Higher Education and the Critique of Values

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Abstract
The first part of the paper argues that the formidable problems facing the contemporary world involve intractable questions of values and of priorities among values: ‘values’ being used in the sense of the objects on which people set a value, not at a conscious, explicit level but at the deeper level of the driving purposes or ambitions of their lives. Supporting material is presented from four sources. A Club of Rome Report insists on the need to re‐articulate the values which sustain civilized societies. A historian of Western civilization presents a similar conclusion drawn from other evidence. A survivor of the Nazi holocaust raises questions as to the reality of commitment of Western societies to civilized values. A fourth report points to the significance of the value‐assumptions operating in a clash of cultures. The second part of the paper is concerned with the challenge posed to higher education by the above considerations. It is noted that higher education is dominated by an ‘academic culture’ which focusses on the analytical training of the intelligence in the context of a subject discipline. It is argued that if students are to be prepared for undertaking the above tasks, then teaching needs to be given in a context which evokes a felt personal response from the students. The paper concludes with a sketch of the problems involved in establishing such teaching.

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