Journal of Moral Education, Vol. 33, No.

2, June 2004

Values education: sustaining the ethical environment

Graham Haydon*
University of London, UK

This article, drawing on philosophical sources, proposes a certain way of seeing the nature and scope of values education: as a matter of sustaining the ethical environment. The idea is introduced that just as we live in a physical environment we also live in an ethical environment, the surrounding climate of ideas about how to live. It is argued that there are some illuminating analogies between our responsibility for the quality of the physical environment and our responsibility for the quality of the ethical environment. Values education, in turn, can be seen as an important way in which we can collectively attend to the quality of the ethical environment; in doing so, we should put positive value on diversity within that environment. This way of seeing values education suggests a way in which teachers can realistically see their own responsibilities for values education.

Introduction In this paper I shall propose a way of thinking about the nature and point of values education which I believe will be fruitful. Somewhat in the spirit of Rorty (1989), I shall suggest that use of a particular vocabulary can offer an alternative to some well-established ways of thinking about values education (and, within that, moral education). If in some respects our ways of thinking about values education have become too familiarif we feel, looking through the journals and books, that we go round in circles, that there is perhaps no position on values education that has not already been worked over many timesthen a different way of thinking, stimulated by the use of a particular vocabulary, may well offer insights that we might otherwise overlook. The vocabulary is one used by the philosopher Simon Blackburn in his introduction to a work on ethics:
We have all learned to become sensitive to the physical environment. We know that we depend upon it, that it is fragile, and that we have the power to ruin it, thereby ruining *School of Educational Foundations and Policy Studies, Institute of Education, University of London, 20 Bedford Way, London WC1V 0AL, UK. Email: G.Haydon@ioe.ac.uk ISSN 0305-7240 print; ISSN 1465-3877 online/04/020115-15 2004 Journal of Moral Education Ltd DOI: 10.1080/0305724042000215186

116

G. Haydon
our own lives, or more probably those of our descendants. Perhaps fewer of us are sensitive to what we might call the moral or ethical environment. This is the surrounding climate of ideas about how to live. (Blackburn, 2001, p. 1)

I am going to suggest that it is the business of values education, including moral education, to attend to the protection and enhancement of the ethical environment.1 There are, of course, various positive ways in which human beings can relate to the physical environment: sometimes it may be best to leave it alone, but we may also exercise our care for it in more active ways. I shall suggest that there is a fruitful analogy to be drawnthough like most analogies it should not be pushed too farbetween the ways that we relate to our physical environment and the ways that we can, partly through values education, relate to our ethical environment. To indicate the fruitfulness of the analogy, I shall consider in the following sections: how the ethical environment can be compared with the physical environment; that just as we can evaluate the quality of the physical environment, so we can evaluate the quality of our ethical environment; that in both cases we can ask where the responsibility lies for the quality of the environment; that in the case of the ethical, as well as the physical environment, we have reason to positively value diversity; that the environmental picture of values education, while it does not indicate a specic model for teachers to follow in the classroom, does suggest a particular way of looking at the responsibility of teachers in the area of values education. The ethical environment and the physical environment The root idea, that we live in an ethical environment, is by no means new, though it has not always been referred to in this vocabulary. Possibly no writer on moral education has ever failed to recognize that the surrounding climate of ideas about how to live is an inuence on the moral development of any individual. There are also other terminologies in which that point can be made. The notion of culture is often relevant here, as is the notion of community. But these notions carry their own baggage, and if we are to gain anything from taking a less familiar perspective, it will be best simply to explore directly, as Blackburn does not do in any detail, the comparison between physical and ethical environments. Writers on environmental matters have sometimes wondered whether it is better to speak of the environment or of many environments. The best answer is probably that we need both ways of speaking. There are clearly many different environments: an Antarctic ice shelf is a very different environment from central London, for instance. But we are also increasingly aware that no one environment is isolated from another: changes in the Southern Ocean can, via ocean currents, affect the climate in northern Europe and emission of carbon dioxide there contributes to global warming which affects the Antarctic. Recognizing interdependencies, we need

