‘How to put real value into schools – Teachers do it every day’

Article by the Director General EDUCATION AND TRAINING, MANAGING DIRECTOR OF TAFE NSW, Michael Coutts-Trotter, in the Daily Telegraph
Imagine you arrive at work to find a dead body hidden behind a curtain and being attended to by police. It’s a stranger who has committed suicide. Now imagine you’re a school principal and 600 young children will arrive in the next half an hour. What are you going to do?
The principal of a public school, who was recently confronted by this, chose not to close the school but instead to invite the children and their parents in, deciding it was better to help the children understand what they’d seen than let rumour and imagination take hold.
She and her staff gathered them together and talked with them about what had happened.
Think about that. With no notice, you’ve got to talk to children as young as five about loneliness, depression and suicide. You’ve got to help them feel safe and to learn something that will protect them, or another child, from depression.
What that principal and her staff did that day, and later, was all about values: lived values that provide a model for students and the community.
There’s a lot of drivel, and worse, said and written about a supposed lack of values in public education.
Values education can’t be taught from a textbook. It doesn’t hang from a flagpole.
It comes from a deep examination of our proud and complex history. Those Australian values have to be lived by school staff, who by their decency, self-knowledge, generosity and, yes, by their love, help to teach our children how to live well.
Understanding and respecting everyone’s worth and difference is the bedrock of a successful community.
The Beverly Hills Intensive English Centre, which receives new students from around the world, recently took teenagers from the Sudan, Palestine, China, Lebanon, the Philippines and India out to Coonabarabran High School where they stayed in the Warrumbungles, watched Aboriginal students dance and learnt how to shear a sheep.
In the wake of the Cronulla riots, many Sutherland Shire schools arranged exchange programs with schools with high Muslim student enrolments. These visits challenged stereotypes of all kinds and helped create unexpected friendships.
Is that values education? You bet it is.
In schools everywhere in Australia there are children who come to school without having eaten. At some NSW public schools, teachers and school staff, at their own expense, give a very few children a good breakfast, because you can’t learn if you’re hungry.
That’s wonderful. But what’s even better, those teachers expect their students to excel academically.
At the ANZAC memorial in Hyde Park a crowd is gathered to remember the contribution of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander veterans.
Among the throng are public school children, some Indigenous, some not - all brought there by their teachers to see, to hear and to learn more about our history, to examine the past, to accumulate facts and context to better understand the present.
Public education teaches values that inform decision-making, that equip the conscience and supply the courage to do the right thing.