Throughstone #5: How Do You Teach Values? You Don't.

1. You model them.
2. If you have a core value system, you disclose it with the caveat that you will respect other perspectives.
3. You unveil the historical and cultural contexts of multiple value systems worth exploring together.
4. You create a context in which those different value systems can be tested or even lived.
5. You provide the space and the support for the student to assemble those values in a way that makes sense for them.
6. You offer as many opportunities as possible for the students to observe how those values function within their immediate community, along with a broader context for those values to be tested, tempered, adjusted, or even abandoned.
7. You find ways to demonstrate that people and their values evolve over time and that this doesn’t mean values are all uselessly relative, but rather, they are born out of context, culture, and experience.

Yes, all of us who are educators will at times fail in our modeling and fall into the simpler trap of teaching, but that failure is itself a lesson. It’s a reminder while there may not be total equality between educator and student, there is at least mutuality.

Most if not all of the NINE colleges that have closed in Vermont in the last decade shared a values-based pedagogy that functioned best within a relatively small academic community where exploration was valued more than graduation checklists. Each college provided faculty and students with a themed thread for navigating through the darkness we all share. 

Lux fiat. 

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“Throughstone 250” is a purposefully constrained blog project. As a long-winded Southerner constrained by Vermont’s limited porch season and the Yankee penchant for paragraphs of three words or less, I’ve opted to aim for semi-daily reflections of precisely 250 words for the foreseeable future.

250 means something right now. Maybe more than we anticipated. It’s symbolic but incredibly important…and a 250 word count seems much less constrained than a 5-7-5 syllable count for a haiku. 

Like many others, I’m struggling to make meaning out of these tumultuous days. I’ve always found it useful to try and write my way out of tough spots. Looking for throughstones is just one more effort to try and generate some meaning from the mayhem.