Understanding the Concept of Values in Education

Every choice a person makes, from the small daily ones to the life-defining ones, traces back to something deeper than logic or impulse. That deeper layer is a person’s values. Values are the quiet standards that tell us what is worth pursuing, what is worth defending, and what is worth refusing. In education, understanding what values actually are, and how they shape the way a person behaves, is the starting point for any serious attempt to nurture character. This article unpacks the concept of values: how leading thinkers have defined it, how values connect to behaviour, and why teachers sit at the centre of how values take root.

What do we mean by values? 🔗

The word “values” gets used loosely in everyday speech, often as a synonym for whatever a person happens to think is good. Scholars who study education have tried to give it sharper meaning. The common thread across their definitions is that values are guiding principles: stable internal standards that direct how we think, judge, and act across many different situations.

One of the most widely cited definitions comes from J. Mark Halstead and Monica Taylor, whose work on values in education has shaped the field for decades. They describe values as principles and fundamental convictions that act as general guides to behaviour, enduring beliefs about what is worthwhile, ideals a person strives towards, and the standards by which particular beliefs and actions are judged to be good or desirable. Notice how much is packed into that description. Values are not fleeting preferences. They are enduring, they point towards what is worthwhile, and they function as a yardstick for evaluating both our own actions and the actions of others.

This definition is influential partly because it sidesteps a complication. Rather than getting tangled in debates about which values are moral, spiritual, or social, it focuses on the criterion of worth: a value is something a person genuinely holds to be worth striving for.

Values as an initiation into principled living 🔗

A second perspective, associated with the educationist Andrew McGettrick, frames values education as a process rather than a list. In this view, educating someone in values means giving young people an initiation into values: equipping them with knowledge of the rules needed to relate to other people, helping them grasp the underlying principles behind those rules, and developing the settled disposition to actually apply them. The phrase “settled disposition” matters. It signals that values are not fully formed once a person can recite them. They are formed when a person reliably acts on them, even when no one is watching.

Putting these views together gives a fuller picture. Values are guiding principles (Halstead and Taylor), and forming them is a developmental journey towards a stable, principled way of living (McGettrick). One describes what values are; the other describes how a person grows into them.

How beliefs, values, and attitudes shape behaviour 🔗

To understand why values matter so much, it helps to see where they sit in relation to the other forces that drive human action. Psychologists often arrange four related concepts on a spectrum that runs from the most abstract to the most concrete: beliefs, values, attitudes, and behaviour.

A useful way to see the connection is to think of it as a chain. A belief is something a person holds to be true about the world, often absorbed from family, culture, faith, education, and personal experience. A value is a selected belief that has become enduring and important enough to guide how a person orders their life. An attitude is the more specific, evaluative stance a person takes towards particular people, objects, or situations. And behaviour is the visible action that results.

Social-psychological research describes this as the value-attitude-behaviour model, where values act as the source of motivation and the link between a value and an actual behaviour is mediated by the attitudes that value produces. In plain terms: deep values do not jump straight to action. They first shape our attitudes, and those attitudes then shape what we do.

A pyramid that makes the layers visible 🔗

This layered relationship is often drawn as a pyramid, an idea developed in value education writing by scholars such as Gaikwad. At the base sit beliefs, the broadest and most foundational layer. Resting on them are values, then attitudes, and finally, at the visible tip, behaviour. The structure carries a clear message: the actions we see on the surface are supported by hidden layers underneath, and the foundation does most of the quiet work.

Consider a worked example. Suppose a person holds the belief that every human being deserves dignity. Over time, that belief hardens into a value: equality. That value shapes an attitude, perhaps a strong favourable stance towards fair treatment in a classroom or workplace. And that attitude finally shows up as behaviour, such as speaking up when someone is treated unfairly. The behaviour is what others observe, but it is the belief at the base that set the whole chain in motion.

This framework also explains something many teachers notice: changing behaviour is hard when it conflicts with a deeply held value. You can offer someone new information that shifts a surface attitude, but if that information seems to threaten a foundational value, resistance tends to be much stronger. Lasting change usually has to reach the lower layers of the pyramid, not just the tip.