Sustaining the ethical environment

117

to be able to talk about the (global) environment. By the same token, we have to recognize that the environment is multifaceted and enormously complex. Climate, for instance, is only one aspect of the environment (so while in casual reference we might equate environment and climate, as Blackburn appears to in the quotation above, it may be better to avoid this). We can also ask whether there is one ethical environment or many. Certainly there are different local environments (a point which communitarianism stresses, in its own terminology), but, as with the physical environment, the chances of any local ethical environment existing in complete isolation in the world today are small (a point stressed by multiculturalists). Does it, given the variations, make sense to talk of the ethical environment? One way of cashing out this idea is in a literal geographical sense. There are at least some ethical ideas that have global currency, such as the notion of human rights or the notion that women should be respected equally alongside men. The point is not that such notions meet with the same readiness of acceptance or the same interpretation in all culturesclearly they do notbut that no part of the world now is free from encountering them. This, so far, suggests that the relationship between local and global in the ethical environment is closely analogous to that in the physical. We can also interpret talk of particular environments and the environment, in an ethical context, less literally. One of the striking features of the physical environment is its diversity. As well as the multifaceted nature of any local environmentthe soil, the climate, the plant life, the animal life, and so onthere are many different habitats and different landscapes. Our ethical environment is also marked by diversity. For any individual or group, the ethical environment is already multifaceted; ideas about how to live are not all of a kind. There are ideas about what is appropriate to a particular role and ideas about what is expected of anyone; there are ideas about rights and obligations, ideas about virtues, ideas about quality of life, ideas about the importance of choice or of conformity, and so on. If we speak simply of the ethical environment we are encompassing all of these in all their diversity. Within that totality, what differentiates particular ethical environments is not only the content of their conceptions under any of the headings mentioned, but which of these headings they give salience to and what order of priorities they observe among them. As well as the ethical environments of, for example, religious communities, we could speak of the ethical environment of a profession, the ethical environment of parliamentary politics, and so on.2 Furthermore, the ideas constituting the ethical environment differ, not only in their subject matter and scope, but in how far they are consciously recognized and articulated. Blackburn says that the ethical environment:
determines what we nd acceptable or unacceptable, admirable or contemptible our conception of when things are going well and when they are going badly our conception of what is due to us, and what is due from us, as we relate to others what is a cause of pride or shame, or anger or gratitude, or what can be forgiven and what cannot. (Blackburn, 2001, p.1)

118

G. Haydon

As this indicates, the ethical environment must include understandings which, while they may never be articulated by a given individual, will set the context not only for what a person thinks and says but for a persons emotional responses and motivations to action.3 It may well be that some such understandings are themselves very widespread across the global ethical environment: thus there may well be shared understandings of certain virtues, as admirable personal qualities, though these understandings may be largely implicit, in contrast with the idea of rights and equality mentioned above. So the ethical environment, like the physical, is multifaceted. And, like the physical environmentand this is one way in which the analogy, if nothing else, is at least a useful reminderthe ethical environment is always there; we cannot live outside of it. Particular individuals may ignore particular aspects of itsomeone might for instance be indifferent to moral notions in the narrow sense to be indicated belowbut the same person will still live in an environment of ideas about how to live, what is important and so on. Since we have feelings and preferences, make choices and do things, we cannot live independently of the ethical environment any more than we can live independently of the physical environment. To some degree, the ethical environment is internalized within us; but at the same time the ideas of the real people out there, their expectations, demands and reactions, are also part of every persons ethical environment, and no individual always knows in advance what the expectations and demands and reactions of others are going to be. There is, in the end, one ethical environment, and all our ideas about how to live are part of it. While everyone lives their life in the light of ideasin Blackburns broad and open senseabout how to live, these ideas are not always altruistic, and not always concerned with the welfare or the rights of other people. One way of putting this point is to say that the ethical environment cannot just be about morality. Within the totality of the ethical environment, it may be possible to recognize a more restricted set of ideascentred on recognition of the claims of others, and hence of rules and principles, obligations and rightswhich could be considered distinctively moral.4 The fact that such a distinction might be controversial, and that the nature of morality might be understood in narrower or broader ways, does not undermine the basic notion of the ethical environment, since wherever the line is drawn between what is distinctively moral and what is not, ideas on both sides of this line, and our very thoughts about the distinction itself, will be part of the whole ethical environment. Even if it should turn out that it is possible for human beings to live their lives, for better or worse, without morality, it will still be true that they could not live other than in an ethical environment; that is, they cannot, having the capacities and tendencies that seem to be distinctive of human beings, live without some context of ideas about how to live. Here we might wonder how much is to be included in the idea of the ethical environment; or rather, what is to be excluded. For instance, the complex kind of phenomenon (itself involving a variety of attitudes and practices) which we refer to as consumerism, and which sets the context for so much of the way in which many of us live today, would have to be recognized as part of our ethical environment.

