Feb 6 Thu
Is it possible education without values?
Sometimes people speak of 'education in values' to express the opposite of what one would expect: teaching people to choose virtue and reject vice.
It is said that the moral dissipation suffered by our society is due to an unprecedented crisis of values. Yet for several decades now, many international institutions and organizations have been promoting, through the many means available to them, the so-called education in values.
Unfortunately, many parents sin of naivety because, forgetting that we must be as cunning as serpents, blindly entrust the education of our children to the prevailing system, leaving them like sheep among wolves. Thus, they believe that when school curricula or educational programs use the word ‘values’, they mean what we understand them to be.
Yet the word value (in addition to referring to valor or courage) means a quality of a person for which it is considered good. Hence, the value of something is based on consensus, on the perception or valuation of what a majority, or even an influential minority, defines as value.
Under this concept, both objectively good guidelines are promoted (the non-negotiable value, promoted by the Church, of the right to life from conception to natural death) together with dubious modern ‘values’, especially with the so-called integral sexual education.
Many of the values promoted today, especially through the media and educational institutions, contradict Christian morality, attack the common good, and destroy the person. For, in addition, they cover all kinds of immoral conduct with the moral veneer of ambiguous and misleading language. Hence, they reject both the concepts of vice, immorality, and sin and those of virtue, grace, and holiness.
Consequently, our relativistic and hedonistic world spreads vice.
To successfully confront our evident moral crisis, it is indispensable to understand the prevailing concepts – to avoid their confusing language - and to promote the moral principles that, based on divine and natural law, benefit society as a whole and perfect the human being.
We must return to the promotion of virtue; that firm and stable attitude of the understanding and the will that regulates our acts, orders our passions, and guides our conduct according to reason. For, as Lope de Vega affirmed: “Virtue has in itself all things; and whoever lacks virtue, lacks everything.”
Only then, we will be able to bring the whole world, all the human values that attract many — friendship, the arts, science, philosophy, theology, sport, nature, culture, souls — within the sphere of hope: the hope of Christ.
We must not lose sight that, due to original sin, we are inclined to concupiscence (a blind desire for everything that produces satisfaction), so that we often confuse the apparent good with the real good by judging, subjectively, based on what we consider attractive or convenient at that moment.
Virtue, the quality of the soul to know and act the good easily and promptly, can only be achieved with perseverance, effort, and sacrifice, going against one's passions, appetites, and desires. Thus, we can achieve the freedom that gives self-control, and also the happiness produced by knowledge, and the exercise of goodness.
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