“Now, here, my dear Glaucon, is the whole risk for a human being … And on this account each of us must, to the neglect of other studies, above all see to it that he is a seeker and a student of that study by which he might be able to learn and find out who will give him the capacity and the knowledge to distinguish the good and the bad life, and so everywhere and always choose the better from among those that are possible… .”

Socrates in Plato’s Republic

Some things in life we learn as we go. We call this experience. Other things we acquire, either through our own effort and reflection, (like a guru, a mentor, or a teacher who happens to know more, and, for one reason or another, chooses to help us in our way. This latter is one important phenomenon, often referred to as education. Education comprises a number of different elements all moving towards the same objective, which, in the words of a very old educator, Socrates, is “the conversion of the soul, in the readiest way; not to put the power of sight into the soul’s eye, which already has it, but to ensure that, instead of looking in the wrong direction, it is turned the way it ought to be.” Ever since the days of Socrates, going through Rousseau and Kant, and up to the present, the importance of education was outlined in rather a striking way by those eminent thinkers who could not conceive of any society, be it utopian or not, without placing the issue of education on the top of their list. They all felt that at the heart of society lies some form of a first generation that needs to be educated, that ought to look in the right direction. Of course, all this seems too normative. But let us go back to Socrates.

Almost 2500 years ago, the Athenians did a strange thing. They sentenced their great philosopher to death by poison. Socrates was known for walking in the Athenian Agora, talking to the people he encountered, asking them questions and leaving them wondering about whether they really know what they thought they knew. Accused of corrupting the youth of Athens, he was ultimately sentenced to death and put an end to his days by drinking the hemlock.

Socrates was not guilty of indoctrinating or preparing the young Athenians to revolt against the then ruling thirty tyrants. He was guilty because of his dialectic that was dangerous precisely because it influenced the youth through its highly normative and profound message: “Know Thyself” and his constant call: “the unexamined life is not worth living”. Almost 4000 years later, the German philosopher Nietzsche accused Socrates of agitating the Greek society by wanting to conquer the Dionysian (representing disruption and change) over the Apollonian (representing stability, continuity), but what Nietzsche perhaps failed to estimate was the fact that the Socratic dialectic was needed to challenge the then prevalent ideas and values, to renovate them if and when necessary. Dynamic change is a condition of growth; and at the basis of a healthy change, there need be a healthy education.

Socrates taught us, perhaps indirectly, that education is far more than instruction and mental discipline. It is also about devotion to virtue and consideration for others which, if practiced in the affairs of daily life, will create a maturing vision of reality.

These days, and unfortunately in more than just one area of our lives, the cleavage between theory and practice is becoming ubiquitous and all too familiar. Idealism became a nuisance, a form of pestilence characteristic of dreamers and visionaries; while realism; even crude realism and pragmatism, became a virtue, a mark of prudence and rationality. But since when does rationality exclude visions and ideals? In the midst of this pandemonium, we are faced with what might be viewed as a moral obligation to try to bridge theory and practice and come up with the tools necessary for the shaping of a person who has a healthy conception of herself and of others as similarly conceived. This is where teaching values in education comes in.

Ideally, schools and institutions of higher education are like Ivory Towers where young individuals acquire the disciplines and the proficiency that will empower and prepare them for a sound confrontation with the outside world, a world we are all doomed to inescapably dwell in. Ideally also, schools ought to perform an important role in the making and shaping of good individuals, and, as the philosopher Kant very well put it, “our idea [of education] must in the first place be correct, and then, notwithstanding all the hindrances that still stand in the way to its realization, it is not at all impossible.” Underlying this is the Kantian vision of the human being as possessing inherent worth and dignity, as having inalienable rights to freedom, autonomy and dignity.

We live in a world of chaos and the question that the teaching body raises is “shouldn’t we as members of a liberal pluralistic society account for all the views and ways of life?” Isn’t this a necessary form of tolerance? Why should we want to change the way things work especially when we are living in a world where ideals and visions do not pay? To this I can only answer that indeed tolerance is a virtue, but that we should know the nature and the consequences of the views we are tolerating. In itself, tolerance is noble, but we should not deceive ourselves into making this a universal rule. If we tolerate evil we are partaking in it, and this is morally wrong. A line should be drawn somewhere and as such, when we commit ourselves to teach values, we should apply a filtering device and reflect on the values we are teaching. Of course, the old question of whether values are relative or absolute forces itself to the scene. But as far as teaching values are concerned, I have in mind the teaching of universal values. Yet, teaching values should not be, in my opinion simply taken for granted as a new wave, something that is “modish”.

Teaching values is a job, a mission so to speak and like any other job, it has a teleological nature to it, an extrinsic value. We are not teaching values for the sake of teaching values. We are teaching values because we want to make our students become better people.

In Some Thoughts Concerning Education, the British philosopher John Locke presented a view of education that aimed at producing the model of a gentleman, a rational morally dependable person, capable of good judgment and adequate action. Locke believed that morals and fine manners are more important than knowledge. Hundreds of years before Locke, Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics argued that character is a matter of potentiality that existed at birth, that can be channeled in different directions and can be molded. Thus, moral traits can be acquired after birth. Virtue is habituation. Here again the role of education is important.

Of course we cannot teach all the values necessary for the making of a good Kantian individual, indeed there is no exhaustive list of values, but we can always find some core values from which other values can spring. Having done that, students can be taught the Kantian Golden Rule (Do to others like you would like others to do to you) which touches on a form of empirical psychological egoism and, perhaps paradoxically so, values that are supposed to shape ways of conduct and modes of judgment will emerge on their own.

Kant said that “a man can only become a man through education. He is nothing more than what education makes him.” When we educate children, we should teach them about the status quo, yet, we have to make them also think of the need to improve the human condition.

Teaching values in education emphasizes the quintessential moral characteristic of education without which it could easily be transformed from virtue to vice, from a tool necessary for the making of a good civil society, to a tool sufficient in itself to destroy one and replace it by yet other thirty tyrants or perhaps more! This is precisely where the role of the educator, particularly concerned with the proper education of the young comes in. Socrates explains the work of midwives, and compares it with his own art whose concern is not with the body, but with the soul that is in travail of birth. As such, the teacher is a catalyst, a midwife, whose aim is not to indoctrinate his/her student, but to orient him/her in the right direction.

When parents put their children in schools, they are entrusting them, ironically like young Athenians but without knowing it, committing their souls to another person, hoping that it be improved in the process. As such, education does not consist of putting knowledge into the soul, like sight into blind eyes, since the soul already has the ability to learn. Education must be the process of liberating the student’s whole being from a level of ignorance and turning him/her by degrees toward what is correct and true and these terms are loaded with moral connotations.

We are all aware of the fact that our world today is plagued by a number of paradoxical socio-political, economical and bioethical issues that are so overwhelming to the extent that talk of the rightness or wrongness of a certain decision or behavior is ignored. However, this does not mean that moral acceptability is an issue that has become itself obsolete. What is needed is to bring it back to the front and give it a chance to play the role it was meant to play. One way of doing that is by actually helping students to make sense of these concerns on their own, to unravel the real reasons behind the positions they make and discover that at the base of everything that is human, lay a number of values, beliefs and moral givens. Thus, the actual curriculum can serve as a framework for such issues from which moral values can surface and be emphasized. Students should be taught the skill of how to make a “reflective judgment” and to make a solid list of the “relevant considerations” before they take a position vis-