Springer Values Education and Quality Teaching: The Double Helix Effect

Some revision of public schooling history is necessary to challenge the dominant mythology that public schools were established on the grounds of values-neutrality. In fact, those responsible for the foundations of public education in Australia were sufficiently pragmatic to know that its success relied on its charter being in accord with public sentiment. Part of the pragmatism was in convincing those whose main experience of education had been through some form of church-based education that state-based education was capable of meeting the same ends. Hence, the documents of the 1870s and 1880s that contained the charters of the various state and territory systems witness to a breadth of vision about the scope of education. Beyond the standard goals of literacy and numeracy, education was said to be capable of assuring personal morality for each individual and a suitable citizenry for the soon-to-be new nation. As an instance, the NSW Public Instr- tion Act of 1880 (cf. NSW, 1912), under the rubric of “religious teaching”, stressed the need for students to be inculcated into the values of their society, including understanding the role that religious values had played in forming that society’s legal codes and social ethics. The notion, therefore, that public education is part of a deep and ancient heritage around values neutrality is mistaken and in need of se- ous revision. The evidence suggests that public education’s initial conception was of being the complete educator, not only of young people’s minds but of their inner character as well. From the Back Cover Values Education and Quality Teaching: The Double Helix Effect reports on the results of two of the major projects in the Australian Government’s Values Education Program. These results point to the fact that Values Education can no longer be seen as marginal to the main role of teaching and schooling nor as a venture merely for religious schooling. In contrast, the results show that Values Education sits at the centre of teaching and schooling wherever it occurs. The importance of Values Education is in its potential to re-focus teachers and schools on their essential purpose, namely the holistic betterment of the students in their care.The focus of Values Education coincides with the results of research into student achievement that illustrate the vital role played by relationships of care, trust and respect with teachers if students are to ‘do well’ both academically and more broadly. It picks up on a feature of Quality Teaching research concerned with the creation of the positive and supportive learning ambience. It is a feature that can be overlooked in the concern for technique and craft . Yet research tells us that it is this ambience, and especially the positive relationships that are part and parcel of it, that is one of the essential ingredients in student achievement.Furthermore, research tells us that student achievement is more assured when those values of care, respect and trust that underpin the learning relationship are made explicit in all aspects of teaching and schooling, including in the curriculum. In this sense, Values Education might be described as the ‘other side of the coin’ to Quality Teaching, as its sometimes ‘missing link’or, to borrow from the research fi eld of Genetics, as co-existing with Quality Teaching in a ‘double helix’ relationship. It is this latter description that the authors have chosen as most appropriately describing the results of the studies on which the book reports. About the Author Terry Lovat is Professor of Education and Pro Vice-Chancellor at The University of Newcastle. He is chief investigator on the Australian Government Partnerships Project in Values Education with the Australian Council of Deans of Education, and is a consultant on several other Values Education projects funded by the Australian Government.Ron Toomey is an Adjunct Professor in the Centre for Lifelo