Values production through social and emotional learning

Abstract

This chapter considers if social and emotional learning(SEL) schemes have the potential to marginalise and promote certain values, norms and behaviours, to guard against cultural pollution. It explores the historical underpinnings of values education and highlights concerns regarding values production via the national and hidden curriculum. Education serves a function for society as it should shape social beings by instilling shared moral traditions, practices and ideals. Such opinion is also demonstrable in terminology of various acts of parliament in the United Kingdom, like 1944 Education Act and the Education Reform Act 1988, which both identified the central role of education system in values production. The National Curriculum, which stemmed from latter of these acts, was the first step in explicitly recognising the integral tenet of schooling in shaping the values of pupils, by making it compulsory for schools. Current educational policy and its narrow emphasis on academic performance is one of the obvious barriers to the realisation of mutual reach.