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 andscope of values education: as a matter of ‘sustaining the ethical environment’. The idea isintroduced 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 illuminatinganalogies between our responsibility for the quality of the physical environment and our responsi-bility for the quality of the ethical environment. Values education, in turn, can be seen as animportant way in which we can collectively attend to the quality of the ethical environment; indoing so, we should put positive value on diversity within that environment. This way of seeingvalues education suggests a way in which teachers can realistically see their own responsibilitiesfor values education.

Introduction

In this paper I shall propose a way of thinking about the nature and point of valueseducation which I believe will be fruitful. Somewhat in the spirit of Rorty (1989), Ishall suggest that use of a particular vocabulary can offer an alternative to somewell-established ways of thinking about values education (and, within that, moraleducation). If in some respects our ways of thinking about values education havebecome too familiar—if we feel, looking through the journals and books, that we goround in circles, that there is perhaps no position on values education that has notalready been worked over many times—then a different way of thinking, stimulatedby the use of a particular vocabulary, may well offer insights that we might otherwiseoverlook.

The vocabulary is one used by the philosopher Simon Blackburn in his introduc-tion to a work on ethics:

We have all learned to become sensitive to the physical environment. We know that wedepend 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 ofLondon, 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 LtdDOI: 10.1080/0305724042000215186

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our own lives, or more probably those of our descendants. Perhaps fewer of us aresensitive to what we might call the moral or ethical environment. This is the surround-ing 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 moraleducation, 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 thephysical environment: sometimes it may be best to leave it alone, but we may alsoexercise our care for it in more active ways. I shall suggest that there is a fruitfulanalogy to be drawn—though like most analogies it should not be pushed toofar—between the ways that we relate to our physical environment and the ways thatwe can, partly through values education, relate to our ethical environment.

To indicate the fruitfulness of the analogy, I shall consider in the followingsections:

• how the ethical environment can be compared with the physical environment; thatjust as we can evaluate the quality of the physical environment, so we can evaluatethe quality of our ethical environment;

• that in both cases we can ask where the responsibility lies for the quality of theenvironment;

• that in the case of the ethical, as well as the physical environment, we have reasonto positively value diversity;

• that the environmental picture of values education, while it does not indicate aspecific model for teachers to follow in the classroom, does suggest a particularway 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, thoughit has not always been referred to in this vocabulary. Possibly no writer on moraleducation has ever failed to recognize that ‘the surrounding climate of ideas abouthow to live’ is an influence on the moral development of any individual. There arealso other terminologies in which that point can be made. The notion of culture isoften relevant here, as is the notion of community. But these notions carry their ownbaggage, and if we are to gain anything from taking a less familiar perspective, it willbe best simply to explore directly, as Blackburn does not do in any detail, thecomparison between physical and ethical environments.

Writers on environmental matters have sometimes wondered whether it is betterto speak of the environment or of many environments. The best answer is probablythat we need both ways of speaking. There are clearly many different environments:an Antarctic ice shelf is a very different environment from central London, forinstance. But we are also increasingly aware that no one environment is isolatedfrom another: changes in the Southern Ocean can, via ocean currents, affect theclimate in northern Europe and emission of carbon dioxide there contributes toglobal warming which affects the Antarctic. Recognizing interdependencies, we need

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to be able to talk about the (global) environment. By the same token, we have torecognize that the environment is multifaceted and enormously complex. Climate,for instance, is only one aspect of the environment (so while in casual reference wemight equate ‘environment’ and ‘climate’, as Blackburn appears to in the quotationabove, it may be better to avoid this).

