ABSTRACT
Education is very much a value-laden activity; this unit is designed to help you reflect on the values you encounter in your work and the values you yourself bring to it. People’s ideas about the aims of education may, in part, be simply ‘read off ’ from the educational traditions of their own society, which already incorporate certain shared values; and they may be formed through an individual’s own reflection on their personal values. Not surprisingly, then, in a complex society there is room for differences in views about educational aims. Individuals with, for example, different educational and life experiences, different religious beliefs and cultural traditions, and different political tendencies may all differ in their conceptions of the aims of education. In Britain views about the aims of education in the past have remained often more implicit than explicit, but in recent years there has been some conscious attention to aims at government level. Thus what may at first sight seem rather an abstract question – what should the aims of education be? – is in fact an unavoidable part of the context in which you are working as a teacher.