Why teachers are central to value formation 🔗

If values are foundational and slow to form, where do they come from? Research on how children acquire values shows that the process begins remarkably early and draws on many sources. Children start absorbing values very early in life, initially from their families, but also from media, peers, their local community, and other agencies. By the time learners reach a classroom, they already carry a mixed inheritance of values picked up from these sources.

This is exactly why teachers occupy such an important position. A teacher is not simply delivering a syllabus. Through everyday behaviour and countless small decisions, a teacher models what values look like in practice. How a teacher handles a disagreement, responds to a struggling learner, admits a mistake, or distributes attention fairly all communicate values far more powerfully than a lecture on the topic ever could.

The difference between explicit and implicit teaching 🔗

Educators often distinguish between two ways values get taught. Explicit value education refers to the deliberate methods, lessons, and programmes designed to address questions of value directly. Implicit value education happens through the ethos of the classroom, the relationships within it, and the example the teacher sets without ever announcing it as a lesson.

Both matter, but the implicit kind often carries the most weight, because it is harder to fake and easier to trust. A teacher who preaches honesty but acts unfairly teaches the second lesson, not the first. Importantly, research on values in schools notes that the values an institution officially documents are not always the values that actually inform behaviour. Values that are genuinely lived, discussed, and experienced are the ones that take hold. This places a real responsibility on educators: their lived conduct is part of the curriculum, whether they intend it to be or not.

India’s National Education Policy 2020 reflects this thinking by treating character, ethical, and constitutional values as goals that education should actively develop, not as optional extras layered on top of academic content. The policy also points to the need to prepare teachers to deliver value-based education well, recognising that the educator’s own grounding shapes what learners absorb.

The case for consistent value education 🔗

If values are built slowly through repeated experience, then consistency becomes the deciding factor in whether they take root. A single inspiring assembly or a one-off workshop rarely changes the foundation of a person’s character. What changes it is a steady, coherent message repeated across time and across the people a learner looks up to.

Inconsistency does real damage here. When the values stated in a school’s mission collide with the values learners actually witness day to day, the gap teaches its own cynical lesson: that values are decorative rather than real. Consistency works in the opposite direction. When the same principles show up in the way teachers behave, in how the institution makes decisions, and in what gets rewarded or corrected, learners receive a stable signal they can build on.

This matters because forming a meaningful value system is not about memorising a list of virtues. It is about helping a person develop their own coherent framework for deciding what is worthwhile, and then the disposition to act on it reliably. That kind of inner structure cannot be installed in a single sitting. It is assembled gradually, through guidance that points consistently in the same direction. Education that takes values seriously, therefore, treats them not as a unit to be covered and ticked off, but as a thread woven steadily through everything a learner experiences.

Bringing the pieces together 🔗

The concept of values, then, rests on a few connected ideas. Values are enduring guiding principles that define what we hold worthwhile. They sit beneath our attitudes and behaviour, doing quiet foundational work, as the beliefs-values-attitudes-behaviour pyramid makes visible. They are absorbed early and shaped continuously by the people around us, which gives teachers a uniquely powerful role. And because they form slowly, they need consistent, lived guidance rather than occasional instruction. Understanding values at this level is what makes it possible to nurture them with intention rather than leaving them to chance.

What do you think? Looking back at your own life, which of your strongest values came from something a teacher or mentor did rather than something they said? And if behaviour really does rest on hidden layers of belief and value, what would it take to change a habit you have been struggling to shift?

References

1. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED393218
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Values_education
3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6504687/
4. https://psychology.town/social/attitudes-values-beliefs-social-psychology/
5. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Learning-and-Teaching-about-Values:-A-review-of-Halstead-Taylor/dfeb113cc9505f0074c06e2980f9d187d03c6216
6. https://dr-neilhawkes.medium.com/values-based-education-vbe-de2cc87f051d
7. https://www.ugc.gov.in/pdfnews/5294663_Salient-Featuresofnep-Eng-merged.pdf