We can also ask whether there is one ethical environment or many. Certainly thereare different local environments (a point which communitarianism stresses, in itsown terminology), but, as with the physical environment, the chances of any localethical environment existing in complete isolation in the world today are small (apoint stressed by multiculturalists). Does it, given the variations, make sense to talkof the ethical environment? One way of cashing out this idea is in a literal geograph-ical sense. There are at least some ethical ideas that have global currency, such asthe notion of human rights or the notion that women should be respected equallyalongside men. The point is not that such notions meet with the same readiness ofacceptance or the same interpretation in all cultures—clearly they do not—but thatno part of the world now is free from encountering them. This, so far, suggests thatthe relationship between local and global in the ethical environment is closelyanalogous to that in the physical.

We can also interpret talk of particular environments and the environment, in anethical context, less literally. One of the striking features of the physical environmentis its diversity. As well as the multifaceted nature of any local environment—the soil,the climate, the plant life, the animal life, and so on—there are many differenthabitats and different landscapes. Our ethical environment is also marked bydiversity. For any individual or group, the ethical environment is already multi-faceted; ‘ideas about how to live’ are not all of a kind. There are ideas about whatis appropriate to a particular role and ideas about what is expected of anyone; thereare 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 simplyof the ethical environment we are encompassing all of these in all their diversity.Within that totality, what differentiates particular ethical environments is not onlythe content of their conceptions under any of the headings mentioned, but which ofthese headings they give salience to and what order of priorities they observe amongthem. As well as the ethical environments of, for example, religious communities, wecould speak of the ethical environment of a profession, the ethical environment ofparliamentary politics, and so on.2

Furthermore, the ideas constituting the ethical environment differ, not only intheir subject matter and scope, but in how far they are consciously recognized andarticulated. Blackburn says that the ethical environment:

determines what we find acceptable or unacceptable, admirable or contemptible … ourconception of when things are going well and when they are going badly … ourconception of what is due to us, and what is due from us, as we relate to others … whatis a cause of pride or shame, or anger or gratitude, or what can be forgiven and whatcannot. (Blackburn, 2001, p.1)

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As this indicates, the ethical environment must include understandings which, whilethey may never be articulated by a given individual, will set the context not only forwhat a person thinks and says but for a person’s emotional responses and motiva-tions to action.3 It may well be that some such understandings are themselves verywidespread across the global ethical environment: thus there may well be sharedunderstandings of certain virtues, as admirable personal qualities, though theseunderstandings may be largely implicit, in contrast with the idea of rights andequality mentioned above.

So the ethical environment, like the physical, is multifaceted. And, like thephysical environment—and this is one way in which the analogy, if nothing else, isat least a useful reminder—the ethical environment is always there; we cannot liveoutside of it. Particular individuals may ignore particular aspects of it—someonemight for instance be indifferent to moral notions in the narrow sense to be indicatedbelow—but the same person will still live in an environment of ideas about how tolive, what is important and so on. Since we have feelings and preferences, makechoices and do things, we cannot live independently of the ethical environment anymore 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 ofthe real people out there, their expectations, demands and reactions, are also part ofevery person’s ethical environment, and no individual always knows in advance whatthe expectations and demands and reactions of others are going to be. There is, inthe 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 ideas—in Blackburn’s broad and opensense—about how to live, these ideas are not always altruistic, and not alwaysconcerned with the welfare or the rights of other people. One way of putting thispoint is to say that the ethical environment cannot just be about morality. Within thetotality of the ethical environment, it may be possible to recognize a more restrictedset of ideas—centred on recognition of the claims of others, and hence of rules andprinciples, obligations and rights—which could be considered distinctively moral.4

The fact that such a distinction might be controversial, and that the nature ofmorality might be understood in narrower or broader ways, does not undermine thebasic notion of the ethical environment, since wherever the line is drawn betweenwhat is distinctively moral and what is not, ideas on both sides of this line, and ourvery thoughts about the distinction itself, will be part of the whole ethical environ-ment. 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 otherthan in an ethical environment; that is, they cannot, having the capacities andtendencies that seem to be distinctive of human beings, live without some contextof ideas about how to live.

