Combining Values and Knowledge Education

Abstract

Teachers usually say that they would like to do moral and social education and that they would like to teach for autonomy and critical thinking and the like (cf. Patry & Hofmann 1998). In the curricula such goals are also very frequently formulated, although usually in the prefaces and not in the content sections. The parents claim that students should not only learn cognitive content knowledge; rather social learning, civic education and the like should be done as well as values education, although without interfering with the values defended at home. In educational policy and public debates, schools are frequently blamed for not doing social education. The teachers would like to comply. However, there is a gap between what teachers would like to do and what they actually do: the teachers in the study mentioned above said that they teach much less for autonomy and moral development than for subject matters and that dealing with disciplinary issues is more important than they would like. They argue that there is no time for this given the tough program they have to accomplish within rigid time constraints, that there are too many students in class and that they do not know how to teach social learning because they have not been trained for that (Hofmann & Patry 1999). The latter argument is certainly appropriate since in teacher training, typically, students learn little about social and moral education. On the other hand, research has provided few models of social and moral education that teachers could use without inhibiting content knowledge acquisition. Knowledge education and values education are typically seen as antagonists: doing one automatically inhibits doing the other, and it is supposed that the two goals cannot be combined. We want to present here a teaching model that permits just this: the combination of both values and knowledge education in such a way that the students achieve both goals more successfully than if done separately. Briefly said – we will present more details below – the moral dilemma discussion in the tradition of Blatt and Kohlberg (1975) is used not only to trigger a debate on moral issues, but also to initiate a discussion on content, or knowledge, or information on the topic. The concept was prompted by the experience that (a) participants are very motivated by dilemma discussions, but often (b) do not have sufficient knowledge to argue on a high level, but rather (c) are looking for such information. One such experience is the following: a secondary school teacher wanted to do a moral dilemma discussion with his students about the dilemma whether a nuclear