A Brief History of Values
Recent posts by Brendon Connelly at Slacker Manager and Lisa Hanneberg at Management Craft induced me to try to clear the air about values. What is a value? Why are values important? How can we recognize our values? I’ll wrap brief answers to those questions within a bit of historical perspective in order to illuminate how agitated and confused people can become about values.
I honor NYU professor Louis Raths as the grandfather of modern thinking about values. In the 1950s Raths referred to values as “abstract qualities”–security, creativity, challenge, caring, and power for example. He claimed that an abstract quality becomes a value if it has seven characteristics: you prize and cherish it, you chose it from among alternatives, you have examined its consequences, you chose it freely, you affirm it publicly, you act on it, and act repeatedly and consistently.
An understanding of your values makes life’s choices clearer, for values, whether consciously or not, drive choices. If you value security, for example, you are likely to own a different car than someone who values adventure.
Beginning in the 1970s, educators Sidney Simon, Howard Kirschenbaum, Merrill Harmin, and Leland Howe popularized Raths’ work in an educational movement known as “values clarification.” They were not interested in espousing any particular values, but in helping children comprehend the “process of valuing” in order to make better life choices.
Simon et al, and the teachers who adopted their methods, were roundly attacked as devils for trying to “teach values” to kids who, these attackers believed, ought to be getting their values from parents and churches. They were also attacked for not teaching any particular value by those who wanted their own values taught.
Others believed that values ought to be inculcated, and so objected to Raths’ notion that the only true values were those that were freely chosen. Praise the Lord and pass the values. One outcome of this brouhaha is shown in the above photograph: senior citizens in Warsaw, Indiana, in 1977, burning forty copies of Simon, Kirschenbaum, and Howe’s now classic book, Values Clarification, after it had been banned by the Warsaw school board (see journal entry for July 27, 1977).
Values went underground. Until, of course, they were rediscovered in the latter part of the last century by religious fundamentalists and their political suitors (a bit of irony given the book burning incident) and by corporations. Fundamentalists spoke often of “family values”, which is an utterly meaningless term under Rath’s way of thinking about values. In politics, embracing “family values” seems more an attempt to claim some moral high ground and win election than to make any useful social contribution.
In the corporate realm, after Tom Peters and Bob Waterman published In Search of Excellence (1988), in which they professed that America’s best run companies were clear about their values, the race was on for every corporation to lay out its values. Most did, and many did so without much understanding of what they were talking about. Corporate leaders usually failed to acknowledge their most deeply held values—such as status, power and achievement—in favor of values that would play well with employees and customers; they confused values with marketing slogans.
A striking example of corporate silliness about values can be found in the 2000 Annual Report of Enron, which lists the company’s values as communication, respect, integrity, and excellence. Misunderstanding about values also led to statements such as, “we value our people.” With reference to Raths, that statement is just as meaningless as “family values.” People are not an abstract quality.
I cannot do justice here to the extensive work of Raths and his proponents to help people identify their own values and understand the process of valuing. In brief, you can see your values at work—infer them—by examining behavior such as the decisions you make, the goals you set, how you use your time and money, and what you pay attention to. Your values show up in everything you do.
If you want to explore values in the way that Raths defined them, here are a few links:——Finding a Place to Start: Self-Assessment, from the Careers Office at MIT——Joy In Valuing, by Sidney B Simon——A Comprehensive Model for Values Education and Moral Education, by Howard Kirschenbaum
Tuesday, September 13th, 2005 at 1:24 pm ◊ Comment or trackback◊ Send this post to someone who will thank you for it »
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September 13th, 2005 at 5:41 pm
I applaud much of what you have written, but I think you missed the key point about values. They produce emotional responses — and deeply-felt ones at that. The strong power of values lies in their ability to become a focus for emotional attachments of all kinds.
Take terrorists. They may have all kinds of thoughts about their ideology, but thinking alone won’t persuade anyone to become a suicide bomber. That takes powerful emotion. People can decide to be courageous in a tough spot, but when the bullets fly their responses will be visceral and emotional.
Values are not acts of mental willpower, still less “abstractions.” They are fundamental emotional components of what people feel is right and wrong. They feel so concrete to people many refuse even to question them. It would be like questioning their own existence.
