**2. Inculcation of values or obligations towards the law**

How to prepare young generations for life is a fundamental question of human evolution. No period and no civilisation have been able to avoid it. Every civilisation has approached the search for the right path in its own way, and numerous possibilities have developed, including some that have been controversial. Every period and every social community have traced its own paths, since education is a typical phenomenon of culture and cultural differences. This means that evaluating educational practices is never simple. It is only in the last half-century that children's rights and human rights have started to be treated as an important criterion for the assessment of educational practices. Regarding the aims of education, pedagogical theories still offer no clear answer as to what is more important when it comes to preparing the young generation for life: a vision of the future of society or an empirically clear conception of how to trace a path in such a way that the individual will be able to walk along it independently. Some pedagogical theorists devote far more attention to developing ideals, while others emphasise the young generation's right to shape the culture of its own life. It may be that behind all the controversial possibilities that history has brought to our understanding of the education of the young, the most difficult question is whether the adult generation is entitled to decide on what path is right for the young generation. This is, in fact, the eternal question of what values in education should be based on. On the one hand, there is the awareness that we always decide on the education of children and young people with the perspectives of others, and it is therefore fair to think about what perspectives are best for the 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 from the cave is the Greek *paidea*: education (*Bildung*) from slavery to humanity.

(*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

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

How to prepare young generations for life is a fundamental question of human evolution. No period and no civilisation have been able to avoid it. Every civilisation has approached the search for the right path in its own way, and numerous possibilities have developed, including some that have been controversial. Every period and every social community have traced its own paths, since education is a typical phenomenon of culture and cultural differences. This means that evaluating educational practices is never simple. It is only in the last half-century that children's rights and human rights have started to be treated as an important criterion for the assessment of educational practices. Regarding the aims of education, pedagogical theories still offer no clear answer as to what is more important when it comes to preparing the young generation for life: a vision of the future of society or an empirically clear conception of how to trace a path in such a way that the individual will be able to walk along it independently. Some pedagogical theorists devote far more attention to developing ideals, while others emphasise the young generation's right to shape the culture of its own life. It may be that behind all the controversial possibilities that history has brought to our understanding of the education of the young, the most difficult question is whether the adult generation is entitled to decide on what path is right for the young generation. This is, in fact, the eternal question of what values in education should be based on. On the one hand, there is the awareness that we always decide on the education of children and young people with the perspectives of others, and it is therefore fair to think about what perspectives are best for the

knowledge, education (*Bildung*) for values would be a naked ideological construct [1].

74 New Pedagogical Challenges in the 21st Century - Contributions of Research in Education

at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana over the last decade.

**2. Inculcation of values or obligations towards the law**

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

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 the loss of conscience and intimate personal soul-searching.

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*) would undergo a complete shift of paradigm: education for values would be replaced by the development of obligations towards the law and rules. We could characterise this is a paradox: school-based education for values without values, since legal norms form the field of constraint (discipline) and values the field of freedom (vzgoja – *Bildung*). Instead of awakening the internal voice of the conscience, school would reinforce the fear of punishment. When education does not reach deeply into the interior of a person, it disappears as education (*Bildung*). But fear of punishment is already traditionally understood by pedagogy as *disciplining*, not as educating. To paraphrase Kant: discipline is a condition of freedom; it is only a condition, but freedom is only enabled to the subject by cultivation. Without education (*Bildung*), the process of humanisation of a human being is not possible. An alternative announces itself in the development of the school: education or discipline? Successful education (*Bildung*) for values can of course be maintained if the school is based on a clear value system, which, with regard to criteria in public life, clearly means that ethical standards in the school must be higher than in civil society and commercial transactions. Immorality must not be permitted among students.

supposed to resolve the question of social inequality and selectiveness in education2

**3. Ideological uniformity, emancipation and the plural community**

dilutes the effectiveness of the educator's endeavours.

serious burden.