Here we might wonder how much is to be included in the idea of the ethicalenvironment; or rather, what is to be excluded. For instance, the complex kind ofphenomenon (itself involving a variety of attitudes and practices) which we refer toas consumerism, and which sets the context for so much of the way in which manyof us live today, would have to be recognized as part of our ethical environment.

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That seems to me right; indeed, precisely because it is so influential a part of theclimate of ideas of the modern world, it would be odd to exclude it. One mightwonder whether this way of thinking of the ethical environment makes it so broadas to be meaningless, since it becomes harder to find ideas that are not part of theethical environment than to find ones that are. But a comparison with the physicalenvironment should help to show that the very breadth of the notion is far frommaking it useless. What can be excluded from the physical environment? Perhapsnothing 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 tothink about our relationship to it. In any case, the question is not whether it is or isnot true that we live in an ethical environment. The question is whether the idea thatwe do live in an ethical environment is one that is worth working with, or, in Rortyanterms, whether the vocabulary is worth using. The test of whether an idea is worthworking with will lie in particular applications. If it turns out that by using this ideawe can gain insights into the nature and scope of values education, it will haveproved its worth at least in that way. We shall not have to worry unduly aboutwhether something does or does not count as part of the ethical environment, if wecan at least recognize certain aspects of that environment that will be salient ineducational contexts.

From what has been said so far it should be clear—but needs to be madeexplicit—that the ethical environment, again like the physical environment, issubject to change. The modern globalization of the ethical environment, alreadymentioned, is itself an example of change. There are many more local examples; forinstance, there have been striking changes in generally accepted sexual moralitywithin the lifetime of many people living in Western societies. It is the fact thatchange does happen that gives significance to the next point to be considered: thatwe can intelligibly ask whether perceived changes are for better or for worse.

Evaluating the quality of the ethical environment

Blackburn’s 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.’ Thepoint of the comparison is that the same features (except perhaps for our ownawareness of them) hold of our relationship to the ethical environment. Since it‘determines’ what we find acceptable, unacceptable and so on, both our self-regard-ing 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 andon our behaviour towards each other. But a particular ethical environment is fragile.Blackburn cites the often used but always relevant example of Nazi Germany, thatillustrates not just that it is possible for an ethical environment to be a very bad one,but that a surprisingly rapid deterioration—the ethical equivalent of an environmen-

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tal catastrophe—is possible. So we need to be both aware of the quality of our ethicalenvironment and concerned about it.

To be concerned about the quality of the ethical environment assumes that we canevaluate 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 outsideit would be to get outside the world of evaluation altogether. But this does not stopus evaluating this very environment. We can recognize that consumerism is part ofour current ethical environment without thereby having to approve of it, since thereare other resources within our ethical environment from which we might judge itnegatively. And, similarly, by using resources available to us now, we can judge thatthe Nazi ethical environment was bad, and we can judge that certain possiblechanges in future are ones that we had better avoid.

Usually in practical contexts our interest would be in whether some particularaspect of our ethical environment is open to improvement. Apart from extreme casessuch as the Nazi environment, we may have little use, and there might rarely bejustification, for labelling a whole ethical environment as ‘good’ or ‘bad’. At thesame time, if we are to be able to use the notion of the ethical environment for moretheoretical purposes, which may include (as in this article) taking a perspective onthe whole aim and point of values education, we need a terminology for evaluationof the ethical environment which is less crude than ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Again, ananalogy with ways we can evaluate the physical environment suggests two relevantnotions. One is that an environment can be a ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’ one. This doesnot mean that we can sensibly describe a physical environment, anthropomorphi-cally, as being ‘well’ or ‘sick’. Rather, the sense of ‘healthy’ is that in which a climatemay 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 industrialpollution) are bad for physical health; and we can also intelligibly think of someenvironments as being bad for psychological health, though such an assessmentmight be much harder to quantify. By extension and analogy, we can think of someethical 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 prohibitionsis bad for psychological health and well-being (cf. White, 1990, chapter 3 andRustin, 1997).