That’s why people of strongly differing values often come to blows. They can’t compromise on what’s “right” because they feel too deeply about it. If your “right” is my “wrong,” I can’t accept your position without making my “right” become “wrong” instead. And since people’s values are a large part of who they FEEL themselves to be, making that kind of change feels like abandoning their identity.
Values need to be valued. They are usually more decisive in people’s lives than thoughts, beliefs, assumptions or even concern for personal safety.
September 14th, 2005 at 8:22 am
Adrian — I believe that you are quite right that values are not acts of mental willpower and are very often heavily laden with emotion. But one of the real beauties of approaching the human condition through the lens of values is that you can approach at many different levels. You can approach at the level of right and wrong and flying bullets, and you can also approach at the level of the price of ice cream at the local supermarket. Values are that pervasive.
In support of what you have said, and peering underneath the conflict about values clarification during the 1970s, I suspect that what really riled people was not so much that Rath’s proponents were illuminating the process of valuing, but that they were doing so by posing questions about such things as drugs and sex. That must have been a real emotional charge for many people in Warsaw, Indiana, in the 1970s.
I don’t think that Raths meant to say that values were “abstractions”, but that they are abstract qualities that we attach to the realities of our valuing. For example, if your house is lost to a flood, it isn’t just the house that is lost, but also qualities such as identity, security, achievement, etc. These are “abstract qualities” (values) that are attached to the house in such a way that they become almost inseparable. So the values do feel, as you say, “concrete” and a matter of identity. They are abstract in the sense that any single value will be attached to many different realities. Achievement, for example, might be attached to your home, car, bank account, the school your kids attend, the corner office, etc.
And I could not agree more that values, “are usually more decisive in people’s lives than thoughts, beliefs, assumptions or even concern for personal safety.” Unless safety is a deeply held value.
July 4th, 2006 at 8:29 am
I appreciate your historical description of Values. In the mid-80s I attended my fist of many Sidney Simon workshops. He is still a powerful teacher, and he still uses Raths’ theory. The orginaization that evolved from Sid’s work is Values Realization Institute. (He moved from Values “Clarification” to “Realization.”) He leads a workshop in August at Kirkridge Retreat Cinter, Bangor, PA.
July 6th, 2006 at 9:35 am
Wow! Now that would be a treat — Sid Simon AND Kirkridge, one of the more beautiful retreat centers I’ve know. I both led and attended workshops there. Lived a few miles away. Thanks for the memories.
October 16th, 2006 at 12:08 pm
I appreciate your take on values, and would like to very humbly suggest an addition to Rath’s 7 criteria for a value. He said (I learned from his student Sid Simon) that unless a quality met all 7 of these criteria, it would only be a ‘values indicator’ and not a true value.
1. Do you prize and cherish your position?
2. Have you publicly affirmed your position?
3. Have you chosen it from among alternatives?
4. Have you chosen it after thoughtful considerations of its consequences?
5. Have you chosen it freely?
6. Have you acted on or done anything about it?
7. Have you acted on it with repetition, pattern, and consistency?
When presenting this theory of valuing to teachers who wish to implement values and character education in their classrooms and schools, they have suggested that an 8th criterion might also be applied. I doubt that Raths would have agreed with it, but it does seem to me that it does much to defuse values clarification critics and help support values learning in communities. The 8th criterion would be: Is it morally right and good for the larger community?
I’m aware that this could raise the question of who’s to say what’s morally right. However, even granting potential divergence on that topic, I do believe that some values might be considered univeral and pro-social in that they are necessary to create and live within a community.
What might Raths say in response? I’d love to know!
October 18th, 2006 at 10:06 am
Thanks Sally, for the complete list of criteria, and for the thoughtful comment.
It seems to me that Raths was trying very hard to not judge values, to not value any particular value. So, in his terms, for example, honesty is not a “higher” or “better” value than, say, achievement. I think that he was merely trying to help people tease out their values so that they themselves could determine their worthiness or utility in their lives. So the 8th criteria seems superfluous and off track to me, and philosophically inconsistent with Raths’ work, because it places a value on a value. It isn’t so much a value criteria as a value judgment–”good for the larger community” is “better.”
While I agree that “good for the larger community” is great, I don’t see it as a criteria to indicate a value but as a value itself.