2

is merely proof that there is insufficient willingness in politics to address the problems of inequalities in society, which for schools and the education (*Bildung*) of modern youth is a

The more frequent questions of the modern theory of education and educational practice are those deriving from difficulties related to pluralism. In one way or another, all the dilemmas of education, in particular, those that revolve around values and, consequently, authority, are tied to pluralism. Pluralism has always represented a problem for pedagogy. In traditional pedagogy, which derived from religious and philosophically and ideologically unitary views, pluralism was "guilty" of educational ineffectiveness, since this pedagogy believes that the more uniform the education (in terms of views and values), the stronger its educational effect. Cultural pluralism and, in particular, the pluralism of values and views, was believed to create a confusion that reduces the clarity of the educator's messages and preferences and thus

The question is: can pedagogy theoretically justify pluralism as its ideal? This would have been impossible even in the middle of the last century. Education (*Bildung*) in the spirit of the historically tried and tested 2000-year tradition and classical European culture was the only framework that filled teachers with confidence in the effectiveness of education (*Bildung*). The provocative new elements born of the art of the first half of the last century could not get through the school door. Not even critical pedagogy accepted the idea of pluralism, in the sense of cultural pluralism, as its central aim. Critical or emancipatory pedagogy (both terms were used by mid-twentieth century German theorists such as Wolfgang Klafki, Klaus Mollenhauer and Herwig Blankerz) was in fact tied to the critical theory of society and defined the goals of education as the formation of the mature, critical and emancipated subject [2]. Within critical theory, however, Horkheimer's investigations showed that emancipation can also be a mistaken educational goal. Horkheimer developed the concept of emancipation in two mutually incompatible senses. First, he defined emancipation as a behaviour (*Verhalten*) oriented towards the liberation of the human being from dependence on irrational social mechanisms and pressures. In this interpretation, emancipation is the central positive message of the critical theory of society. The aim of emancipation is to rearrange the irrational and ideological mechanisms of social cohesion into a free arrangement of the life of society founded on reason [7]. Emancipatory pedagogy did not highlight this social dimension of emancipation in its interpretation of the aim of education, as may be understood from the above quotation from Mollenhauer. Instead it understands emancipation individualistically, as the opportunity for

The constitutional provision that put an end to the fierce political debates about social selection in the Gymnasium system of upper secondary education is a true caricature: "A child's aptitude, interests, performance and inner calling shall be authoritative for his/her enrolment in a school rather than the economic and social position of the child's parents" (Constitution of the Free State of Bavaria, Article 132). This is reminiscent of the caricature of justice and equality expressed long ago by Anatole France: in a democracy, it will be forbidden for both rich and poor to sleep under bridges.

. All this

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Education (*Bildung*) for Values

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

It should be pointed out that a lower tolerance of evil and the demand for higher ethical standards in schools and in public life trigger an enormous mass of problems. The question that raises itself is that of how to present higher life preferences to young people in schools when public experience shows them that envy, greed and shamelessness are becoming everyday emotions. How are young people supposed to accept higher ethical standards when they are constantly faced, in everyday life, with the facilely narcissistic ideology of a modern society that cultivates the belief that the individual should not be frightened of difficulties because the opportunities for social success and advancement are unlimited? Neoliberalism further strengthens narcissistic ideology, in that it satisfies ambitious interests and encourages the idea that every individual can create a position for themselves and acquire wealth, and that opportunities for advancement and social ascent will offer themselves spontaneously. In this logic, even education as a factor of upward social mobility has lost much of the lustre it still possessed during the expansion of education in the middle of the last century. This introduces further disquiet into schools. As Beck says, formal education may still be necessary, but it is no longer a sufficient condition to guarantee better employment and more prestigious jobs for all sections of the population. Modern society really does tell the individual that they can achieve everything, that everything is possible, but on the other hand, warns Beck, even the simplest glance at social reality, as revealed by simple statistics, shows that we are living in a risk society where opportunities for growth and prosperity are always matched by the equal possibility of collapse and destruction [6]. If we follow the idea of *Risk Society*, we find that the expansion of education is merely a product of neoliberal logic. Society offers opportunities for education to everyone, which strengthens the idea of the success of the individualistic society more than it provides realistic life prospects. In the end, however, the individual is also to blame for collapse and unfortunate circumstances in life. The "society of possibilities" is thus at the same time a "society of risk." This is a consistent derivation of neoliberalism. The individual is ultimately to blame not only for their social rise but also for their fall. The state offers fewer and fewer guarantees and there is increasing indifference towards citizens' rights. Social rights are somehow pushed to the margin, including the right to education. Expressions of cynical indifference include non-binding constitutional provisions that are supposed to resolve the question of social inequality and selectiveness in education2 . All this is merely proof that there is insufficient willingness in politics to address the problems of inequalities in society, which for schools and the education (*Bildung*) of modern youth is a serious burden.