Another notion we can helpfully borrow from the discourse which evaluatesphysical environments is that of sustainability. The positive evaluation we mightmake of some local aspect of the physical environment (say, when an oasis isartificially created in a desert) will be limited in its scope if that environment is notsustainable over time. Again, we could ask whether an ethical environment issustainable. Logically, whether an environment (for example, a guilt-inducingregime of rules) is a healthy one and whether it is sustainable—whether it could lastover some considerable time—are two different considerations. (This point may berelevant if someone is inclined to think that any judgment of the ‘healthiness’ of anethical environment is hopelessly subjective; whether it is sustainable seems a more

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empirical matter.) Nevertheless, it seems plausible that unhealthy ethical environ-ments are unlikely to be sustainable over a long term. It is perhaps not just a matterof good fortune or historical accident that slave owning regimes or the Nazi regimecame to an end; such environments were in many ways unhealthy ones not only forthose obviously oppressed by them but for the oppressors as well. Because of that wemight think that even if specific historical events such as the Second World War hadturned out differently, these ethical environments would not have been sustainablein the long term. This is admittedly very speculative and would bear further enquirythan I can give it here.

Be that as it may, considerations both of the healthiness and of the sustainabilityof an environment are relevant when we consider changes that may happen to it. Inrecent times we have become used to thinking seriously about the consequences ofhuman decisions and actions on the physical environment. We are aware that, whileit might well seem hubristic to think we could somehow totally change the environ-ment for the better, we can try to prevent aspects of it from deteriorating (we cantry 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 theenvironment and the possibility of improving it, in what kind of relationship shouldwe try to stand to it? In answering this we need to be aware of the nuances of thelanguage we use. Environmentalists do not talk, for instance, about preserving theenvironment—that would suggest keeping it just as it is, including the damage wehave done to it. The term most often used is probably ‘conserving’ and that caninvolve active intervention – think of the work of conservation of art objects in amuseum.

Regarding the ethical environment, just as for the physical environment, what weneed to be concerned about is not the continued existence of some sort of ethicalenvironment—since that goes with human life—but its quality. So we should beconcerned at least that it does not deteriorate. Should we, then, be trying to preserveit? But, as in the physical case, preserving it would suggest keeping it static; and thatwould mean keeping those aspects of our current ethical environment which wewould be better off without. Now it may be that not all of us would agree uponwhich aspects these are—I would myself, for instance, be inclined to mentionracism, intolerance and, in some respects, over-tolerance of violence—but the forceof the argument at this point depends not on identifying any particular negativeaspects of our present ethical environment, but only on the premise that change forthe better is not ruled out. In that case, even ‘conserving’ carries too muchsuggestion of steady state. Our stance towards our own ethical environment, I amsuggesting, should involve at least the two elements I have already referred to: thatwe should want the environment to be a healthy one for those living within it,5 andthat we should want it to be one that can change across time in response to changingcircumstances, but in such a way that what is most central and important is not putat risk.

The idea of sustainability in fact seems appropriate for this stance. I am suggest-ing, then, that we should seek to sustain a healthy ethical environment.

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Where does the responsibility lie?

It is one thing to say that we should want our ethical environment to be a healthyand sustainable one, but another to say where the responsibility for this lies. Againthe analogy with our relationship to the physical environment can be helpful. Manyof us now consider that we have a contribution to make to the sustaining of thephysical environment. We know that each person, individually and in a privatecapacity, cannot contribute much, but we may do our bit by trying to cut down ourindividual energy consumption, by recycling waste, and so on. At the same time werecognize that there are some moves towards sustaining the environment that can bebetter made, or only made, through collective action on a large scale, and this, as itoften does in the modern world, means action by governments, or indeed byagreement between governments.

