There is much debate about the place and purpose of values education in public schools. For example, should values be taught in schools? If so, what and whose values should be taught? And how should they be taught? Explicitly in the overt curriculum, or implicitly in the ‘hidden curriculum’? How have schools positioned values education in the past, and how are they going about it today?

These are questions that we asked when, as an assessment task for one of the courses in our Education degree, ‘Constructing Curriculum’, we were presented with the following question:

Explore the issue of ‘values education’ in schools.
How should values be positioned and
represented in curriculum?

We did not feel we could adequately address such a broad question in the parameters of this task. We decided, therefore, to refine the question by focussing on the National Framework for Values Education in Australian Schools.

We used Boughton’s model of deconstruction as a starting point, and devised our own model to deconstruct the Framework. We looked at:

We also looked briefly at a history of values education in Australia in order to broaden our understanding of how and why the Framework was developed.

This website outlines our findings.