By Richard A. Baer Jr.
Back in the mid-1960s, social scientists Louis E. Raths, Merrill Harmin and Sidney B. Simon developed the teaching method known as Values Clarification, advertising it as an ideal way to deal with values without taking sides or indoctrinating students in one particular value position. Since “by definition and right . . . values are personal things” (“Values and Teaching,” 1966), teachers should never try to teach children correct values. To tell a student stealing is wrong or that kindness and loyalty are good values, would be, according to Values Clarification, to manipulate and coerce a student. Teachers should help students discover and clarify their own personal values instead of trying to force someone else’s values on them.
Spread by teacher workshops, paid for in part by state and federal tax dollars, Values Clarification caught on quickly in the early 1970s and became popular with many teachers and administrators. Its use in public school sex-education classes and by local Planned Parenthood groups was particularly noteworthy, for whether intended or not, adolescents were in effect given the message that parents, the school or society had no right to tell them what standards should guide sexual behavior. Whether premarital sex was right or wrong, for instance, adolescents would discover for themselves as they were helped to clarify their personal values.
Parents did not react immediately. But when children began to report over dinner that class discussion had been about whether lying was sometimes permissible and whether they should always obey their parents, it wasn’t long before groups of parents began to mobilize against Values Clarification.
Emotions Outstripped Logic
Many of these parents were Christian fundamentalists. Their arguments were not couched in the sophisticated jargon of philosophy or social science, and sometimes emotions outstripped logic. But they left little doubt that they thought Values Clarification was teaching their children a kind of ethical relativism.
Instead of meeting such objections with solid arguments of their own, many educators attacked the objectors, dismissing their criticisms as little more than a reactionary fundamentalist response to education innovation.
This is precisely what happened, for example, in the spring of 1979 in a dispute over Values Clarification in the consolidated school system of Spencer and Van Etten, two small Upstate New York communities not far from Elmira. Supporters of Values Clarification referred early in the conflict to the concerned parents as simplistic, anti-intellectual and opposed to independent thought. One teacher accused them of having ties with national right-wing groups. But what was most embarrassing about this dispute was that it soon became apparent to several outside observers (including myself) that these “anti-intellectual” parents had a better grasp of the philosophical issues involved than the professional educators.
Martin Eger, professor of philosophy and physics at the City University of New York, pointed out in a spring 1981 article in the Public Interest that the climate of trust eroded rapidly after the school at first denied that Values Clarification made up any part of the required curriculum. When it became public knowledge that it did form the basis of at least one required course in vocational decision-making, school authorities still refused to meet in open, mediated dialogue with the protesters. The parents were left with no recourse but to accept the use of Values Clarification—which they thought would violate their consciences—or attempt a political solution by entering their own candidates in school board elections.
The basic complaints of the parents in Spencer-Van Etten and in many similar cases have now been largely substantiated. Over the past seven years, nonfundamentalist scholars from major universities—including professors Kenneth A. Strike of Cornell, Alan L. Lockwood of the University of Wisconsin and John S. Stewart, formerly of Michigan State University—have faulted Values Clarification on at least a dozen counts. The list of critics also includes William J. Bennett, recently appointed by President Reagan as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Edwin J. Delattre, president of St. John’s College in Annapolis. The major objections of these writers are virtually identical with those initially raised by religious fundamentalists and other parents’ groups.
First, contrary to what its proponents claim, Values Clarification is not values-neutral. Even on the level of particular ethical decisons, where the authors try hard to be neutral, they succeed only partially. As Messrs. Bennett and Delattre point out, the approach used in such Values Clarification strategies as Sidney Simon’s “Priorities” “emphatically indoctrinates—by encouraging and even exhorting the student to narcissistic self-gratification.”
And on the deeper level of what philosophers call “metaethics”—that is, critical analysis and theory about the nature of values as such—the claim to neutrality is entirely misleading. At this more basic level, the originators of Values Clarification simply assume that their own subjectivist theory of values is correct. By affirming the complete relativity of all values, they in effect equate values with personal tastes and preferences. If parents object to their children using pot or engaging in premarital sex, the theory behind Values Clarification makes it appropriate for the child to respond, “But that’s just your value judgment. Don’t force it on me.”
Furthermore, Values Clarification indoctrinates students in ethical relativism, for its proponents push their own position on their captive student audiences and never suggest that thoughtful people may choose alternatives. Sidney Simon, Howard Kirschenbaum and other Values Clarification authors repeatedly belittle teachers of traditional values. Such teachers, they claim, “moralize,” “preach,” “manipulate” and “whip the child into line.” Their positions are “rigid” and they rely on “religion and other cultural truisms.”
The second major fault, according to the University of Wisconsin’s Alan Lockwood, is that “a substantial proportion of the content and methods of Values Clarification constitutes a threat to the privacy rights of students and their families.” To be sure, the method permits students to say “I pass” when the teacher asks them to complete such open-ended sentences as “If I had 24 hours to live . . .”, “Secretly I wish . . .” or “My parents are usually . . .” But many of these “projective techniques” are designed in such a fashion, Mr. Lockwood claims, that students often will realize too late that they have divulged more about themselves and their families than they wish or feel is appropriate in a public setting. Moreover, the method itself incorporates pressure toward self-disclosure.
Contradicting the Bible
A third criticism of Values Clarification is that by presupposing very specific views about human nature and society, it becomes a kind of “religious” position in its own right which competes directly with other religious views. For instance, Values Clarification theory consistently presents the individual self as the final arbiter of value truth (individuals must develop their own values “out of personal choices”), and it assumes that the good life is one of self-fulfillment and self-actualization, These positions directly contradict the Biblical view that God is the ultimate lawgiver and that the good life is to be found only in losing oneself in the service of God and of one’s neighbor.
The use of Values Clarification in public schools or even by such quasi-public agencies as Planned Parenthood constitutes a direct violation of First Amendment protection against the establishinent of religion, one at least as objectionable as the attempt by some fundamentalists to require the teaching of creationism in the public schools. Schools that use the method are, probably unwittingly, fostering the establishment of one particular “religion” and by doing so are abusing the rights of those who hold differing positions.
The controversy over Values Clarification tells us something about the quality of public discourse in this country. The educational establishment and the press ought to recognize that there is as much diversity among religious fundamentalists as among Catholics, Jews and liberal Protestants. Gratuitous sniping against blacks, women, Jews, Chicanos and Roman Catholics is no longer tolerated, but somehow fundamentalists who speak out against a development like Value Clarification remain fair game for the worst kinds of prejudicial attack. A bit more fairness is long overdue.
Dr. Baer is an associate professor in the department of natural resources at New York State College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Cornell University.