotes a sense of brotherhood and patriotism, which helps students become more accepting of all cultures and religions.
• Due to the fact that they are taught about the proper values and ethics, it gives students' lives a positive direction.
• It aids students in discovering their true calling in life—one that involves giving back to society and striving to improve themselves.
• A wide range of responsibilities come with getting older. Occasionally, this can create a sense of meaninglessness, which increases the risk of mental health disorders, midlife crises, and growing dissatisfaction with one's life. Value education seeks to fill a void in peoples' lives in some small way.
• Additionally, people are more convinced and dedicated to their goals and passions when they learn about the importance of values in society and their own lives. This causes the emergence of awareness, which then produces deliberate and fruitful decisions. 
• The critical role of value in highlighting the execution of the act and the significance of its value, education is highlighted. It instils a sense of ‘meaning' behind what one is supposed to do and thus aids in personality development.

Also read more National Education Day and Women's Education in India .

Purpose of value education.

Value education is significant on many levels in the modern world. It is essential to ensure that moral and ethical values are instilled in children throughout their educational journey and even after.

The main goals of value education are as follows:

• To make sure that a child's personality development is approached holistically, taking into account their physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual needs
• Instilling a sense of patriotism and good citizenship values
• Educating students about the value of brotherhood at the social, national, and global levels
• Fostering politeness, accountability, and cooperation
• Fostering a sense of curiosity and inquiry about orthodox practices
• Teaching students how to make moral decisions and how to make good decisions
• Encouraging a democratic outlook and way of life
• Teaching students the value of tolerance and respect for people of all cultures and religions.

Read more about the Importance of Books  and Distance Education Universities .

Scope of value education.

The scope of value education is as follows- 

• To make a positive contribution to society through good living and trust. 
• Moral education, personality education, ethics, and philosophy have all attempted to accomplish similar goals. 
• Character education in the United States refers to six character education programs in schools that try to teach key values such as friendliness, fairness, and social justice while also influencing students' behavior and attitudes.

Also read more Best Distance Education Institutes .

Types of value education, cultural value.

Cultural values are concerned with what is right and wrong, good and evil, as well as conventions and behavior. Language, ethics, social hierarchy, aesthetics, education, law, economics, philosophy, and many social institutions all reflect cultural values.

Moral Value

Ethical principles include respecting others' and one's own authority, keeping commitments, avoiding unnecessary conflicts with others, avoiding cheating and dishonesty, praising people and making them work, and encouraging others. 

Personal Values

Personal values include whatever a person needs in social interaction. Personal values include beauty, morality, confidence, self-motivation, regularity, ambition, courage, vision, imagination, and so on.

Spiritual Value

Spiritual worth is the greatest moral value. Purity, meditation, yoga, discipline, control, clarity, and devotion to God are examples of spiritual virtues.

Spiritual value education emphasizes self-discipline concepts. satisfaction with self-discipline, absence of wants, general greed, and freedom from seriousness.

Social Value

A person cannot exist in the world unless they communicate with others. People are looking for social values such as love, affection, friendship, noble groups, reference groups, impurity, hospitality, courage, service, justice, freedom, patience, forgiveness, coordination, compassion, tolerance, and so on.

Universal Value

The perception of the human predicament is defined by universal ideals. We identify ourselves with mankind and the universe through universal ideals. Life, joy, fraternity, love, sympathy, service, paradise, truth, and eternity are examples of universal values.

Importance of Value Education in School

The inclusion of value education in school curricula is crucial because it teaches students the fundamental morals they need to develop into good citizens and individuals. Here are the top reasons why valuing education in school is important:

• Their future can be significantly shaped and their ability to discover their true calling in life can be helped by value education.
• Every child's education begins in school, so incorporating value-based education into the curriculum can aid students in learning the most fundamental moral principles from the very beginning of their academic careers.
• Value education can also be taught in schools with a stronger emphasis on teaching human values than memorizing theories, concepts, and formulas to get better grades. The fundamentals of human values can thus be taught to students through the use of storytelling in value education.
• Without the study of human values that can make every child a more kind, compassionate, and empathic person and foster emotional intelligence in every child, education would undoubtedly fall short.

Importance of Value Education in Personal Life

We all understand the value of education in our lives in this competitive world; it plays a crucial part in molding our lives and personalities. Education is critical for obtaining a good position and a career in society; it not only improves our personalities but also advances us psychologically, spiritually, and intellectually. A child's childhood ambitions include becoming a doctor, lawyer, or IAS official. Parents desire to picture their children as doctors, lawyers, or high-ranking officials. This is only achievable if the youngster has a good education. As a result, we may infer that education is extremely essential in our lives and that we must all work hard to obtain it in order to be successful.

How Does Value Education Help in Attaining Life Goals

Education in values is crucial for a person's growth. In many ways, it benefits them. Through value education, you can achieve all of your life goals, and here's how:

• It helps students know how to shape their future and even helps them understand the meaning of life.
• It teaches them how to live their lives in the most advantageous way for both themselves and those around them.
• In addition to helping students understand life's perspective more clearly and live successful lives as responsible citizens, value education also helps students become more and more responsible and sensible.
• Additionally, it aids students in forging solid bonds with their relatives and friends.
• enhances the students' personality and character.
• Value-based education helps students cultivate a positive outlook on life.

