ABSTRACT
Given a time-honoured educational concern with the promotion of what is humanly worthwhile, the current obsession with so-called ‘values education’ in the UK and elsewhere (cf. Jarrett 1991; Halstead and Taylor 1996; Best 1996; Haydon 1997) would seem to call for special comment. We might first note that while much of the recent spate of recent official documentation (NCC 1993; Ofsted 1994; SCAA 1995, 1996) seems, on the face of it, to be concerned with a range of values-spiritual, religious, aesthetic, economic, social and so on-the primary focus has undoubtedly been upon the ethical and moral aspects of personal formation. In turn, among the many reasons we might mention for this emphasis are a high level of popular and public concern about lawlessness and social breakdown (fanned by often sensational media coverage of recent appalling, if relatively aberrent, crimes of violence and mayhem), a degree of professional concern about (arguably) recent political preoccupation with the instrumental and economic more than the moral and intrinsic benefits of education, and a more philosophicaltheoretical concern about the very possibility of a coherent basis for moral and civic education in the culturally pluralist contexts which, by and large, characterize most western liberal democratic polities.