Sustaining the ethical environment

119

That seems to me right; indeed, precisely because it is so inuential a part of the climate of ideas of the modern world, it would be odd to exclude it. One might wonder whether this way of thinking of the ethical environment makes it so broad as to be meaningless, since it becomes harder to nd ideas that are not part of the ethical environment than to nd ones that are. But a comparison with the physical environment should help to show that the very breadth of the notion is far from making it useless. What can be excluded from the physical environment? Perhaps nothing in our world that can be plausibly reckoned a physical phenomenon at all. Yet this does not stop us working with the idea of the environment and being able to think about our relationship to it. In any case, the question is not whether it is or is not true that we live in an ethical environment. The question is whether the idea that we do live in an ethical environment is one that is worth working with, or, in Rortyan terms, whether the vocabulary is worth using. The test of whether an idea is worth working with will lie in particular applications. If it turns out that by using this idea we can gain insights into the nature and scope of values education, it will have proved its worth at least in that way. We shall not have to worry unduly about whether something does or does not count as part of the ethical environment, if we can at least recognize certain aspects of that environment that will be salient in educational contexts. From what has been said so far it should be clearbut needs to be made explicitthat the ethical environment, again like the physical environment, is subject to change. The modern globalization of the ethical environment, already mentioned, is itself an example of change. There are many more local examples; for instance, there have been striking changes in generally accepted sexual morality within the lifetime of many people living in Western societies. It is the fact that change does happen that gives signicance to the next point to be considered: that we can intelligibly ask whether perceived changes are for better or for worse.

Evaluating the quality of the ethical environment Blackburns initial point about our relationship to the physical environment was that we depend upon it, that it is fragile, and that we have the power to ruin it, thereby ruining our own lives, or more probably those of our descendants. The point of the comparison is that the same features (except perhaps for our own awareness of them) hold of our relationship to the ethical environment. Since it determines what we nd acceptable, unacceptable and so on, both our self-regarding choices and our behaviour to each other depend on our ethical environment and, in turn, much of the quality of our lives depends on our self-regarding choices and on our behaviour towards each other. But a particular ethical environment is fragile. Blackburn cites the often used but always relevant example of Nazi Germany, that illustrates not just that it is possible for an ethical environment to be a very bad one, but that a surprisingly rapid deteriorationthe ethical equivalent of an environmen-

120

G. Haydon

tal catastropheis possible. So we need to be both aware of the quality of our ethical environment and concerned about it. To be concerned about the quality of the ethical environment assumes that we can evaluate it. Since we are, as I have stressed, always within the ethical environment, any evaluation we make will be made from inside that environment. To get outside it would be to get outside the world of evaluation altogether. But this does not stop us evaluating this very environment. We can recognize that consumerism is part of our current ethical environment without thereby having to approve of it, since there are other resources within our ethical environment from which we might judge it negatively. And, similarly, by using resources available to us now, we can judge that the Nazi ethical environment was bad, and we can judge that certain possible changes in future are ones that we had better avoid. Usually in practical contexts our interest would be in whether some particular aspect of our ethical environment is open to improvement. Apart from extreme cases such as the Nazi environment, we may have little use, and there might rarely be justication, for labelling a whole ethical environment as good or bad. At the same time, if we are to be able to use the notion of the ethical environment for more theoretical purposes, which may include (as in this article) taking a perspective on the whole aim and point of values education, we need a terminology for evaluation of the ethical environment which is less crude than good or bad. Again, an analogy with ways we can evaluate the physical environment suggests two relevant notions. One is that an environment can be a healthy or unhealthy one. This does not mean that we can sensibly describe a physical environment, anthropomorphically, as being well or sick. Rather, the sense of healthy is that in which a climate may be a healthy or unhealthy one for people to live in. Some physical environments (such as an overcrowded shanty town with poor sanitation and subject to industrial pollution) are bad for physical health; and we can also intelligibly think of some environments as being bad for psychological health, though such an assessment might be much harder to quantify. By extension and analogy, we can think of some ethical environments as being bad for people, if not physically, then psychologically. In fact, examples of this kind of view are not uncommon, as when we are told (plausibly) that a moral climate consisting primarily of guilt-inducing prohibitions is bad for psychological health and well-being (cf. White, 1990, chapter 3 and Rustin, 1997). Another notion we can helpfully borrow from the discourse which evaluates physical environments is that of sustainability. The positive evaluation we might make of some local aspect of the physical environment (say, when an oasis is articially created in a desert) will be limited in its scope if that environment is not sustainable over time. Again, we could ask whether an ethical environment is sustainable. Logically, whether an environment (for example, a guilt-inducing regime of rules) is a healthy one and whether it is sustainablewhether it could last over some considerable timeare two different considerations. (This point may be relevant if someone is inclined to think that any judgment of the healthiness of an ethical environment is hopelessly subjective; whether it is sustainable seems a more

