Sustaining What is Valuable: Contours of an Educational Language About Values

Abstract

Making liberal democratic values meaningful to study in schools is a more complex issue than being a question of turning values into explicit educational goals (Schleicher) or of curing a motivational deficit (Critchley). Since values seem to play an important role in the practices and commitments of people's everyday lives, values are calling for a continual refinement of our words in relation to the world (Laverty). The purpose of this article is to offer contours of an educational language about values that acknowledges this refinement and the pedagogical work that teachers might do—by way of language—in order to sustain the living-on of what is valued and valuable to us as individuals and as societies. To this end, the article is divided into two parts. The first part takes the temperature of the current political and educational debates, offering thereby a sociopolitical background to the need of a renewed language about values. Drawing on ordinary language philosophy (Moi, Murdoch and Forsberg) and the idea that there is an intimate relationship between how we look at the world (attention) and the words we use in describing it (language). The second part of the article places the emergence of values in a particular time in history before suggesting a more existential vocabulary about values for the purpose of teaching values in schools.