Professional Values and Standards

Social Justice

"Social Justice is the view that everyone deserves equal economic, political and social rights and opportunities now and in the future"

This was a statement on a slide on day 2 of my teacher training.  It comes from the General Teaching Council for Scotland's statement of professional values. 

By day 4, I had heard it again in a lecture about the Scottish government's child "wellbeing" policy:  GIRFEC.  I felt the lecture was highly politicised and, for that matter I thought the term "social justice" and even more so, its definition above, was a political statement.  That statement is not one I disagree with, but still, I get uncomfortable when education becomes political.

Or is social justice a value, like honesty?  The idea that honesty is not a political statement is not controversial, in the way that "social justice" is not a political statement might be.  And I find it unsettling that these different things are being mixed up.

Trust and Respect

"Trust and respect" are expectations of positive actions that support authentic relationship building and show care for the need and feelings of the people involved and respect for our natural world and its limited resources

This is gobbledegook to me, partly because it is ungrammatical. I feel on the one hand we are supposed to just accept this meaningless attempt at a sentence while at the same time we are urged to engage critically with what we are taught, the research, the policies. So which is it? Let's look at the sentence again. It's difficult to untangle what is meant here, there are about seven different concepts crammed into this sentence, which would be less of a problem if the structures and grammar linking them were not so tenuous or downright incorrect. To point out just one: "need" should be plural. 

First, trust and respect are not at all the same. Just respecting someone is a far cry from trusting them. You can't expect trust. You earn it. Everyone though, has some entitlement, just as fellow human beings to respect. For what it's worth - which I can't say I think is much - I have tried to put this into a clear and meaningful English sentence: 

Teachers are expected to build supportive, respectful relationships with children and young people and with their colleagues. These respectful relationships also extend to our natural world and its limited resources

So far we have one political concept and two others, conroversially linked together in almost unintelligible language.  You'll excuse me if I leave the other two.

How a silversmith came up with the values that underpin Scottish educational policy

                              

The number of slogans and buzzwords in Scottish education beggars belief.  It feels as though an army of marketeers or ad-men in the Scottish government are paid to dream these up up and build them into policy. 

Here's one.  According to the "Statement for Practitioners" from HM Chief Inspector of Education, 

"The Scottish approach to the curriculum is values based. Wisdom, justice, compassion and integrity define the values for Scottish society.  

'For' is such a little word, but significant.  Why didn't they say 'of''? I guess because the values are being defined, well, for you.  They are not arising from the people, they are of not of the people. Perhaps they are, coincidentally; but in this case they are being defined for you.  And this is a tiny, but significant clue to the culture of education policy, management and training in Scotland, and as such an indicator of the culture of the implementation of those policies.

So where did these values come from? They are written in gold, gold apparently panned from Scottish rivers, and set in silver in the ceremonial mace which the queen presented to the Scottish Parliament when it opened.  As this post explains, Donald Dewar spoke these words to the nation in his speech at the opening ceremony in 1999. 

The Curriculum for Excellence was published only four years later, so it was decided that these values should underpin CfE.   But why these words?  As the author of that blog post points out: "There are lots of other great-sounding words after all - honesty, fairness, tolerance, trust for example. And since we are talking about Scotland, how about thrift, prudence or financial propriety?" 

It was the silversmith who made the mace who dreamed up the words.  Because Scotland is a village, the blog author's mum knew someone who knew someone who knew Michael Lloyd.  Apparently, "the words he chose were simply accepted, without the need for debate or approval by a grand committee". Does that count as "of the people". Apparently there was a fifth word:  'courage', but there was no room for it on the mace.