What are the types of value education opportunities? 

After understanding the significance of this important topic, the next step is choosing the type that best meets your needs. The teaching of values can start at a young age (in primary school) and continue through higher education and beyond. Understanding the various opportunities available to you will make it easy to find the right fit. 

Early Age Training

Value education is now being taught in many primary, middle, and high schools all over the world. The best way to learn the skills taught in this training is to be taught how important it is from a young age. 

Student Exchange Programs

One of the best ways to teach students about values and foster a sense of responsibility in them is through student exchange or gap year programs. Student exchange programs are another exceptional way to experience various cultures and broaden your understanding of how people behave and function. This is a fantastic chance for first- and second-year undergraduate students.  

Workshops for Adults 

People who are four to five years into their careers frequently show signs of irritation, unhappiness, fatigue, and burnout, which is a worrying statistic worth noting. As a result, the relevance and significance of education for adults is a notion that is currently steadily gaining support within the global community. 

Methods of Teaching Value Education

Teaching value education can be done using a variety of methodologies and techniques. Four of the many are the most frequently used. They are

• Methods used in classroom instruction include direct instruction, group discussions, reading, listening, and other activities.
• This method includes a practical description of the strategies. It is an activity-based method. This practical knowledge improves learning abilities and helps people live practical lives on their own.
• Socialized techniques: These involve the learner participating in real-world activities and encounters that simulate the roles and issues that socialization agents face.
• The incident learning approach enables the examination of a particular event or encounter in the history of a particular group.

Related Articles-

Traditional education vs. value education.

 Both traditional education and values education are important for personal development since they help us establish our life goals. However, although the former educates us about social, scientific, and humanistic knowledge, the latter teaches us how to be decent citizens. In contrast to traditional education, there is no separation between what happens inside and outside the classroom in values education.

Key takeaways

• The discipline of value education is essential to the overall growth and learning of students.  
• You can acquire all the necessary emotional and spiritual tools for use in a variety of situations by realizing its significance. 
• You can apply the lessons over the course of your academic career. Additionally, there are special education options available for a particular age group. 
• One of the best ways to get the most out of your educational experience is to combine the two types of value education training. 
• It's also crucial to remember that value education is a continuous process that extends outside of the classroom.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What are the 5 main values of education.

Ans. There are five fundamental approaches to values education, according to Superka, Ahrens, and Hedstrom (1976): inculcation, moral development, analysis, values clarification, and action learning.

What is value education?

Ans. An individual develops abilities, attitudes, values, and other types of positive behavior depending on the society he lives in through the process of value education.

Why is value education important?

Ans. Every person must ensure a holistic approach to the development of their personality in regard to the physical, mental, social, and moral aspects. It gives the students a constructive direction in which to mold their future, assisting them in growing in maturity and responsibility and in understanding the meaning of life.

Does value education increase emotional intelligence (EQ)?

Ans. Yes, value education has been shown to boost emotional intelligence (particularly when given at a young age). For a variety of personal, academic, and professional opportunities, EQ is a crucial factor that is evaluated.

Will I learn how to socialize better if I study value education?

Ans. Yes, you will. You can develop a fresh perspective on people and groups from various communities and professions with the aid of value education. This aerial perspective of various people is a great way to hone your socialization abilities.

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What Is Education For?

Read an excerpt from a new book by Sir Ken Robinson and Kate Robinson, which calls for redesigning education for the future.

What is education for? As it happens, people differ sharply on this question. It is what is known as an “essentially contested concept.” Like “democracy” and “justice,” “education” means different things to different people. Various factors can contribute to a person’s understanding of the purpose of education, including their background and circumstances. It is also inflected by how they view related issues such as ethnicity, gender, and social class. Still, not having an agreed-upon definition of education doesn’t mean we can’t discuss it or do anything about it.

We just need to be clear on terms. There are a few terms that are often confused or used interchangeably—“learning,” “education,” “training,” and “school”—but there are important differences between them. Learning is the process of acquiring new skills and understanding. Education is an organized system of learning. Training is a type of education that is focused on learning specific skills. A school is a community of learners: a group that comes together to learn with and from each other. It is vital that we differentiate these terms: children love to learn, they do it naturally; many have a hard time with education, and some have big problems with school.

There are many assumptions of compulsory education. One is that young people need to know, understand, and be able to do certain things that they most likely would not if they were left to their own devices. What these things are and how best to ensure students learn them are complicated and often controversial issues. Another assumption is that compulsory education is a preparation for what will come afterward, like getting a good job or going on to higher education.

So, what does it mean to be educated now? Well, I believe that education should expand our consciousness, capabilities, sensitivities, and cultural understanding. It should enlarge our worldview. As we all live in two worlds—the world within you that exists only because you do, and the world around you—the core purpose of education is to enable students to understand both worlds. In today’s climate, there is also a new and urgent challenge: to provide forms of education that engage young people with the global-economic issues of environmental well-being.

