By: Sidney B. Simon
Values clarification has been the centerpin and the joy of my professional life for almost 40 years. I learned values clarification form Louis Raths, my teacher at New York University, in the mid –‘50s. Raths lived and breathed values clarification, and his fire and passion affected almost every one of his graduate students. I remember vividly the very first values clarification lesson Raths taught us.
It’s World Series time, circa 1955. We’re in New York City, and passions are running high. The Brooklyn Dodgers are matched against the New York Yankees. Raths poses these questions to all of us: “Which team in all of baseball is your favorite team? And which team do you hate the most?: We dutifully wrote those “values” down, and in a small group, we discussed them briefly. Incidentally, 40 years ago, students didn’t normally work in small groups to discuss things, but in Raths’s classes you did.
After the small-group discussion, Raths asked the zinger question: “If all the members on the team you love were traded to the team you hate and you got all of their players, which team do you now root for?” I will never forget the wild and wooly discussions that followed, and how values issues of loyalty, love, hate , circumstance, patriotism, how we’ve been programmed to think, and at least a dozen other values were explored, challenged, and ultimately clarified.
And week after week in Raths’s classes we learned the intricate process called values clarification. Over the 40 years I have plied that subtle craft, I believe thousands of students, and even more participants in our workshops, and maybe a million readers of our books, have benefited from the joyous values clarification work that Raths started.
Let me tell you about just one small but vivid example of what that values clarification joy looked like. From 1954 to 1957, I taught 10th grade core curriculum at the New Lincoln School in New York City. It was a private progressive school,, maybe the liveliest place I have ever taught in, and values clarification was at the heard of all that I taught.
Each year at New Lincoln my 10th grade class took a week-long field trip to Washington, D.C. Our core theme was politics and government, so we organized a field trip to see our national government close up.
Our trip began with some crucial decision making, decisions made from a values clarification perspective. First, we made the decision that I would not make one phone call or write one letter. If phone calls were to be made, students would make them. If letters were to be written students would write them.
The second decision was also worked out with the class. We would do al the planning as a class. We would break down into small planning committees; each would tackle the variety of problems that had to be faced. We must have spent a full week brainstorming all the problems, chores, and experiences that a trip of this scope entails. We considered little things. Where do we stay? How do we get there? Where does the money come from? What about sex? And discipline? Alcohol and privacy? The list had well over a hundred items. I mad sure it contained student time in the Senate Gallery, visits to our congressperson, committee hearings, interviews of lobbyists, and visits to the shrines of our democracy, as well as to the Phillips Art Gallery, the Smithsonian, and Arlington National Cemetery. WE even negotiated a social event with an all-black high school class, a pretty radical event in the mid –‘50s.
Do you have any idea about how many values issues came up in that planning process? (I remember one sticky one: Should the rich kids be allowed to bring along as much spending money as they wanted? Was that what freedom of choice is about?) AS the issues came up , every member in that class learned the values clarification process. They also learned how to fight for that incredibly powerful idea that the majority rules, of course, but that the majority also has a responsibility to consider the objections of the minority and meet them in some way. Democracy is more than just counting votes. It involves negotiation, compromise, an compassion. Merely for your side to win is not enough. Instead, you commit to working long enough so everyone wins.
Those three years of week-long field trips to Washington, D.C. totally planned and carried out by the students themselves, are among the greatest joys in my 40 years of teaching.
But there is one more part of those joyous New Lincoln years to tell you about. Each year, when we got back form the trip, after the journals were shared, letters of thanks written, and summary reports delivered, we had the task of doing our annual 10th grade assembly for the whole school.
For some classes the assembly was a play, the ubiquitous senior play, a chorus program, or the staging of a town meeting debate. For us, it was always a variety show, with one most fascinating difference. Every student in the class committed to being on stage. In some way. In my value system, if we had a class assembly, then the whole class would be involved, not just the 20 best singers or the 6 best actors.
So, once again the class broke down into small units, and each unit produced its piece of the revue. We had dramatic scenes from important plays. We had comedy sketches, sometimes brilliant satires, musical presentations, shadow plays, pantomimes, and poetry read to modern dance. Our variety shows were always long on variety.
But we had another values dimension as well. Everyone learned how to work the lights, and everyone learned how and when to pull the curtain. We all pitched in to produce the printed program, the costumes, and the makeup. One of my most joyous moments was to see someone who had just done an exquisite dance piece bow to thunderous applause and then dash to the balcony to relieve her “light man” because his skit was on two slots down the program. When he was done, he pulled the curtain to open the next act. So it went.
We always ended with a grand finale, with the whole class on stage at one time. The finale was usually a musical item, with new words teasingly written to some popular song and staged so whoever was working lights would se the lights and race back down out of the balcony in time to be in the finale.
We all triumphed. Everyone had a place. Sure, some had more of a triumph, but often because they risked more, not that they necessarily had more talent. Isn’t that a value worth teaching?
I have lost touch with most of those students form 40 years ago. The school merged and then, finally and sadly, was closed. But I know wherever they are, those New Lincoln School students will remember what we did. Washington, I bet, will always have a place in their consciousness and in their values. I bet, too, that whenever they go to the theater, a little corner of their psychic memory holds the vision of a 10th grade assembly, where the lights person arrives breathless but proud to take part in a tumultuous finale.
Thanks, Louis Raths. Thanks form the bottom of my heart for values clarification and the joy it brought to my teaching.
-The End-
This article appeared in TEACHING FOR JOY, edited by Robert Sornson and James Scott, Assoc. for Curriculum and Development.