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Resolved: The object of education should be to teach skills, not values.
Describe a specific situation in which the object of education might be teaching values rather than skills. Discuss what you think determines when the object of education is to teach skills and when it is to teach values.
It is often said that those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. Consider Holocaust education. The explicit aim of building awareness of the Holocaust is to ensure that another genocide of the Jews shall “never again” occur. If we privilege cultural sensitivity as a skill, then Holocaust educators reinforce cultural sensitivity, inhibit pathologic anti-semitism, and promote a preference for Jewish nationalism, while leaving attentive museum-goers with a universal narrative that describes the course of genocide, such that they can recognize and oppose the emotional stampedes that lead populations toward genocide.
As for technical education, in the course of a master teaching a skill to a pupil, the values that undergird the master’s craft will diffuse, or undergo active transport, to the pupil. Skill-building is inseparable from the development and refinement of moral taste, for all education unavoidably affects students’ orientation to and pursuit of truth, goodness, beauty, nobility and happiness. How can a potter instruct a student in her art, without relaying criteria for the assessment and determination of excellence? Values are coincident and coeval with craft, for women and men, boys and girls love that which they make or do. Since time immemorial, moneymakers loved money, dancers dance, and potters pots. Nowhere else is this more evident than in the pupil’s choice of how to spend their time, both at work and at leisure.
The resolution above (“The object of education should be to teach skills, not values”) presents a false dichotomy, and a false schism, between skills and values, because skills entail values and values entail skills. Education should teach skills by influencing and reinforcing the values of their craft, while embedding the craft’s values in students in the course of student skill development. This holds true whether the skills we value (or the values we enskill) are genocide avoidance and recognition or tissue healing and engineering.
