**Education (***Bildung***) for Values**

**Education (***Bildung***) for Values**

#### Zdenko Medveš Zdenko Medveš Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

Additional information is available at the end of the chapter

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.72450

#### **Abstract**

The article develops the thesis that a universal value basis for holistic education (*Bildung*) is provided by a plural moral system in which various ethical discourses are constructively interwoven. This is more successful for education and allows the individual a broader evaluation of alternatives in moral action. The plurality of a moral system supposes the presence of various ethical discourses, including the ethics of human rights (liberal discourse), the ethics of the common good (communitarian discourse) and the ethics of interpersonal relations (the ethics of care). In interweaving all three of these discourses in education, the teacher should use common sense, which we define as the power of judgement and a sense of community. This is followed by views on how to model organise educational practices that stimulate the creation of an ethically plural educational environment in open communication, where the learner develops the ability to make judicious decisions with regard to moral action without having to submit passively to common norms.

DOI: 10.5772/intechopen.72450

**Keywords:** human rights, liberal discourse, communitarian discourse, discourse of the ethics of care, the child as the medium of education, education as internalisation and as communication, autopoietic pedagogy

#### **1. Introduction**

The primary topic of pedagogy (Slovene: *pedagogika*; German: *Pädagogik*) is **vzgoja**. The Slovene term *vzgoja* is translated here as "education," but it should be noted that we understand *vzgoja* more as an approximation of the German category of *Bildung*<sup>1</sup> . Enquiry about education (*Bildung*) is the essence of pedagogical enquiry. Education (*Bildung*) is education

Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2018 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons

<sup>1</sup> The English translation "education" will be followed by the German word *Bildung* in brackets in those cases where education is meant more as the formation of spiritual image (internalisation of an image of humanity or the social), but not where it is used as a common term or as a predominantly instrumental process (development of the capacities of judgement, evaluation, learning; sensibilisation of the emotions).

(*Bildung*) for values par excellence. For values in different fields: aesthetics (the beautiful), ethics (the moral), science (truth), physical development (the body), sport, interpersonal relations, attitudes towards the self and others, attitudes towards nature, the economy and so on. The acquisition of knowledge and the development of abilities is somehow secondary, but nevertheless important, because knowledge substantiates and supports values. Without knowledge, education (*Bildung*) for values would be a naked ideological construct [1].

young generation and what is good for the child [2]. On the other hand, there is the common good as a starting point. Plato illustrated this very dramatically in his allegory of the cave, out of which only a philosopher can lead us from imprisonment in the world of shadows towards the light that "is indeed the cause for all things of all that is right and beautiful … and that anyone who is to act wisely in private or public must have caught sight of this" [3]. This path

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Two views of values are highlighted, leading to very different attitudes about the importance of the human being as individual. Plato understands value as valuable in itself. It is universally valid and the individual human being can add nothing to it. Mollenhauer, on the other hand, takes the perspectives of the young generation and the individual as a criterion, rather than universal validity. Value thus "arises" in a concrete discourse of existence. It is not definitively clear where the answer to the dilemma of Mollenhauer and Plato may lie. Even contemporary pedagogy, which adopts a different attitude towards the child from that adopted by traditional pedagogy, is unable to renounce offering young people ideals as a form of imagined excellences in the development of abilities and moral virtues. This striving towards excellence is supposed to be encouraged today by education for human rights [4]. Even when it comes to exercising human rights, it is never possible to be satisfied with what has been achieved, since societal practices show that the exercise of these rights is not self-evident, and there is no guarantee that the achieved state would be maintained without striving towards a better one. On the one hand, there are calls for pedagogy to give up the idealisation of educational objectives and replace them with realistic and realisable goals, and above all to build on the understanding of the child as a capable, rich being [5]. Even today, pedagogy has no true response to this alternative. On the other hand, the advocates of realism are increasingly rare among theorists, while the majority continue to impose new and increasingly idealised tasks even on the modern school. It not

from the cave is the Greek *paidea*: education (*Bildung*) from slavery to humanity.

infrequently happens that these tasks are mutually contradictory in their very essence.

the loss of conscience and intimate personal soul-searching.

The challenges of modern pedagogy also derive from the crisis being suffered by the sciences that border on it and on which it has relied. Let us take Herbart's *Allgemeine Pädagogik* from the early nineteenth century, on which the stable primary school practices of education (*Bildung*), teaching and learning were based for more than a century, until somewhere around the 1930s. This built on a widely held belief in the solid applicability of associative psychology and Kantian ethics. Today, on the other hand, proficiency in psychology is common to the many fields from which the various schools of thought about successful teaching and learning grow, and this in itself is a challenge. While a pluralism of views enriches the educational practices of teaching and learning, it leads to a series of difficulties in the field of education. Dilemmas for education also arise in the ethical field, particularly when ethicists, philosophers and anthropologists talk about a decline in values, the twilight of ethics and morals and

Can human rights fill the moral vacuum in modern society? It is true that they are conceived as a common ideal of all peoples, but their implementation in the legal system can cause problems, as we will see below. Will the law be able to substitute ethics and morals? With what consequences? If we transfer the ethical criteria of public life into schools, we can expect schools to react to this and only prevent that which is prohibited by rules. In this way, education (*Bildung*)

Pedagogy is conceived as a normative discipline. Without an answer to the question of what the goal of education (*Bildung*) actually is, it is blind as a science and unable to defend itself against the multiple influences through which various centres of influence and power attempt to win over young people in modern society. That is why values are so much in the foreground in pedagogy. In this article, we will first consider the goal of education (*Bildung*) on the basis of theoretical analyses of various ethical discourses in order to consolidate the theory of the importance of pluralism in the educational concept of the public school. We will conclude the article with a conceptual proposal for the implementation of educational practice, where we propose a model of *differentiated moral communication* through which an open space is created for moral judgement and decision-making on the part of the individual, who is at the same time encouraged to reflect on various fields of the moral: human rights, the common good and the quality of interpersonal relations. The differentiated moral communication model is based on numerous reports from educational practice prepared by students of educational sciences at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana over the last decade.
