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Research Bulletin

Phi Delta Kappa Center for Evaluation, Development, and Research
September 1996, No. 17

Values and the Schools: Sixty Years Ago and Now
By Jack Frymier, Luvern Cunningham, Willard Duckett, Bruce Gansneder, Frances Link, June Rimmer, James Scholz

The time was 1937. Franklin Roosevelt had just been re-elected to a second term. The United States had taken steps toward economic stability, but the Great Depression continued and unemployment was still terribly high. Hitler and Mussolini were strutting across Europe, threatening other nations and promising glory to those at home. Stalin was purging Russia of millions of its citizens. Eleven million Englishmen had signed a pledge for peace; they did not want to go to war. Memories of the Great War were fresh in everyone's mind.

Two sets of forces were at work in the world in the 1930s; two conflicting value systems were competing for attention. One centered on the ideals inherent in democracy: individual initiative, responsibility, and self-control. The other centered on totalitarian power, absolute obedience to authorities, and centralized control.

Democracy was on trial. World War II was about to begin. Clarifying and preserving the historical and philosophical foundations of public education was important. Developing initiatives in the field of education was imperative.

The Purposes of Education in American Democracy was published by the Education Policies Commission in 1938, and it called for "education aimed at economic literacy, respect for law, acceptance of civic duties, and above all, loyalty to democratic ideals."(1) The book, written by William Carr, begins this way:

Educational objectives depend upon a scale of values. Every statement of educational purposes, including this one, depends upon the judgment of some person or group as to what is good and what is bad, what is true and what is false, what is ugly and what is beautiful, what is valuable and what is worthless, in the conduct of human affairs. Objectives are, essentially, a statement of preferences, choices, values. These preferences are exercised, these choices made, these values arranged in a variety of ways.

The book postulates that "the social policy of America is democracy," then stipulates that democracy promotes the general welfare, civil liberty, consent of the governed, the pursuit of happiness, and an appeal to reason. Following this, 43 objectives for schools are specified.

Given the context of the book, including the explicit statement about objectives being values, it seems reasonable to assume that these objectives comprised a set of values that educators thought schools should teach young people in the 1930s.

CORE VALUES STUDY

The committee to coordinate the Phi Delta Kappa Study of Core Values took the 43 objectives in Carr's book, added 11 more, and posed them all as statements on a questionnaire about values in the schools.

At the same time, the committee scoured the literature for value statements that represented the other forces at work in the world in the 1930s, the anti-democratic or authoritarian forces represented by Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. We found 70 such statements(2) and cast them as value positions on another questionnaire.

These two questionnaires, one containing 54 value statements representing democratic values and one containing 70 value statements representing authoritarian values, were presented to two groups of educators for their responses. In all, 3,613 educators completed the two questionnaires.

The first questionnaire instructed educators to respond to each of the 54 statements by answering three different questions:

* Is this an important objective for schools?

* Should this be part of the curriculum?

* Is this now part of the curriculum in your schools?

We assumed that if a respondent answered "Yes" in regard to the first question, it would indicate that the respondent accepted democratic values. A "No" would indicate rejection of democratic values.

The introduction to the directions on the second questionnaire postulated that "beliefs and values are learned" and that "adults help young people learn to value certain things and to reject other things. Parents and teachers always try to shape young people's values by what they say and what they do." This questionnaire instructed educators to respond to each of the 70 statements by answering this question:

* What should young people believe by the time they finish high school? If you think young people should agree with the statement, mark "Should Agree." If you think young people should disagree with the statement, mark "Should Disagree."

We assumed that if a respondent indicated "Should Disagree" to a statement, that would indicate that he or she rejected authoritarian values for young people in school. If a respondent indicated "Should Agree," that would indicate acceptance of authoritarian values.

Our hypothesis was simple: most educators would agree with the idea that democratic values belong in schools, and they would disagree with the idea that authoritarian values belong in schools. That seemed to be a reasonable hypothesis, given the nature of our culture and our experience, but we wanted to test it. If the proposition turned out to be true, then we would have a defensible basis for assuming the importance of democratic values as those values relate to schools. We were assuming that this is what educators believed in the 1930s, based on our review of events described above. If our hypothesis was supported, that would suggest that educators' values today are comparable to the values of educators 60 years ago, and that would be an important finding.