Analogously, any one of us could see ourselves as contributing something tosustaining the ethical environment—every time, for instance, we make an appeal tojustice, or every time we remind someone that a certain issue is not a purelytechnical one but has ethical repercussions. For each individual in a private capacity,their contribution will usually be small (individuals in a professional capacity mayhave greater responsibilities; I shall return below to the responsibilities of teachers).But governments can influence the ethical environment in ways that are not open toindividuals. One way is through legislation which is not directly aimed at aneducational outcome. For example, legislation against discrimination on grounds ofgender or ethnicity has made a difference to the public acceptability of some waysof talking and acting.

But there are also ways in which governments can seek to make a difference to theethical environment directly through education. Programmes for values education inparticular are an important way in which governments can influence the ethicalenvironment. And, if we assume that we are talking here about the governments ofdemocratic societies, then supporting the institution of such programmes is a way inwhich the members of a society can collectively exercise their responsibility for thesustaining of the ethical environment. And through democratic processes they cancollectively deliberate on what would constitute a healthy and sustainable ethicalenvironment.

Even in Western liberal societies, the idea of seeking, through an educationalprogramme, to influence the climate of values of a society is by no means unknown.For instance, the advisory group whose report led directly to the inclusion ofcitizenship in the National Curriculum for England and Wales said: ‘we aim at noless than a change in the political culture of this country…’ (Qualifications andCurriculum Authority (QCA), 1998, p. 7). Yet to some people it appears that anysuch intention risks undermining liberal values, since it could appear that a policyseeking through education to improve and sustain the ethical environment issubordinating the good of individuals to the good of a collectivity. But this need notbe the case, both because all, including the individual recipients of values education,stand to benefit from a healthy ethical environment, and because there need be no

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incompatibility between the qualities and capacities that are beneficial to eachindividual and a healthy ethical environment. There would indeed be such incom-patibility if a healthy ethical environment were characterized by such qualities asconformity, uniformity, authoritarianism and intolerance; but that is implausible. Asustainable ethical environment will not be one that is set in stone, incapable ofchange if change is needed; so a receptive attitude towards the possibility of changewill have to be present in at least some people.

Certainly if public policy were to aim explicitly at sustaining a healthy ethicalenvironment there would have to be much more discussion of what constitutes suchan environment, since it cannot be simply assumed that the adequate promotion ofthe ethical development of individuals—even if that could be assumed—wouldensure a healthy environment. There is a danger here of assuming that there is asingle desirable model for the ethical development of each person, as there is adanger, too, of assuming that a policy of sustaining a healthy ethical environment—given that this environment consists of ideas about how to live—presupposes adefinitive list of the constituent ideas. If an ethical environment could be formed onsome predetermined plan, it could not be simply assumed that this environmentwould be sustainable in the long term.

Here the analogy with the physical environment suggests a further thought thatmerits exploration: that diversity may itself be a healthy attribute of the ethicalenvironment. If that is so, then a social practice which seeks to sustain a healthyethical environment will not be a practice which seeks standardization in individualdevelopment; and thus at least one ground for suspecting an incompatibility be-tween 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 thereis some particular local environment that we favour, perhaps because we feel athome 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 plainsand deserts and rain forests and so on. This may in part be an aesthetic response, butthe valuing of environmental diversity can also be a judgement based on strongreason for thinking that the loss of any of these local environments would be a lossto the world as a whole. It reduces the gene pool, it reduces the range of differenthabitats in the world, and this may make the whole natural environment lessadaptable to changes in the future which we know we cannot predict in detail. Aflourishing environment that is able to go on flourishing will be characterized bydiversity.