This core purpose of education can be broken down into four basic purposes.

Education should enable young people to engage with the world within them as well as the world around them. In Western cultures, there is a firm distinction between the two worlds, between thinking and feeling, objectivity and subjectivity. This distinction is misguided. There is a deep correlation between our experience of the world around us and how we feel. As we explored in the previous chapters, all individuals have unique strengths and weaknesses, outlooks and personalities. Students do not come in standard physical shapes, nor do their abilities and personalities. They all have their own aptitudes and dispositions and different ways of understanding things. Education is therefore deeply personal. It is about cultivating the minds and hearts of living people. Engaging them as individuals is at the heart of raising achievement.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights emphasizes that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,” and that “Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Many of the deepest problems in current systems of education result from losing sight of this basic principle.

Schools should enable students to understand their own cultures and to respect the diversity of others. There are various definitions of culture, but in this context the most appropriate is “the values and forms of behavior that characterize different social groups.” To put it more bluntly, it is “the way we do things around here.” Education is one of the ways that communities pass on their values from one generation to the next. For some, education is a way of preserving a culture against outside influences. For others, it is a way of promoting cultural tolerance. As the world becomes more crowded and connected, it is becoming more complex culturally. Living respectfully with diversity is not just an ethical choice, it is a practical imperative.

There should be three cultural priorities for schools: to help students understand their own cultures, to understand other cultures, and to promote a sense of cultural tolerance and coexistence. The lives of all communities can be hugely enriched by celebrating their own cultures and the practices and traditions of other cultures.

Education should enable students to become economically responsible and independent. This is one of the reasons governments take such a keen interest in education: they know that an educated workforce is essential to creating economic prosperity. Leaders of the Industrial Revolution knew that education was critical to creating the types of workforce they required, too. But the world of work has changed so profoundly since then, and continues to do so at an ever-quickening pace. We know that many of the jobs of previous decades are disappearing and being rapidly replaced by contemporary counterparts. It is almost impossible to predict the direction of advancing technologies, and where they will take us.

How can schools prepare students to navigate this ever-changing economic landscape? They must connect students with their unique talents and interests, dissolve the division between academic and vocational programs, and foster practical partnerships between schools and the world of work, so that young people can experience working environments as part of their education, not simply when it is time for them to enter the labor market.

Education should enable young people to become active and compassionate citizens. We live in densely woven social systems. The benefits we derive from them depend on our working together to sustain them. The empowerment of individuals has to be balanced by practicing the values and responsibilities of collective life, and of democracy in particular. Our freedoms in democratic societies are not automatic. They come from centuries of struggle against tyranny and autocracy and those who foment sectarianism, hatred, and fear. Those struggles are far from over. As John Dewey observed, “Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.”

For a democratic society to function, it depends upon the majority of its people to be active within the democratic process. In many democracies, this is increasingly not the case. Schools should engage students in becoming active, and proactive, democratic participants. An academic civics course will scratch the surface, but to nurture a deeply rooted respect for democracy, it is essential to give young people real-life democratic experiences long before they come of age to vote.

Eight Core Competencies

The conventional curriculum is based on a collection of separate subjects. These are prioritized according to beliefs around the limited understanding of intelligence we discussed in the previous chapter, as well as what is deemed to be important later in life. The idea of “subjects” suggests that each subject, whether mathematics, science, art, or language, stands completely separate from all the other subjects. This is problematic. Mathematics, for example, is not defined only by propositional knowledge; it is a combination of types of knowledge, including concepts, processes, and methods as well as propositional knowledge. This is also true of science, art, and languages, and of all other subjects. It is therefore much more useful to focus on the concept of disciplines rather than subjects.

Disciplines are fluid; they constantly merge and collaborate. In focusing on disciplines rather than subjects we can also explore the concept of interdisciplinary learning. This is a much more holistic approach that mirrors real life more closely—it is rare that activities outside of school are as clearly segregated as conventional curriculums suggest. A journalist writing an article, for example, must be able to call upon skills of conversation, deductive reasoning, literacy, and social sciences. A surgeon must understand the academic concept of the patient’s condition, as well as the practical application of the appropriate procedure. At least, we would certainly hope this is the case should we find ourselves being wheeled into surgery.

The concept of disciplines brings us to a better starting point when planning the curriculum, which is to ask what students should know and be able to do as a result of their education. The four purposes above suggest eight core competencies that, if properly integrated into education, will equip students who leave school to engage in the economic, cultural, social, and personal challenges they will inevitably face in their lives. These competencies are curiosity, creativity, criticism, communication, collaboration, compassion, composure, and citizenship. Rather than be triggered by age, they should be interwoven from the beginning of a student’s educational journey and nurtured throughout.

From Imagine If: Creating a Future for Us All by Sir Ken Robinson, Ph.D and Kate Robinson, published by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2022 by the Estate of Sir Kenneth Robinson and Kate Robinson.

BU Hub Turns Six—and It’s More Important Than Ever

With workers frequently changing jobs and careers, faculty and students reflect on the value and challenges of boston university’s groundbreaking general-education curriculum.

