Engaging Hearts & Minds: A Values-Based Education

By Matt Bolton, Head of The Seven Hills School

What do you remember when you think of your favorite school teacher? I would guess that what comes to mind first is not the academic material that teacher covered. 

Rather, what sustained us as children and shaped us into adults were our relationships with teachers and classmates, our sense of being part of a community, and the values that we developed during our time in school. In this pressurized era, students and their families may be tempted to think that GPAs, extracurricular resumes, and college-readiness tests are the be-all and end-all of education. Yet if we are truly preparing students to live meaningful and fulfilling lives, we cannot professionalize their childhood and adolescence. 

Instead, we should see education as a process of self-discovery in which young people explore their talents and interests and develop values that they will carry into their adult lives. 

Here are three ways that parents and teachers alike can put values at the core of our children’s educational experience:

Learning From and With Others

Great teaching and learning taps into young people’s inherently social nature. As they move from the parallel-play stage of toddlers to cooperating with partners and groups, children develop so many important values through interacting with their peers. 

Whether you observe kindergartners building with blocks or high schoolers completing a chemistry lab, you’ll find that the same interpersonal skills come into play: actively listening to others, compromising, sharing the work and the credit, and more. By learning in community and delving into meaningful endeavors together, young people develop not just strong academic skills, but deep values that they will draw on long after their formal education has ended. 

Following One’s Interests

At every stage of a child’s development, teachers and parents have an opportunity to provide them with choices that allow their emerging interests to guide their learning. For example, letting a young person choose books about a topic they love — say, dinosaurs — means they will be intrinsically motivated to develop their reading skills. A great academic program will allow students to make meaningful choices on a regular basis, so that they are actively engaged with their learning, rather than “doing school.” 

This concept of choice can be seen in everything from thoughtfully constructed projects and assignments, in which students can connect their own interests to academic material, to elective courses and clubs that students opt into out of a sense of enthusiasm and engagement. 

By making choices and following their interests, young people develop autonomy, mastery, and purpose — the values that research suggests are critical to living a fulfilling adult life.

Real World Learning

Do you remember as a middle or high school student thinking (or even asking aloud) the question: “When will we use this in real life?” In schools today, that question comes up far less frequently, because teachers deliberately connect academic material to “real life.”

One of the ways to do this is to connect the classroom more deliberately to the broader community. At Seven Hills, for example, students partner with the Cincinnati Zoo in their biology classes, with the Freedom Center in their history classes, and with Cincinnati Shakespeare Company in their English classes. These kinds of local, real-world connections contextualize and inform everything that they are studying in class. 

By exposing students to interesting careers, important social issues, and real-world challenges and opportunities, we help them to see their connection to the broader community and the role they can play in contributing to it.

Education and Life

The great educator John Dewey said, “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” By seeing academics and values as going hand-in-hand, we can prepare young people to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives, both in school and as they move into adulthood.