There is a parallel argument for the ethical environment. We do not know whatethical challenges our world is going to throw up in future—already we are havingto face issues about genetic engineering, cloning and so on, which were not evenenvisaged a few decades ago. Again, it could at least be argued that the character ofrelationships between different cultures and ideologies in the world is changing and

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throwing up problems which are hard to meet from an established liberal-democratic repertoire of ideas. And ethical attitudes towards the physical environ-ment itself provide another illustration. Concerns about the effects of environmentaldegradation on the human population locally and in the short term can coexist withconcerns about the quality of human life worldwide and into the future, withconcerns about the good of other animals, and with concerns that may appear to beaesthetic or spiritual rather than moral. The point in all these examples is thatwithout the diversity, our ethical consideration, both of the issues which face us nowand of others which will come in the future, would itself be impoverished; we wouldsee fewer factors as relevant, and so the range of possible answers to our questionswould be smaller. Other things being equal, a richness of ethical resources is morelikely to enable us to cope in the future than some one-dimensional ethical environ-ment.

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 weonly had Kantian ethics, or only Aristotelian ethics, what sort of resource wouldeither of these be for handling problems we can not even predict now? Similar pointsapply on the level of practical politics too. A particular approach—it might becost-benefit analysis, it might be a narrow interpretation of a traditional religiouscode—may be inadequate to deal with ongoing issues if it is pursued single-mind-edly and exclusively. Or, if we only had one model of the virtuous person, how couldwe know in advance that this would be the right sort of person to flourish in futureconditions? 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 forhuman beings? And so on.

To a degree, this kind of argument for diversity may recall a standard liberalargument, associated for instance with John Stuart Mill, for freedom of debate: thattruth will win through where there is fair competition between ideas. But thatargument 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 inplace. The environmental emphasis, putting weight on the unpredictability of ourworld, is rather different; it indicates a need, not just for keeping open the conditionsfor debate until truth emerges, but for actively supporting the existence of diversityindefinitely.

At this point, since we often express educational aims in terms of qualities orcapacities to be developed in individuals, one might suggest that each individualshould be educated so as to have at his or her disposal as wide a range of ethicalresources as possible. While there may be something in that, it perhaps misconstruesthe environmental analogy, and is in any case unrealistic from an educationalperspective. Ethical resources are not something to be picked up or put down by anindividual like tools for specific 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 takeit seriously in their own deliberation. But for any one individual, even if it is possible

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and desirable to have a decontextualized knowledge of a wide range of ideas, itcannot be possible to take all of them equally seriously. The diversity that character-izes a healthy ethical environment therefore needs to be a diversity among persons.We need persons with different points of view, different virtues, different commit-ments – even, perhaps, different prejudices.

At the level of overall educational policy, this means that, in the construction ofprogrammes of values education, diversity of values is a positive resource rather thana problem. There may still be a point in attempts to work towards a consensus ona certain range of values,6 but it should be recognized that any construction of a listof 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. Norshould it be thought that difficulties in providing a common programme of valueseducation across schools are a strong argument against the existence of schoolscommitted to different faiths with their different traditions of values. While it is truethat if diversity is to be sustainable there is a need for understanding, toleration andrespect, the existence of faith schools could help to maintain the diversity that I haveargued 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 bestbe exercised by governments, it is also, of course, true that teachers, in virtue of theirrole, have a special responsibility. All teachers, insofar as they are engaged in valueseducation, 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 influence is alreadytowards a healthy environment. They exercise this influence chiefly through seekingto promote desirable kinds of understanding, capacities and attitudes in theirstudents. So if teachers come to see themselves explicitly as having a responsibilityfor sustaining a healthy ethical environment, this does not mean that in theclassroom they will be doing something radically different from what they alreadydo.

When a way of looking at education is advocated, readers will often expect thatconcrete implications for the practice of teachers will be drawn. While this expec-tation is understandable it is not always appropriate, both because there can beimplications at the level of public policy rather than pedagogy, and because theconsequences for an individual of looking at education in a particular way may bemore subtle. In this case, the effects may in part be in how teachers of valueseducation see their own responsibilities and aims.