Students in the History of Boston University summer 2021 Hub course taught by Daryl Healea (STH’01, Wheelock’11) (far left) about to embark on a walking tour around Boston to view historical BU locations. Photo by Jake Belcher

Alene Bouranova

Modern Greek Culture and Film. Marine Biology. Introduction to Internet Technologies and Web Programming. History of Boston University. Political Economy in China. Ceramics I. 

These are just a selection of the nearly 2,000 classes that qualify for the Boston University Hub , BU’s general-education undergraduate program for all BU undergraduates. 

With the days of employees staying with one company for decades, or even a lifetime, long gone , and less than 30 percent of college graduates working in the same field they majored in, experts say it’s more important than ever that workers carry a diverse skill set that’s easily transferable between companies and career paths. Today’s average worker will have 12 jobs in their life, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education .

The Hub, which launched in 2018 and just marked its six-year anniversary, is intended for just this purpose. It’s also marking the inaugural mandatory five-year review period for the first round of Hub courses added to the program.

The Hub combines gen-ed principles—giving students a set of versatile skills they can carry into their careers—with a framework of learning outcomes that can be applied to all fields. That means students have almost limitless options to choose from when meeting their major’s requirements: courses differ widely—from, say, Archaeological Science to Religion and Hip Hop—but that’s precisely what makes the program a standout among higher education institutions. 

“When I participate in higher-ed conferences about general education, staff from other universities are always awed by the scale and ambition of what we’ve accomplished,” says David Carballo , a professor of anthropology, archaeology, and Latin American studies in CAS and former assistant provost for general education. Consider: it’s not uncommon for other universities to have general education offerings of around 100 to 200 courses, Carballo says. 

That doesn’t mean the Hub is without some obstacles. 

Some have complained that the program can be unwieldy and overly complicated. For students who come into BU with no Advanced Placement credits, it can be challenging to fit all 26 Hub requirements into their schedule while also meeting requirements for majors and minors. The same is true for students who switch majors and find themselves with a brand-new set of requirements or for those whose majors don’t have enough overlap with Hub classes. 

But in a time when the American public increasingly questions the value of higher education, ensuring that curricula translate to employment outcomes has never been more vital. For schools with mandatory gen-ed requirements, like BU, the pressure is on to give students the best possible background and skill sets that will help them once they graduate and enter the workforce. 

Hub administrators are aware of its limitations. They’re also mindful of the larger struggles that plague general education, which is why the Hub is so valuable in today’s economic pipeline, Carballo says: “Our ‘big tent’ approach has challenges for sure, but it provides students with just so much choice and flexibility.”

How the Hub works

The Hub requires students to satisfy 26 requirements across six essential capacities: 1) Philosophical, Aesthetic, and Historical Interpretation, 2) Scientific and Social Inquiry, 3) Quantitative Reasoning, 4) Diversity, Civic Engagement, and Global Citizenship, 5) Communication, and 6) Intellectual Toolkit. Each one has subcategories and those subcategories make up the Hub requirements. 

Different courses satisfy different numbers and types of Hub requirements. For example, the course Visual Arts Drawing satisfies both “aesthetic exploration” and “creativity/innovation,” which, respectively, fall under Philosophical, Aesthetic, and Historical Interpretation and Intellectual Toolkit. The Hub structure is laid out here . 

Students are free to choose the courses they want to take. All of BU’s undergraduate schools and colleges offer courses with Hub requirements. Most undergrads are able to satisfy their Hub requirements within 10 to 12 courses, according to the Hub website. Undergraduate transfer students have fewer requirements and meet them within four to five courses.

The Hub also offers a variety of specialty courses , from a two-part introduction to social and racial justice to Cross-College Challenge courses, interdisciplinary electives that put students from different colleges into teams and charge them with solving a real-world problem. And then there are cocurricular courses, or ungraded electives, that focus on a particular Hub area and fulfill one requirement. An example? BU’s Marching Band, which earns members a Hub credit on teamwork and collaboration.

The point of the Hub is to impart a diverse but purposeful knowledge set to students while they earn required credits. The six essential capacities that BU’s General Education Committee settled on blend critical thinking with global and historical awareness, in addition to setting students up with the communication skills they’ll need in the working world.

“Training students to be broad, engaged thinkers, to have transferable skills, and to be good citizens are the three pillars of the program,” Carballo says.

Faculty and the Hub

The Hub isn’t just for students. It also allows flexibility and autonomy for faculty. The Hub isn’t mandatory for professors and lecturers—they have always been free to choose whether or not to participate. Faculty who opt in can incorporate up to three requirements in a course’s curriculum. (Some science labs can fulfill four.) Once a faculty member has a proposed curriculum written out, they submit it to a Hub peer review committee for approval. The committee, comprising fellow faculty members, then reviews and recommends any tweaks.

“What I’ve really appreciated about the Hub is that it requires that we, as instructors, include student-facing explanations for what students are gaining in our courses in terms of knowledge, skills, and habits of mind, rather than only in terms of the class’ content,” says Kathleen Vandenderg , a master lecturer in rhetoric in the College of General Studies and a member of the General Education peer review committee.