WHAT EDUCATORS THINK

All together, 67% or more of the respondents shared consensus on 75% of the value statements (93 out of 124) used in the two questionnaires.That is, 67% or more agreed that students should learn a value statement or should not learn a value statement. These figures indicate general agreement among educators regarding which values should be taught in schools.

Educators agreed that democratic values should be taught in schools and authoritarian values should not be taught. This suggests that educators today hold the same beliefs about the importance of democratic values and the dangers of authoritarian values that educators held 60 years ago.

The statements in Table 1 indicate some of the many values that educators agreed were important for young people to learn. (Note the high percentages of disagreement with authoritarian value statements.)

While their responses indicated strong agreement about which values young people should learn, educators were divided about some value statements, as Table 2 illustrates.

OTHER STUDIES

Three other studies were undertaken by the committee to coordinate the Phi Delta Kappa Study of Core Values. All of the studies were accomplished in collaboration with Phi Delta Kappa chapters. One study involved structured meetings of 1,463 educators (45%) and non-educators (55%), who discussed value questions in 36 communities across the country and then responded to a 64-item values questionnaire.

All participants in these community meetings agreed that the home has primary responsibility for teaching young people values such as honesty, tolerance, kindness, ambition, obedience, responsibility, helpfulness, manners, and morality. The school and church have secondary responsibilities in these areas. Further, people in those meetings indicated that the home was more to blame for increases in crime in the United States from 1960 to 1990 than churches, schools, businesses, police, judges, media, peer groups, or policy makers.

TEACHERS' ESTIMATES OF STUDENTS' VALUES

A third study involved 2,163 high school teachers who were asked to estimate their students' responses to a 43-item values questionnaire. A fourth study involved 2,634 students from nine high schools in three cities, who responded to the same 43-item questionnaire.

In general, teachers were fairly accurate in estimating students' responses to some value statements compared to how students actually responded, but there were many areas in which teachers were markedly "off base." And teachers almost always estimated that things were worse than they actually were.

For example, teachers were reasonably accurate in estimating students' responses to the value statements in Table 3. In other areas, however, teachers' estimates of students' responses to value statements were decidedly inaccurate. The statements in Table 4 represent value areas in which teachers seriously misjudged how students would respond.

It is important to point out that the students who responded to the value questionnaire were not from the same schools as those in which teachers estimated how their students would respond. Even so, the discrepancies reported here suggest interesting areas in which further research should be accomplished.

SUMMARY

The values that teachers think are important for children to learn today are remarkably similar to values that educators thought young people should learn 60 years ago.(3) For example:

* Democracy is right. Authoritarianism is wrong.

* Honesty is right. Dishonesty is wrong.

* Responsibility is right. Irresponsibility is wrong.

* Freedom of speech is right. Restricting freedom of speech is wrong.

* Courtesy is right. Discourtesy is wrong.

* Tolerance is right. Intolerance is wrong.

* Freedom of worship is right. Restricting freedom of worship is wrong.

* Respecting the law is right. Violating the law is wrong.

* Integrating schools is right. Segregating schools is wrong.

Second, educators and non-educators alike think that the home is the primary agency for developing values in the young, but school and church both have an important role to play. Further, educators and non-educators agree that the rise in crime during the past 30 years is primarily the fault of the home.

Third, adolescents' values are not "perfect" (they report deviations from the social norm, just as adults deviate from the social norm), but they are generally better than teachers think they are, even if they are not as good as others presume they ought to be.

Fourth, the discrepancy between what values are being taught in schools and what should be taught, as reported by educators, is considerable. Schools are not doing nearly as well in teaching values as most of the educators who responded thought they should be doing.

ENDNOTES

1. William Carr, The Purposes of Education in American Democracy (Washington, DC: Educational Policies Commission, 1938), p. 1.

2. Philip E. Jacob, Changing Values in College (New York: Harper and Bros., 1957); H. H. Remmers (ed.), Anti-Democratic Attitudes in American Schools (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1963); T. W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper and Bros., 1950); Milton Rokeach, The Open and Closed Mind (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1960); Richard Christie and Marie Jahoda (eds.), Studies in the Scope and Method of "The Authoritarian Personality" (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1954); and Hermann Rauschning, The Revolution of Nihilism: Warning to the West (New York: Alliance Book Corp., 1939).

3. For a detailed examination of all the data from this project, see Jack Frymier et al., A Study of Core Values and the Schools: Final Report (Bloomington, IN: Phi Delta Kappa, 1995).