As mentioned above, we often express educational aims in terms of qualities orcapacities to be developed in individuals. So it will be a major responsibility of ateacher of a given subject to develop in his or her students certain knowledge andskills. On the same model, in the context of values education, we may expect the

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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 seemmore problematic. Some teachers may doubt whether they should really be the onesheld responsible for, or entrusted with, the development of values—in the moral andethical area—in individuals, since that is sometimes thought to be the responsibilityof parents or of religious communities, and these other parties may indeed claim theresponsibility for themselves. Teachers might also be forgiven for feeling that if theyare expected to aim at the optimal ethical development of each individual, they arebound to fail in this aim in at least some cases. Yet, at the same time, they will knowthat there are many other factors in the ethical environment that will have had ashare of influence in how a given individual turns out.

Insofar as teachers should come to see themselves, far from having sole responsi-bility for the ethical development of each student, as sharing with many others aresponsibility to contribute to the sustaining of a healthy ethical environment, thentheir 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 notmean that the teacher has failed in his or her aim, since the fact that an individualdoes not live up to the standards of his or her own ethical environment does notmean that the ethical environment itself has deteriorated.

Thinking in terms of the ethical environment may also help teachers to take aworkable view of the overall scope of values education. Though the term ‘valueseducation’ is sometimes used without distinction from ‘moral education’, such ausage renders one of the terms redundant. On the face of it, values education is abroader field than moral education, since not all values are moral ones. The ideathat what we recognize as morality is only one aspect of the ethical environment inwhich we live allows us to say that values education, being broader than moraleducation, has to do with the whole of the ethical environment. And in fact, acharacterization of values education as that area, or those aspects, of educationwhich have to do with the ethical environment seems to capture quite well thatwhich practitioners are likely to see as being included in values education. This maygo under different names in different countries; in England and Wales, the mostrelevant aspect of the curriculum is that called Personal, Social and Health Edu-cation (PSHE). Such a field will not be concerned solely with moral questions, onany usual understanding of that term, but will include, for instance, career choiceand lifestyle choices relating to health. The values people bring to bear in consider-ing such choices will often not be distinctively moral, but they will all be drawn fromthe surrounding ethical environment.

To say that the ethical environment provides the subject matter of values edu-cation is not, of course, to give any precise delimitation of the content. Rather, itsuggests that anything that can plausibly be considered part of the ethical environ-ment is a candidate for consideration within values education. Educationally, that isprobably the right approach as, though for pragmatic purposes syllabuses have to bedrawn up, a good teacher in this area will surely be able to recognize something

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which has not been identified in advance as part of the syllabus as nevertheless arelevant issue to consider.

So are there concrete implications for classroom practice from the proposal toconsider values education as a matter of sustaining a healthy ethical environment? Ina sense the answer is no, not because this picture of values education is irrelevant toclassroom practice, but because it questions the desirability of there being any onebest-practice model. By seeing diversity as healthy, it allows room for variation inteachers’ practice, since the variation may itself contribute to diversity across theethical environment. We probably in any case would not expect—if we think thereis a place for faith schools or other schools committed to a particular tradition ofvalues—that the practice of teachers in such schools would be just the same as thepractice of teachers in secular common schools. But equally we need not expect thatthe practice of every teacher within secular common schools should conform to asingle model.

The educational press not infrequently contains the recollections of individualsabout their schooling, and such recollections often contain memories of particularteachers who have been especially influential in an individual’s life. Such teacherswere 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, whowere committed to promoting some set of values that differed from or went beyondwhat was common across their society. Liberal sensibilities tend to be wary in suchcases that the values of an individual are being imposed on students, but we shouldremember both that what can be a lifelong inspiration to one student might leaveanother cold, and that all students in modern societies are subject to multipleinfluences. The dangers of indoctrination on an individual level are probablyrelatively small; the approach taken in this article suggests that the dangers of aone-dimensional ethical environment promoted through all schools pursuing acommon programme may be rather greater.