Sustaining the ethical environment

121

empirical matter.) Nevertheless, it seems plausible that unhealthy ethical environments are unlikely to be sustainable over a long term. It is perhaps not just a matter of good fortune or historical accident that slave owning regimes or the Nazi regime came to an end; such environments were in many ways unhealthy ones not only for those obviously oppressed by them but for the oppressors as well. Because of that we might think that even if specic historical events such as the Second World War had turned out differently, these ethical environments would not have been sustainable in the long term. This is admittedly very speculative and would bear further enquiry than I can give it here. Be that as it may, considerations both of the healthiness and of the sustainability of an environment are relevant when we consider changes that may happen to it. In recent times we have become used to thinking seriously about the consequences of human decisions and actions on the physical environment. We are aware that, while it might well seem hubristic to think we could somehow totally change the environment for the better, we can try to prevent aspects of it from deteriorating (we can try to slow the rate of global warming and we can at least improve, on a local level, some of the damage we have done). Given the constant danger of damaging the environment and the possibility of improving it, in what kind of relationship should we try to stand to it? In answering this we need to be aware of the nuances of the language we use. Environmentalists do not talk, for instance, about preserving the environmentthat would suggest keeping it just as it is, including the damage we have done to it. The term most often used is probably conserving and that can involve active intervention think of the work of conservation of art objects in a museum. Regarding the ethical environment, just as for the physical environment, what we need to be concerned about is not the continued existence of some sort of ethical environmentsince that goes with human lifebut its quality. So we should be concerned at least that it does not deteriorate. Should we, then, be trying to preserve it? But, as in the physical case, preserving it would suggest keeping it static; and that would mean keeping those aspects of our current ethical environment which we would be better off without. Now it may be that not all of us would agree upon which aspects these areI would myself, for instance, be inclined to mention racism, intolerance and, in some respects, over-tolerance of violencebut the force of the argument at this point depends not on identifying any particular negative aspects of our present ethical environment, but only on the premise that change for the better is not ruled out. In that case, even conserving carries too much suggestion of steady state. Our stance towards our own ethical environment, I am suggesting, should involve at least the two elements I have already referred to: that we should want the environment to be a healthy one for those living within it,5 and that we should want it to be one that can change across time in response to changing circumstances, but in such a way that what is most central and important is not put at risk. The idea of sustainability in fact seems appropriate for this stance. I am suggesting, then, that we should seek to sustain a healthy ethical environment.

