Learning to care: a focus for values in health and environmental education

Health and environmental education seek to address the living conditions and lifestyle choices that lead to health and environmental problems by motivating and teaching students how to participate in the reconstruction of themselves and society in accordance with ecological values and the democratic values of social and economic justice. While an ethic of care unites health and environmental education in this endeavour, liberal and conservative educational practices in the area of values education are dominated by discourses of values relativity and neutrality. This paper seeks to provide a case for teachers adopting a committed stance in teaching young people an ethic of care so that they may participate in the personal and social changes needed to advance the transition towards a healthy and sustainable world. In particular, it draws upon insights from the literature of environmental values education, which is characterized by intense debates between those of liberal and committed persuasions, to explore the ethical and pedagogical issues involved in teaching for an ethic of care in both health and environmental education. Education, indoctrination and values Teaching as indoctrination—or indoctrination through our teaching—is a concern for teachers and parents. Teachers-in-training are generally taught Centre Tor Innovation and Research in Environmental Education, Faculty of Environmental Sciences, Griffith University, Nathan, Queensland 4111, Australia how wrong it is and are shown various ways of ensuring they adopt a balanced approach in their work. In place of indoctrination, balanced perspectives and neutrality are claimed as virtues. However, claims to balance and neutrality often deny the reality of much educational decision making by curriculum planners and teachers. Education, like all social institutions and processes, is a human creation; its nature and purpose determined by human values, history and changing patterns of power relationships. Another reason why education cannot be neutral is that there is insufficient time to teach everything that is possible to be taught. Thus, all educational objectives, emphases in curriculum content and classroom processes must necessarily be a selection of the culture from which curriculum planners and teachers make their selections of objectives, content, resources and teaching methods—and there is no rational way of making such selections without holding certain values to establish priorities. In this way, the processes of education continually expose students to filtered experiences. This inherent values bias in education means that it has the potential to serve the needs and interests of certain groups and not others and, given the unequal power relations in most societies, educational systems and classrooms tend to reflect and transmit the values of the more powerful political, economic and educational decision makers in a society, thus perpetuating their dominant cultural beliefs. However, the pervasive liberal ideology of balance and values relativity in traditional educational discourses often masks this reality and makes educational processes appear fairer than they actually are. In this way, many traditional and progressive approaches to education can—albeit unintentionally—serve the hegemonic purposes of G Oxford University Press 437