Vandenberg teaches two Hub courses in CGS, Rhetoric 103 and Rhetoric 104. Students in those courses can earn three Hub requirements each under the Communication and Intellectual Toolkit capacities (such as “research and information literacy” and “digital multimedia expression”). In naming these student outcomes, Vandenberg says, “we are making salient the many ways in which we understand, interpret, and interact with the past, the present, and the future. And we are identifying different approaches to understanding the world.”

What I’ve really appreciated about the Hub is that it requires that we, as instructors, include student-facing explanations for what students are gaining in our courses in terms of knowledge, skills, and habits of mind, rather than only in terms of the class’ content. Kathleen Vandenderg

“Some students will primarily learn to understand their study and work through data,” she continues, “some through aesthetic experiences, some through the study of primary texts and historical artifacts—these capacities highlight that there are many ways to move through the world intellectually and creatively.” 

The Hub evolves

The Hub was designed to constantly evolve, says Lynn O’Brien Hallstein , a CGS professor of rhetoric and current assistant provost for general education. 

“The Hub has always been very mindful of responding to student needs,” O’Brien Hallstein says, “in addition to developing new and exciting ways that make it easier for students to earn their requirements.” She says she and her team regularly check in with academic advisors at the schools and colleges, as well as consulting BU Student Government for feedback. 

One recurring request from students: “pathways” of curated courses to follow in the Hub. That prompted two curricular pathways for students: social and racial justice and environment and society. 

And nothing is set in stone. When the Gen-Ed Committee was established, it built mandatory five-year reviews for Hub courses into the charter. The fall 2023 semester marked the first review. There were 641 courses to review, O’Brien Hallstein says. She and the peer review committee asked faculty members to reflect on their courses and identify what did and didn’t work, and whether or not to change the Hub requirements their course is associated with. 

“We really are trying to build in best practices and give faculty the opportunity to think about how a course is working for them, their students, and for major requirements,” O’Brien Hallstein says.

While that can involve a lot of paperwork, faculty say the Hub framework prods them to be better educators.

“Developing a good class that meets the needs of our learners isn’t a given—just because we may be experts in our field doesn’t make us pedagogical experts,” says Sophie Godley (SPH’17), director of undergraduate education in the School of Public Health and a clinical associate professor. “The Hub pushes all of us at BU to be better, and that is a gift to our community.”

Godley teaches several Hub courses, including the Social and Racial Justice advocacy specialty courses. The Hub helps keep her curricula on track, Godley says. “A challenge for anyone teaching in 2024 is the sheer volume of information, knowledge, research, and change that we all—students and faculty alike—encounter on a daily basis,” she says.

“In a field like mine, and with the variety of courses that I am privileged to teach at BU, narrowing down topics, ideas, theories, skills is an ongoing challenge, so that I don’t end up fire-hosing information in class. The Hub capacities allow me to refine and focus my goals, and I appreciate the opportunity to be clear with myself and my students about where we are headed over the course of our time together.”

Students and the Hub

Of course, the real indicator of success is what students have to say about the Hub. For the expected grumblings about having to take required classes, the Hub is largely designed to meet students where they are. 

Transfer student Tabitha Fortner (CAS’24) came to BU after spending a year at Bentley University. She was able to meet all of her Hub requirements through the courses required for her psychology major and economics minor.

As a transfer, “BU made it easy for me to fulfill my requirements, 100 percent,” Fortner says. “Psychology is just enough hard science and econ is just enough math—I didn’t have to take anything outside of my major or minor to cover all of the Hub units.”

Students do sometimes have to go out of their way to meet requirements. In that case, the hope is that they at least get something valuable from a course.

As a senior, recent grad Bernice Li (Questrom’24) says, she tried and failed to get into The Mind, Brain, and Self, a Hub course she’d wanted to take since freshman year. “There’s often only one section available for some of the more popular Hub courses,” Li says. Instead, she ended up signing up for Introduction to Communication Writing. 

The College of Communication course wasn’t exactly on the business administration major’s radar, but Li says she walked away from it with a tangible skill that should be an asset in the job market. “It definitely helped me improve my technical writing skills,” she says. 

In that vein, the Hub can give students a chance to explore disciplines that they may not otherwise experience.

Alum Rebeckah Muratore (Sargent’22, SPH’22) came to BU on a premed track. Then she signed up for the Hub’s Cross-College Challenge pilot. 

“The experience completely changed my career trajectory,” Muratore says. 

The course charged students with analyzing the proposed merger of the Beth Israel Deaconess and Lahey Health hospital systems. Not only did the class push Muratore to think independently, she says, but it marked her first hands-on exposure to health policy.

“The class introduced me to the importance and excitement of analyzing real-time health policy,” she says. And winning the course’s challenge with her team “gave me the confidence to switch majors and apply to a master’s of public health program to continue that kind of work.”

Now? Muratore has her master’s and works as a health policy analyst at a Bay Area–based data analytics company. 