122

G. Haydon

Where does the responsibility lie? It is one thing to say that we should want our ethical environment to be a healthy and sustainable one, but another to say where the responsibility for this lies. Again the analogy with our relationship to the physical environment can be helpful. Many of us now consider that we have a contribution to make to the sustaining of the physical environment. We know that each person, individually and in a private capacity, cannot contribute much, but we may do our bit by trying to cut down our individual energy consumption, by recycling waste, and so on. At the same time we recognize that there are some moves towards sustaining the environment that can be better made, or only made, through collective action on a large scale, and this, as it often does in the modern world, means action by governments, or indeed by agreement between governments. Analogously, any one of us could see ourselves as contributing something to sustaining the ethical environmentevery time, for instance, we make an appeal to justice, or every time we remind someone that a certain issue is not a purely technical one but has ethical repercussions. For each individual in a private capacity, their contribution will usually be small (individuals in a professional capacity may have greater responsibilities; I shall return below to the responsibilities of teachers). But governments can inuence the ethical environment in ways that are not open to individuals. One way is through legislation which is not directly aimed at an educational outcome. For example, legislation against discrimination on grounds of gender or ethnicity has made a difference to the public acceptability of some ways of talking and acting. But there are also ways in which governments can seek to make a difference to the ethical environment directly through education. Programmes for values education in particular are an important way in which governments can inuence the ethical environment. And, if we assume that we are talking here about the governments of democratic societies, then supporting the institution of such programmes is a way in which the members of a society can collectively exercise their responsibility for the sustaining of the ethical environment. And through democratic processes they can collectively deliberate on what would constitute a healthy and sustainable ethical environment. Even in Western liberal societies, the idea of seeking, through an educational programme, to inuence the climate of values of a society is by no means unknown. For instance, the advisory group whose report led directly to the inclusion of citizenship in the National Curriculum for England and Wales said: we aim at no less than a change in the political culture of this country (Qualications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), 1998, p. 7). Yet to some people it appears that any such intention risks undermining liberal values, since it could appear that a policy seeking through education to improve and sustain the ethical environment is subordinating the good of individuals to the good of a collectivity. But this need not be the case, both because all, including the individual recipients of values education, stand to benet from a healthy ethical environment, and because there need be no

Sustaining the ethical environment

123

incompatibility between the qualities and capacities that are benecial to each individual and a healthy ethical environment. There would indeed be such incompatibility if a healthy ethical environment were characterized by such qualities as conformity, uniformity, authoritarianism and intolerance; but that is implausible. A sustainable ethical environment will not be one that is set in stone, incapable of change if change is needed; so a receptive attitude towards the possibility of change will have to be present in at least some people. Certainly if public policy were to aim explicitly at sustaining a healthy ethical environment there would have to be much more discussion of what constitutes such an environment, since it cannot be simply assumed that the adequate promotion of the ethical development of individualseven if that could be assumedwould ensure a healthy environment. There is a danger here of assuming that there is a single desirable model for the ethical development of each person, as there is a danger, too, of assuming that a policy of sustaining a healthy ethical environment given that this environment consists of ideas about how to livepresupposes a denitive list of the constituent ideas. If an ethical environment could be formed on some predetermined plan, it could not be simply assumed that this environment would be sustainable in the long term. Here the analogy with the physical environment suggests a further thought that merits exploration: that diversity may itself be a healthy attribute of the ethical environment. If that is so, then a social practice which seeks to sustain a healthy ethical environment will not be a practice which seeks standardization in individual development; and thus at least one ground for suspecting an incompatibility between individual and environmental aims will have been removed. The ethical equivalent of biodiversity Many of us have come to value diversity in the physical environment. Even if there is some particular local environment that we favour, perhaps because we feel at home in it, we would not want the whole world to resemble our favourite landscape. We can in some sense be glad that the world contains mountains and fertile plains and deserts and rain forests and so on. This may in part be an aesthetic response, but the valuing of environmental diversity can also be a judgement based on strong reason for thinking that the loss of any of these local environments would be a loss to the world as a whole. It reduces the gene pool, it reduces the range of different habitats in the world, and this may make the whole natural environment less adaptable to changes in the future which we know we cannot predict in detail. A ourishing environment that is able to go on ourishing will be characterized by diversity. There is a parallel argument for the ethical environment. We do not know what ethical challenges our world is going to throw up in futurealready we are having to face issues about genetic engineering, cloning and so on, which were not even envisaged a few decades ago. Again, it could at least be argued that the character of relationships between different cultures and ideologies in the world is changing and

