The Australian Values Education Programme took centre stage at recent moral education conferences in Moscow and Kiev. As chief investigator of a number of research projects attached to the programme, I was invited by the Russian and Ukrainian governments to present their findings first in Moscow last year and again there and in Kiev earlier this month. The conferences were hosted jointly by the state ministries of education and the professional academies, signifying the interest in both countries in moral education and holistic education in general.

In both countries, the quest to uncover and implement a pedagogy that can provide the range of knowledge, skills and attitudes for generational change in schools and higher education is high on the agenda of the two governments. This priority was shown by the high-level participation of government ministers, academy presidents, political advisors, university researchers and school bureaucrats and executive.

A number of presentations proposed that, in part at least, some of the more crippling personal, social and political issues besetting the two nations related to a loss of the moral (and therefore humane) component of earlier priorities in education. Hence, moral education is perceived as a way of re-inserting a focus on humane education as a pedagogical imperative.

There is, therefore, great interest in updated research about multiple intelligences (including social, emotional, moral and spiritual intelligences) and in pedagogical practices that attempt to construct learning regimes that do justice to these wider conceptions of intelligence.

This is where the Australian Values Education Programme becomes important because it rests explicitly on the concept that best practice pedagogy is inherently a moral and humane, as well as an intellectual endeavour. The programme now has an array of comprehensive findings showing that such an approach to pedagogy yields results across the range of developmental measures, including enhanced resilience, improved relationships, sensitised conscience about social justice, and academic diligence.

In Australia, the results pertain mainly to the values education good practice schools project. This comprises 316 schools across the country, representing more than 60,000 students, 2,500 teachers and in excess of 50 university academics serving as investigators and/or 'academic friends' to particular projects.

An allied project managed by the Australian Council of Deans of Education has focused on the implications of the findings for teacher education and for higher education in general. The results present a challenge for many traditional assumptions that underpin teacher education, as well as the assumptions behind university education as a whole. The priority for humane education, driven by concepts of multiple intelligences, is as pertinent to higher education as it is to schools.

In Ukraine, the findings from the Australian study fit well with attempts in that country to revive some of its earlier revolutionary thoughts about education, thoughts that have been partly overwhelmed by post-Soviet politics.

One of the 20th century's greatest educational minds was the Ukrainian Vasily Sukhomlinsky, who died in 1970. Although his definitive biography results from an Australian PhD, he is far too little known in the West, partly because his major work occurred behind the 'Iron Curtain' and likely did not fit with Western stereotypes about the tenor of Soviet morality and its educational focus.

Sukhomlinsky placed 'education of the heart' as a way of conceiving the importance of dealing with the whole person, including the emotional, social and moral person. Like Dewey, he proposed that education was principally a moral quest by which a future generation could be provided with personal emotional security and the foundations for effective social citizenry. Far from the stereotype that these things did not matter in the Soviet Union, Sukhomlinsky was in fact accorded the status of 'Hero of Socialist Labour' for his contribution to education.

In Russia and Ukraine, one senses pride in their educational traditions and a renewed willingness to share these with the West, as well as receive the new insights coming from Western pedagogical research. Findings from the Australian Values Education Program were well received and a new and rare dialogue between Australian research and the too-little-known research traditions of the former Eastern Bloc has been established.

* Professor Terry Lovat is pro vice-chancellor (education and arts) at the University of Newcastle in Australia. (Terry.Lovat@newcastle.edu.au)
See also Lovat, T. & Toomey, R. (2007). Values Education and Quality Teaching: The double helix effect. Sydney: David Barlow


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