General education, in general

Sure, keeping track of almost 2,000 courses can be a monumental task. As can making sure students check all of their Hub boxes before they graduate.

But both Carballo and O’Brien Hallstein swear by the importance of general education at BU. 

First and foremost, they hope that the Hub’s breadth helps prepare students for today’s job market.

“We know that not everyone is going to be working in their major after they graduate,” O’Brien Hallstein says. “Folks need to be nimble and ready to change. That’s one of the real strengths of the program—the way that general education prepares students for what we know happens after Commencement.”

But more than anything, Carballo and O’Brien Hallstein say, they hope the Hub creates a generation of lifelong learners. 

“We’re really trying to inculcate in students an engagement in the world,” Carballo says. “If you can find the world interesting, and always find things out there that you want to engage with, life will never be boring. That sort of lifelong learning is a real ethos of the program.

“One way of doing that is not to teach at students, but to make transparent to them the goals for a course, and how they’re going to get there. Showing students those connections, we hope, will keep them interested in the world for the rest of their lives.”

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Alene Bouranova is a Pacific Northwest native and a BU alum (COM’16). After earning a BS in journalism, she spent four years at Boston magazine writing, copyediting, and managing production for all publications. These days, she covers campus happenings, current events, and more for BU Today . Fun fact: she’s still using her Terrier card from 2013. When she’s not writing about campus, she’s trying to lose her Terrier card so BU will give her a new one. She lives in Cambridge with her plants. Profile

Alene Bouranova can be reached at [email protected]

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Is College Worth It?

2. public views on the value of a college degree, table of contents.

• Labor force trends and economic outcomes for young adults
• Economic outcomes for young men
• Economic outcomes for young women
• Wealth trends for households headed by a young adult
• The importance of a four-year college degree
• Getting a high-paying job without a college degree
• Do Americans think their education prepared them for the workplace?
• Is college worth the cost?
• Acknowledgments
• The American Trends Panel survey methodology
• Current Population Survey methodology
• Survey of Consumer Finances methodology

We asked Americans what they think about the value of a four-year college degree from a few different angles:

• Is a degree important in order for someone to get a well-paying job in today’s economy?
• Has the value of a degree changed in recent decades?
• Can someone without a degree get a well-paying job?
• How useful do people think their own education was in preparing them for a well-paying job?
• Is the cost of college worth it today?

Four-in-ten Americans say it is not too or not at all important to have a four-year college degree in order to get a well-paying job in today’s economy.

Only 25% say it’s extremely or very important to have a college degree, and 35% say it’s somewhat important.

We also asked the public about the importance of a college degree now versus 20 years ago.

About half of Americans (49%) say it’s less important today than it was in the past for someone to have a four-year degree in order to get a well-paying job. About a third (32%) say having a degree is more important now, and 17% say its importance hasn’t really changed.

Differences by party

Half of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents – compared with 30% of Democrats and Democratic leaners – say it’s not too or not at all important to have a four-year college degree to get a well-paying job.

And a majority of Republicans (57%) say having a degree is less important today than it was 20 years ago; 43% of Democrats say the same.

These partisan gaps hold even after controlling for differences in the educational attainment of Republicans and Democrats.

Differences by education

College graduates are more likely than those with less education to say that having a college degree is extremely or very important (30% vs. 22%).

But views on whether having a college degree is more or less important today than it was 20 years ago don’t differ significantly by education. Roughly half of four-year college graduates (51%) and those with less education (48%) say it’s less important today for someone to have a college degree than it was in the past.

Adults with a postgraduate degree, however, have somewhat different views than those with a bachelor’s degree on both of these measures. Some 35% of postgraduates say it’s extremely or very important to have a four-year college degree in order to get a well-paying job, compared with 27% of those whose highest attainment is a bachelor’s degree.

And 39% of postgraduates – compared with 30% of those with a bachelor’s degree – say it’s more important to have a college degree today than it was 20 years ago.

Differences by age

Young adults stand out in their views on the importance of a college degree today versus in the past.

Among those ages 18 to 29, 44% say having a degree is more important today in order to get a well-paying job than it was 20 years ago. By comparison, 29% of those 30 to 49 and 30% of those 50 and older say the same.

Americans also have mixed views when it comes to whether someone without a four-year college degree could get a well-paying job in today’s economy.

Only about a third (34%) say it’s extremely or very likely that someone withouta four-year degree could get this kind of job.

Nearly half say it’s somewhat likely that someone without a college degree could get a well-paying job, and 20% say it’s not too or not at all likely.

These views differ by:

• Partisanship: 42% of Republicans and 26% of Democrats say it’s extremely or very likely someone without a four-year degree could get a well-paying job. Among Democrats, 25% say it’s not too or not at all likely; just 15% of Republicans say the same.
• Education: 28% of adults with at least a bachelor’s degree say it’s extremely or very likely that someone without a college degree could get a well-paying job today. This compares with 37% of those with some college and 36% of those with a high school diploma or less education.

When thinking about how useful their own education was in giving them the skills and knowledge needed to get a well-paying job, a majority of those with a four-year college degree or more education (58%) say it was extremely or very useful. (This finding excludes the 9% of respondents who said this question did not apply to them.)