124

G. Haydon

throwing up problems which are hard to meet from an established liberaldemocratic repertoire of ideas. And ethical attitudes towards the physical environment itself provide another illustration. Concerns about the effects of environmental degradation on the human population locally and in the short term can coexist with concerns about the quality of human life worldwide and into the future, with concerns about the good of other animals, and with concerns that may appear to be aesthetic or spiritual rather than moral. The point in all these examples is that without the diversity, our ethical consideration, both of the issues which face us now and of others which will come in the future, would itself be impoverished; we would see fewer factors as relevant, and so the range of possible answers to our questions would be smaller. Other things being equal, a richness of ethical resources is more likely to enable us to cope in the future than some one-dimensional ethical environment. The point applies on both theoretical and practical levels. On the theoretical level, would we wish, say, utilitarianism to be the only approach we had? Or equally, if we only had Kantian ethics, or only Aristotelian ethics, what sort of resource would either of these be for handling problems we can not even predict now? Similar points apply on the level of practical politics too. A particular approachit might be cost-benet analysis, it might be a narrow interpretation of a traditional religious codemay be inadequate to deal with ongoing issues if it is pursued single-mindedly and exclusively. Or, if we only had one model of the virtuous person, how could we know in advance that this would be the right sort of person to ourish in future conditions? If we could only envisage one sort of life that could count as a good life, how could we know that this sort of life would always continue to be possible for human beings? And so on. To a degree, this kind of argument for diversity may recall a standard liberal argument, associated for instance with John Stuart Mill, for freedom of debate: that truth will win through where there is fair competition between ideas. But that argument is compatible with a faith that the truth is already there to be discovered, if only the right conditions for its emergence can be found; other things being equal, one might hope that the truth would emerge as soon as possible and then remain in place. The environmental emphasis, putting weight on the unpredictability of our world, is rather different; it indicates a need, not just for keeping open the conditions for debate until truth emerges, but for actively supporting the existence of diversity indenitely. At this point, since we often express educational aims in terms of qualities or capacities to be developed in individuals, one might suggest that each individual should be educated so as to have at his or her disposal as wide a range of ethical resources as possible. While there may be something in that, it perhaps misconstrues the environmental analogy, and is in any case unrealistic from an educational perspective. Ethical resources are not something to be picked up or put down by an individual like tools for specic purposes. For an ethical idea to make a difference, there must be some people who in some way believe in it, are committed to it or take it seriously in their own deliberation. But for any one individual, even if it is possible

Sustaining the ethical environment

125

and desirable to have a decontextualized knowledge of a wide range of ideas, it cannot be possible to take all of them equally seriously. The diversity that characterizes a healthy ethical environment therefore needs to be a diversity among persons. We need persons with different points of view, different virtues, different commitments even, perhaps, different prejudices. At the level of overall educational policy, this means that, in the construction of programmes of values education, diversity of values is a positive resource rather than a problem. There may still be a point in attempts to work towards a consensus on a certain range of values,6 but it should be recognized that any construction of a list of shared values will bring with it an openness to interpretation, not to say fudging, which can itself be viewed positively, not just as a regrettable political necessity. Nor should it be thought that difculties in providing a common programme of values education across schools are a strong argument against the existence of schools committed to different faiths with their different traditions of values. While it is true that if diversity is to be sustainable there is a need for understanding, toleration and respect, the existence of faith schools could help to maintain the diversity that I have argued is a positive feature of the ethical environment.

The responsibility of teachers of values education While everyone shares in responsibility for the condition of our ethical environment, and while at the same time there are some aspects of that responsibility that can best be exercised by governments, it is also, of course, true that teachers, in virtue of their role, have a special responsibility. All teachers, insofar as they are engaged in values education, are already helping to keep some sort of ethical environment in being, and it may well be that in the great majority of cases, their inuence is already towards a healthy environment. They exercise this inuence chiey through seeking to promote desirable kinds of understanding, capacities and attitudes in their students. So if teachers come to see themselves explicitly as having a responsibility for sustaining a healthy ethical environment, this does not mean that in the classroom they will be doing something radically different from what they already do. When a way of looking at education is advocated, readers will often expect that concrete implications for the practice of teachers will be drawn. While this expectation is understandable it is not always appropriate, both because there can be implications at the level of public policy rather than pedagogy, and because the consequences for an individual of looking at education in a particular way may be more subtle. In this case, the effects may in part be in how teachers of values education see their own responsibilities and aims. As mentioned above, we often express educational aims in terms of qualities or capacities to be developed in individuals. So it will be a major responsibility of a teacher of a given subject to develop in his or her students certain knowledge and skills. On the same model, in the context of values education, we may expect the