For the teacher in the classroom, as well as for whole programmes of valueseducation, diversity can be a positive resource (both for the obvious reasonsconcerning students learning from each other, and because any teacher of valueseducation will still have much to learn). Other things being equal, a classroom towhich students bring a wide range of perspectives will be a better micro-environmentfor values education than a more homogeneous one; but this is only one factoramong others, and the degree to which students do bring a range of perspectives willnot correlate very readily with whether a school is secular or faith-based. Since thereis diversity in the many aspects of the ethical environment that are internalizedwithin each of us, no classroom can be without the resources from which students’awareness of the ethical environment can be brought out and expanded. Teachersneed to respond positively to different perspectives coming from students, not onlyout of respect for individuals, and not only because differences of view can make formore lively lessons, but also to help all to be aware of the richness of the ethicalenvironment.

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 theimportance of the ethos of the school can only be reinforced by the environmentalperspective urged here. But this perspective does suggest that it cannot be sufficientto 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). Theaim of sustaining a healthy ethical environment needs populations who are aware oftheir ethical environment and its importance. Pedagogically, the most likely route toan awareness and reflectivity about the wider ethical environment will start fromawareness about the immediate ethical environment in classroom and school.

We should not be too eager to look for one common model of classroom practicefor values education. But the environmental picture of values education does suggesta way of formulating an overall aim that teachers should keep in mind, since eventhough the ethical environment is all around us, only some aspects of it are readilyvisible to any one individual at any one time. That aim is that individuals, howevermuch they may themselves be committed to a particular system of values, shoulddevelop and maintain an awareness of the enormous richness of the ethical environ-ment that human beings in the twenty-first century have inherited; they should beencouraged to reflect on that environment, appreciate its importance, accept theirshare of responsibility for it and be helped to negotiate their own way through it intheir lives.

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was presented at the Philosophy of Educationresearch seminar at the Institute of Education, University of London, 19 February2003. I would like to thank Janet Coldstream, Jane Green, Shirley Rowan and ananonymous 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 specifically that virtue ethics ‘is the part of ethics that concernseducators, trying to turn out people of the right sort’ (Blackburn, 1998, p. 28).

2. For more on diversity within the ethical environment (though not by that terminology) andits implications for education see Haydon (2000).

3. That the shaping of emotional responses is an important aspect of the ethical environmentis consistent with the broadly neo-Humean character of Blackburn’s ethical writings; seeBlackburn (1998). I suspect that ‘determines’ in the words quoted from Blackburn is notto be taken in a philosophically-loaded sense. The point is not that our ethical context leavesus no choice, but that it shapes the choices which are open to us.

4. Within moral philosophy, several writers have recognized a notion of ‘morality in the narrowsense’ 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 educa-tional context, Haydon (1999). The fact that ‘moral’ and ‘ethical’ can be used to mark thisdistinction is the reason that I do not follow Blackburn in speaking of ‘the moral or ethicalenvironment’.

Sustaining the ethical environment 129

5. The example of Nazi Germany draws our attention most obviously to the fact that an ethicalenvironment can be a bad one for people to live in; but we should not neglect the fact thatsome ethical environments, in which cruelty or indifference towards animals is the norm,will be bad ones for other animals, too.

6. A recent example in England and Wales was the exercise conducted by the SchoolCurriculum and Assessment Authority and its successor, the Qualifications and CurriculumAuthority (QCA), in the late 1990s, which resulted in a statement of values incorporatedinto National Curriculum documents (see, for example, Department for Education andEmployment (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)/Qualifications and Curriculum Authority

(QCA) (1999) The National Curriculum: handbook for secondary teachers in England (London,Department for Education and Employment/Qualifications 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 andteacher education (London, Falmer).

Mackie, J. (1977) Ethics: inventing right and wrong (Harmondsworth, Penguin).Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) (1998) Education for citizenship and the teaching

of democracy in schools (London, Qualifications 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-on-Trent, 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 (Cam-

bridge, Cambridge University Press).