Adults with a postgraduate degree are especially likely to say their education was extremely or very useful: 72% say this, compared with 47% of those whose highest attainment is a bachelor’s.

By comparison, adults with less education have more mixed views. Among those who have not completed a bachelor’s degree, 38% say their education was not too or not at all useful in giving them the skills and knowledge needed to get a well-paying job; 35% say it was somewhat useful, and 26% say it was extremely or very useful.

These views don’t differ as substantially by age or by party.

When asked about the cost of college these days, many Americans question whether it’s worth it if a student has to take on debt. Nearly half of adults (47%) say a four-year college degree is worth the cost, but only if someone doesn’t have to take out loans in order to attend.

Only 22% say college is worth the cost even if someone has to take out loans. And 29% say college isn’t worth the cost.

Meanwhile, data from the Federal Reserve shows that more than four-in-ten adults who attended college say they took out student loans for their education .

Views on the value of college differ by partisanship, education and age. But notably, in all groups except for Republicans, pluralities say the cost of college is worth it only if someone doesn’t have to take out loans.

A narrow majority of Democrats (54%) say the cost of getting a four-year college degree is worth it, but only if someone doesn’t have to take out loans. A smaller share of Republicans (41%) say the same.

About one-in-four Democrats (26%), compared with 19% of Republicans, say the cost is worth it even with loans.

Republicans are twice as likely as Democrats to say college is not worth the cost (38% vs. 19%).

Americans with at least a four-year college degree are much more likely than those with less education to say that college is worth the cost even if someone has to take out loans (32% vs. 17%).

Those with a postgraduate degree are among the most likely to express this view: 37% say college is worth the cost even after taking out loans. This compares with 29% among those with a bachelor’s but no postgraduate degree.

Even so, across all education levels, more say a four-year degree is worth the cost only if someone doesn’t take on debt than say it’s worth the cost with debt.

Those with some college or less education are about twice as likely as those with at least a bachelor’s degree to say the cost of getting a degree isn’t worth it at all (35% vs. 18%).

Young adults are more likely than their older counterparts to say the cost of a degree is worth it only if someone doesn’t take out loans: 55% of those ages 18 to 29 say this, compared with 48% of those 30 to 49 and 44% of those 50 and older.

And 18- to 29-year-olds are less likely to say the cost isn’t worth it at all (22% vs. roughly three-in-ten among older age groups).

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Half of Latinas Say Hispanic Women’s Situation Has Improved in the Past Decade and Expect More Gains

From businesses and banks to colleges and churches: americans’ views of u.s. institutions, fewer young men are in college, especially at 4-year schools, key facts about u.s. latinos with graduate degrees, private, selective colleges are most likely to use race, ethnicity as a factor in admissions decisions, most popular, report materials.

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Is college worth it? Here’s what this national study says

As economic outcomes have improved for young americans with and without college degrees in the past decade, pew research center finds perceived value of college is a mixed bag.

By Marjorie Cortez

Just 1 in 4 American adults say it’s extremely or very important to have a four-year college degree to get a well-paying job in today’s economy.

Nearly one-third of U.S. adults say the cost of college is not worth it if someone has to take out loans.

These were just two of the findings of a Pew Research Center study that queried more than 5,200 U.S. adults on their views of the value of a college degree. The survey had a 2.1% margin of error.

The online survey, conducted Nov. 27 to Dec. 3, 2023, revealed stark differences in perceptions depending upon political affiliation.

According to survey results made public on Thursday, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are more likely than Democrats and Democratic leaners to say it’s not too or not at all important to have a four-year college degree in order to get a well-paying job, which was the perception of half of the Republican and 30% of Democrats who responded to the survey.

The survey also found that it is “extremely or very likely” that someone without a four-year college degree can get a well-paying job. Forty-two percent of Republican and Republican-leaning independents agreed with that perception, as did 26% of Democrats and Democratic leaners.

Geoffrey Landward, Utah’s new Commissioner of Higher Education, during his recent confirmation hearing before a committee of the Utah Senate, extolled the “demonstrated benefits” of higher education.

“I believe that at no other time in higher education’s history have we faced such an existential crisis that higher education, long viewed as a pillar of American society and exceptionalism, is now viewed with distrust and it’s value doubted, all contrary to objective data,” Landward said.

“There isn’t a single person in this state who would not benefit from earning a certificate or degree from one of our institutions. Completion of a post-secondary credential is as valuable as ever. Postsecondary education remains strongly correlated with increased job security, lifetime earnings, civic engagement and personal health and happiness,” he said.

Rising earnings over the past decade — for those with and without college degrees — is another factor that has influenced perceptions of the value of a college degree, according to the report.

“After decades of falling wages, young U.S. workers (ages 25 to 34) without a bachelor’s degree have seen their earnings increase over the past 10 years. Their overall wealth has gone up too, and fewer are living in poverty today,” the report states.

Over the same period, economic outcomes have also improved for young college graduates.

“As a result, the gap in earnings between young adults with and without a college degree has not narrowed,” according to the study.

