Values Education in the Early Years

Speakers:

Christina Easton (University of Warwick): “Early years reading programmes and LGBT-affirmative education”
Liz Pemberton (The Black Nursery Manager): “Why Anti-Racist Practice is Important in the Early Years” 
Dominic Wyse (Institute of Education, UCL): Values in education: from national curricula to children’s agency
Michael Hand (School of Education, University of Birmingham): “Moral formation and moral inquiry in the early years”

Registration: Please email d.vanello@ucl.ac.uk

According to many philosophers, and certainly many parents, a desirable aim of education is that children develop ethical virtues such as kindness, respect, compassion, tolerance, inclusivity, and so on. This is often discussed under the rubric of ‘Values Education’. Values Education, as understood here, refers to the educational process by which children learn values conducive to positive and prosocial attitudes.

Values education has been discussed by philosophers in particular in relation to school settings with children from middle childhood onwards, approximately from the latter half of primary school onwards. But recent research on moral development has highlighted that children’s moral learning starts already in the early years. Although research on the psychological processes constituting early childhood moral learning is still in its early phases, this research area raises the following questions for Values Education: should Values Education be extended to the early years?