126

G. Haydon

aims for the teacher to be spelled out in terms of aims for individual development; but where the qualities to be developed may include a commitment to certain values, such an aim, with its associated responsibility on the part of the teacher, can seem more problematic. Some teachers may doubt whether they should really be the ones held responsible for, or entrusted with, the development of valuesin the moral and ethical areain individuals, since that is sometimes thought to be the responsibility of parents or of religious communities, and these other parties may indeed claim the responsibility for themselves. Teachers might also be forgiven for feeling that if they are expected to aim at the optimal ethical development of each individual, they are bound to fail in this aim in at least some cases. Yet, at the same time, they will know that there are many other factors in the ethical environment that will have had a share of inuence in how a given individual turns out. Insofar as teachers should come to see themselves, far from having sole responsibility for the ethical development of each student, as sharing with many others a responsibility to contribute to the sustaining of a healthy ethical environment, then their view of their responsibilities will be both more realistic and less burdensome. The fact that any one individual does not develop some ideal set of qualities will not mean that the teacher has failed in his or her aim, since the fact that an individual does not live up to the standards of his or her own ethical environment does not mean that the ethical environment itself has deteriorated. Thinking in terms of the ethical environment may also help teachers to take a workable view of the overall scope of values education. Though the term values education is sometimes used without distinction from moral education, such a usage renders one of the terms redundant. On the face of it, values education is a broader eld than moral education, since not all values are moral ones. The idea that what we recognize as morality is only one aspect of the ethical environment in which we live allows us to say that values education, being broader than moral education, has to do with the whole of the ethical environment. And in fact, a characterization of values education as that area, or those aspects, of education which have to do with the ethical environment seems to capture quite well that which practitioners are likely to see as being included in values education. This may go under different names in different countries; in England and Wales, the most relevant aspect of the curriculum is that called Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE). Such a eld will not be concerned solely with moral questions, on any usual understanding of that term, but will include, for instance, career choice and lifestyle choices relating to health. The values people bring to bear in considering such choices will often not be distinctively moral, but they will all be drawn from the surrounding ethical environment. To say that the ethical environment provides the subject matter of values education is not, of course, to give any precise delimitation of the content. Rather, it suggests that anything that can plausibly be considered part of the ethical environment is a candidate for consideration within values education. Educationally, that is probably the right approach as, though for pragmatic purposes syllabuses have to be drawn up, a good teacher in this area will surely be able to recognize something

Sustaining the ethical environment

127

which has not been identied in advance as part of the syllabus as nevertheless a relevant issue to consider. So are there concrete implications for classroom practice from the proposal to consider values education as a matter of sustaining a healthy ethical environment? In a sense the answer is no, not because this picture of values education is irrelevant to classroom practice, but because it questions the desirability of there being any one best-practice model. By seeing diversity as healthy, it allows room for variation in teachers practice, since the variation may itself contribute to diversity across the ethical environment. We probably in any case would not expectif we think there is a place for faith schools or other schools committed to a particular tradition of valuesthat the practice of teachers in such schools would be just the same as the practice of teachers in secular common schools. But equally we need not expect that the practice of every teacher within secular common schools should conform to a single model. The educational press not infrequently contains the recollections of individuals about their schooling, and such recollections often contain memories of particular teachers who have been especially inuential in an individuals life. Such teachers were probably not those who were following some standard model of best practice. They may even in some cases have been teachers who had their own agenda, who were committed to promoting some set of values that differed from or went beyond what was common across their society. Liberal sensibilities tend to be wary in such cases that the values of an individual are being imposed on students, but we should remember both that what can be a lifelong inspiration to one student might leave another cold, and that all students in modern societies are subject to multiple inuences. The dangers of indoctrination on an individual level are probably relatively small; the approach taken in this article suggests that the dangers of a one-dimensional ethical environment promoted through all schools pursuing a common programme may be rather greater. For the teacher in the classroom, as well as for whole programmes of values education, diversity can be a positive resource (both for the obvious reasons concerning students learning from each other, and because any teacher of values education will still have much to learn). Other things being equal, a classroom to which students bring a wide range of perspectives will be a better micro-environment for values education than a more homogeneous one; but this is only one factor among others, and the degree to which students do bring a range of perspectives will not correlate very readily with whether a school is secular or faith-based. Since there is diversity in the many aspects of the ethical environment that are internalized within each of us, no classroom can be without the resources from which students awareness of the ethical environment can be brought out and expanded. Teachers need to respond positively to different perspectives coming from students, not only out of respect for individuals, and not only because differences of view can make for more lively lessons, but also to help all to be aware of the richness of the ethical environment. Of course, in no school is values education going to be the responsibility only of

