Let's not confuse the education of values with the value of education

In the perfect world, our schooling feeds and waters the enquiring mind, and teaches us to expand our thought rather than blinker it. To question even the most established knowledge. To think empirically and artistically. To think linearly and laterally. To grapple with orthodoxy and heterodoxy. To discipline thought as well as to set it free. To not be afraid to look foolish in order to learn. To not be enticed into accepting anyone's viewpoint as the final word. To:

read not from one book only
rather from a hundred sources gather honeyed lore,
thou art else that helpless bird, whom once its nest is plundered
ne'er can build another more

Contrary to the position held by our Prime Minister, schools are not, and ought not be, the source of a value system. This is because education should serve no master lest it falls prey to subversive ends

Indeed the opposite is true, the aspirations of an educational institution ought be to offer information in a value free or at least value neutral setting. Indoctrination of values is a contradiction born out of fear. We should not be afraid of ideas or encouraging our children to think freely, to experience the emancipation of curiosity, free from judgment or sentiment.

Poets more eloquent than I, have captured in imagery the boundless human intellect:

Something brightened toward the north.
It caught his eye, they say,
And then he flew right up against it.
He pushed his mind through
And pulled his body after. Skaay

Most mornings we turn a door handle and walk out into the larger world (Ralston Saul 2001). The degree to which that world is constructed or real is the degree to which we question it, and the degree to which we push our mind through the veil of perceptions.

Education is the process by which we learn to harness the power of the mind to take each of us to unchartered places. A journey upon which we learn to sift through the available information and make informed and reasoned deductions. The happening by which we learn to scrutinise, as well as draw pleasure, allowing us to listen to world news and hear the sub text, to listen to a piece of classical music and understand its deepest promptings.

We develop the mind informally through experience, reading and travel and formally through a progression of primary, secondary, and for some tertiary, levels of sophistication.

But what does John Howard mean by values?

If by values Howard means that children today are less mannerly, I will wager most parents do not send their children to school to learn "please" and "thankyou" or to be socialised.

If by values Howard means his own values, then curricula in Australian schools will need to be re-written to reflect dogma in preference to ideas.

Howard is so busy tying us up for his own exclusive ends - promoting his own middle class democracy and false wisdoms - that he is not content until has poisoned even our most impressionable minds.

Early childhood indoctrination is reminiscent of European Fascist politics such as Mousollini's Italy, where youths were recruited on the Jesuit principle of "Give me the child until he is seven and ill give you the man"

One can only speculate on what values Howard would have installed in our children.

Perhaps our children would be taught foreign policy through a narrow prism of Australian/US relations. Perhaps they would learn to accept, as fact, the fallacious link between the plight of refugees and the threat to national security or the interrelation between the threat of international terrorism and the invasion of Iraq. Perhaps children might be encouraged to see the merit in never reconciling past wrongs to indigenous Australia, or urged to despise the unemployed as job shy.

We all possess our own unconscious bias and we all practice ignorance. But bias and ignorance ought not be perpetuated under the guise of a value system. It is so easy to shape developing minds through what we emphasise and more importantly what we omit.

But half truths are not what we want for our children's education but rather an environment free from ultimate truths, value laden posturing, institutionalised thinking and thought regimes, for this is not education but rather an abuse of position.

A teacher's role is to propose not impose streams of thought. For without offering the rule and the exception, the mainstream and the alternative - they present an incomplete world.

How many of us learned Australian History from the ethnocentric beginning point of 1788 and the arrival of the first fleet? Conveniently, indigenous Australia was neatly explained away in one line of our text books, perpetuating the lie of terra nullius. How many learned of only one God without reference to other world religions.

I accept there is need for structural foundations in every child's life, but would argue that the best teachers are those that teach us how to think, rather than what to think. Our most profound mentors are those that liberate our thought, rather than fix it to doctrine.

We must all arrive at our own value system as a consequence of free thought. Even the most well-meaninged value system will constrain us before we have an opportunity to formulate what we value.

If there are pillars of education they are, in my view, these:

• Values have no place in education.
• Education has no value but itself.
• Education has no dollar value because it is the greatest gift of life.
• Education is only privilege extended unless made accessible for everyone on an egalitarian basis.

On this score Whitlam got it right and Howard so terribly wrong.