Survey responses also varied with respect to education attainment.

Thirty percent of college graduates said having a college degree is extremely or very important, compared to 22% of respondents with less education.

The percentage was even higher among postgraduates, with 35% responding that it is extremely or very important to have a four-year college degree in order to get a well-paying job, and 39% saying it’s more important to have a college degree today than it was 20 years ago.

Darin Brush, president of Davis Technical College, said the nation’s strong and stable economy may also play into perceptions about higher education.

“Most of our students have not lived through a period where they had to really compete for work. They only know plentiful job opportunities and that changes as we know. Resilience, in so many ways, depends on your credentials and your skills. Finishing that credential and certificate, finishing that degree we know also leads to greater resilience in the economy and longer and better attachment,” he said.

The college strongly encourages students who earn certificates and credentials to further their education at Weber State University. A student who trains to become a licensed electrician can earn a handsome living but also obtaining an associate degree would give them the skills they need to start their own successful business, Brush said.

Brush said he is a firm believer in higher education because he knows how earning undergraduate and graduate degrees opened doors in his career.

“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have that. I wouldn’t be in a position to do the work I’m doing if I hadn’t learned about the world and learned some things that you can only get, I fundamentally believe, you can only get through pursuit of a degree,” he said.

Letters to the Editor: Make teachers feel valued by giving them real policymaking power

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To the editor: Paul Thornton’s words honoring teachers were greatly appreciated by me, and probably by most teachers who read his piece. Yes, teachers are mostly underpaid, and many would be encouraged to stay in the profession if they could afford basics such as housing.

However, many people enter the teaching profession knowing that they will likely never earn a better-than-average salary. Salaries for teachers have never been good (because it’s a mostly female occupation?) and probably never will be.

There is one way to improve the profession of teaching while increasing the resources for children without additional tax money.

As it is now, teachers have little or no power when it comes to making decisions regarding instruction, curriculum and classroom resources. For example, few teachers would approve requiring four-year-old transitional kindergartners to take the DIBELS standardized test, as the Los Angeles Unified School District did until recently. Teachers know that enormous amounts of money are wasted in this way every year.

Efforts to empower teachers and parents have largely failed for many reasons. If the state could find a way to put decision-making in the hands of teachers, I suspect we’d see a big improvement in job satisfaction, learning and money for classroom resources.

Linda Mele Johnson, Long Beach

To the editor: I’m a retired teacher after 20 years, and one of the many lessons my students taught me was that learning blossoms from relationships, be it with teachers or peers.

That is what keeps teachers in the classroom despite the countless obstacles. Only another teacher can know how hard a job it is.

We teachers don’t need manufactured superficial gestures, because we get daily satisfaction in ways large and small from our colleagues, our students and their parents. For lucky ones like me, that’s sufficient.

As for affordable housing, perhaps developers could be incentivized to set aside below-market units for new teachers. More and better ideas are needed.

If teacher morale is low, we all pay the price.

Michele Harris Padron, Santa Barbara

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ZGN vs. DECK: Which Stock Is the Better Value Option?

May 29, 2024 — 11:40 am EDT

Written by Zacks Equity Research for Zacks  ->

Investors with an interest in Retail - Apparel and Shoes stocks have likely encountered both Ermenegildo Zegna N.V. (ZGN) and Deckers (DECK). But which of these two companies is the best option for those looking for undervalued stocks? Let's take a closer look.

The best way to find great value stocks is to pair a strong Zacks Rank with an impressive grade in the Value category of our Style Scores system. The Zacks Rank favors stocks with strong earnings estimate revision trends, and our Style Scores highlight companies with specific traits.

Currently, Ermenegildo Zegna N.V. has a Zacks Rank of #2 (Buy), while Deckers has a Zacks Rank of #3 (Hold). This system places an emphasis on companies that have seen positive earnings estimate revisions, so investors should feel comfortable knowing that ZGN is likely seeing its earnings outlook improve to a greater extent. However, value investors will care about much more than just this.

Value investors are also interested in a number of tried-and-true valuation metrics that help show when a company is undervalued at its current share price levels.

Our Value category grades stocks based on a number of key metrics, including the tried-and-true P/E ratio, the P/S ratio, earnings yield, and cash flow per share, as well as a variety of other fundamentals that value investors frequently use.

ZGN currently has a forward P/E ratio of 24.37, while DECK has a forward P/E of 35.57. We also note that ZGN has a PEG ratio of 2.18. This popular figure is similar to the widely-used P/E ratio, but the PEG ratio also considers a company's expected EPS growth rate. DECK currently has a PEG ratio of 3.64.

Another notable valuation metric for ZGN is its P/B ratio of 5.17. The P/B ratio is used to compare a stock's market value with its book value, which is defined as total assets minus total liabilities. For comparison, DECK has a P/B of 13.14.

Based on these metrics and many more, ZGN holds a Value grade of B, while DECK has a Value grade of C.

ZGN stands above DECK thanks to its solid earnings outlook, and based on these valuation figures, we also feel that ZGN is the superior value option right now.

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