128

G. Haydon

teachers in their separate classrooms. Everything that is commonly said about the importance of the ethos of the school can only be reinforced by the environmental perspective urged here. But this perspective does suggest that it cannot be sufcient to rely on school organisation and ethos as a hidden curriculum. As Blackburn says, the workings of the ethical environment can be strangely invisible (2001, p. 2). The aim of sustaining a healthy ethical environment needs populations who are aware of their ethical environment and its importance. Pedagogically, the most likely route to an awareness and reectivity about the wider ethical environment will start from awareness about the immediate ethical environment in classroom and school. We should not be too eager to look for one common model of classroom practice for values education. But the environmental picture of values education does suggest a way of formulating an overall aim that teachers should keep in mind, since even though the ethical environment is all around us, only some aspects of it are readily visible to any one individual at any one time. That aim is that individuals, however much they may themselves be committed to a particular system of values, should develop and maintain an awareness of the enormous richness of the ethical environment that human beings in the twenty-rst century have inherited; they should be encouraged to reect on that environment, appreciate its importance, accept their share of responsibility for it and be helped to negotiate their own way through it in their lives.

Acknowledgements An earlier version of this article was presented at the Philosophy of Education research seminar at the Institute of Education, University of London, 19 February 2003. I would like to thank Janet Coldstream, Jane Green, Shirley Rowan and an anonymous reader for comments that have helped me to clarify the argument. Notes
1. My view has the consequence that the whole of ethics can be relevant to values education, whereas Blackburn says specically that virtue ethics is the part of ethics that concerns educators, trying to turn out people of the right sort (Blackburn, 1998, p. 28). For more on diversity within the ethical environment (though not by that terminology) and its implications for education see Haydon (2000). That the shaping of emotional responses is an important aspect of the ethical environment is consistent with the broadly neo-Humean character of Blackburns ethical writings; see Blackburn (1998). I suspect that determines in the words quoted from Blackburn is not to be taken in a philosophically-loaded sense. The point is not that our ethical context leaves us no choice, but that it shapes the choices which are open to us. Within moral philosophy, several writers have recognized a notion of morality in the narrow sense which is only part of the broader sphere of the ethical. See, for example, Mackie (1977), Taylor (1989, p. 3), Williams (1995), Scanlon (1998, p. 173) and, in an educational context, Haydon (1999). The fact that moral and ethical can be used to mark this distinction is the reason that I do not follow Blackburn in speaking of the moral or ethical environment.

2. 3.

4.

Sustaining the ethical environment

5.

129

6.

The example of Nazi Germany draws our attention most obviously to the fact that an ethical environment can be a bad one for people to live in; but we should not neglect the fact that some ethical environments, in which cruelty or indifference towards animals is the norm, will be bad ones for other animals, too. A recent example in England and Wales was the exercise conducted by the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority and its successor, the Qualications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), in the late 1990s, which resulted in a statement of values incorporated into National Curriculum documents (see, for example, Department for Education and Employment (DfEE)/QCA, 1999).

References
Blackburn, S. (1998) Ruling passions (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Blackburn, S. (2001) Being good (Oxford, Oxford University Press). Department for Education and Employment (DfEE)/Qualications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) (1999) The National Curriculum: handbook for secondary teachers in England (London, Department for Education and Employment/Qualications and Curriculum Authority). Haydon, G. (1999) Values, virtues and violence: education and the public understanding of morality (Oxford, Blackwell). Haydon, G. (2000) Understanding the diversity of diversity, in: M. Leicester, C. Modgil & S. Modgil (Eds) Education, culture and values, (vol. 2) Institutional issues: pupils, schools and teacher education (London, Falmer). Mackie, J. (1977) Ethics: inventing right and wrong (Harmondsworth, Penguin). Qualications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) (1998) Education for citizenship and the teaching of democracy in schools (London, Qualications and Curriculum Authority). Rorty, R. (1989) Contingency, irony and solidarity (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). Rustin, M. (1997) Innate morality: a psychoanalytic approach to moral education, in: R. Smith & P. Standish, (Eds) Teaching right and wrong: moral education in the balance (Stoke-onTrent, Trentham). Scanlon, T. (1998) What we owe to each other (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press). Taylor, C. (1989) Sources of the self (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). White, J. (1990) Education and the good life (London, Kogan Page). Williams, B. (1995) Moral luck: a postscript, in: B. Williams, Making sense of humanity (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press).