Values Education: The Missing Link in Quality Teaching and Effective Learning

Educational research of the 1990s and beyond has challenged earlier conceptions concerned with the capacity of teachers, and formal education generally, to make a difference in the lives of students. Decades of apparently experimental research simply served to confirm time and again the view that the destiny of a student was fairly well fixed by heritage and that what was left of impacting agencies related more to issues like peer pressure, media, and disability than to the agencies of teacher and school. Countless studies were conducted by eminent figures such as the revered Talcott Parsons wherein the extent of research merely reinforced his fundamental belief that families were “factories which produce human personality” (Parsons & Bales 1955, p. 16). Against the potency of the family’s formative power, all else paled to insignificance according to the research findings, leading Christopher Jencks to sum up so aptly that “the character of a school’s output depends largely on a single input, namely the characteristics of the entering children” (1972, p. 256).