Whatever Happened to Values Clarification?

In the mid-1960s, prompted by a bestselling education book, a classroom approach called “Values Clarification” spread swiftly among elementary and secondary school teachers. The thrust of the approach was to have students use textbooks and instructional materials to identify their values and reflect on them in discussion, writing, and small-group work where those values would often came into conflict. In effect, help students work through their positions on such values as patriotism, truth, trust, lying, etc. Where Did the Idea Originate? Louis Raths, a professor at New York University in the mid-1950s, working with John Dewey’s ideas about the importance of values in education, developed for his college classes materials and teaching strategies that got his students to think about what they prized in life. He, Sidney Simon, and Merrill Harmin published Values and Teaching: Working with Values in Classrooms in 1966. The book went through subsequent editions and became a staple in…