Similarly the claim to respect “other values”, let alone the aim of teaching children to respect them, is transparently deceitful: there are some values/beliefs that will never be respected – and rightly so. There is no general benevolence in the Curriculum’s values, there is no acceptance of diversity, there is no respect of difference. “The teaching of values in this fashion essentially sees the task of education as the transformation of society, instead of for its intrinsic value as the disinterested study of the best that has been done and thought.”162 The Curriculum specifies a small selection of beliefs to which all children are to be conformed and by which society is to be transformed. The national Curriculum is to induct the children of New Zealand into an official national belief system. For the first time in New Zealand’s history, we now have a compulsory national religion, and the only consultation to which parents will be invited is a discussion on how that religion is to be expressed in their local school. The belief system of values is radically different from a conventional moral system. Ten years ago, Michal Irwin commented: Since Nietzsche introduced the world ‘values’ in its current meaning, many writers have spoken of personal values but not of truth, of beliefs but not of facts, of an individual’s attitudes but not of right and wrong. … The key new notion is that the value attached to a thing or concept is essentially an individual calculation. Values are something ‘which the individual has chosen or possess rather than something which the individual seeks or responds to.’163 The only thing that has changed in the intervening ten years is that values are now deemed to be something the group has chosen or possesses, rather than an individual calculation. By constraining the discussion to Nietzsche’s anti-moral values, the state is conforming everyone to that construction. Discussion of values as a curriculum theme by its very nature conforms everyone taking part to the denial of individual morality and to necessary conformity to the whims of the group. It does not matter therefore what decisions are made by groups of parents “consulting”: by taking part in the consultation parents inescapably endorse the idea that group values replace personal morality. One might ask what is the point of consultation? What is the place of consultation in implementing the teaching of values that are already specified by regulation? The answer of course is that the consultation with parents, as it was with teachers, is a device to publicly obligate parents to buy-into the new values education. Having taken part in the consultation, which parent will dare stand against community acquiescence to teach the values of the curriculum even though everyone will know that the values to be taught were already defined before the consultation took place? The purpose of such consultation is to conform parents to the mob, and to conform the mob to the despotism of the Ministry of Education. Some might object that during the consultation phase with parents, schools will be able to define variations and place particular interpretations on the values to be taught. That is true: but it is also utterly futile. In the first place, it matters not a dot that one local school defines the “value” of “excellence”164 in one way and another in another. They will only be able to modify it within the parameters specified in the Curriculum, so they are conforming to the dictates of the state even when they appear to be making independent choices. Quoting Thomas J Sergiovanni, A Ministry of Education guide to implementing the National Curriculum says: Visions (principles and values) cannot be routinely mandated ... Instead they need to be discovered or forged as a consequence of everyone learning, problem solving, striving to reach a higher moral level of operation and finding sense and meaning … This process promotes learning.165 But more importantly, the Curriculum itself specifies that the real meanings of values are what a group of children gives to them, and that those meanings are temporary and fluid. In other words, 162
ibid Michael Irwin From Virtues and Vices to Passionate Values Independent Christian Schools Fellowship, Auckland, 1999 p2. The quotation he uses is attributed to Habgood, J (1990), “Are Moral Values Enough?”, British Journal of Educational Studies, vol. XXXVlll, No. 2, May. 164 One of the values specified 165 Preparing to Lead Curriculum Change—Vision, Principles and Values undated p7 163
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