Valores Universales y Antivalores en la Escuela - Values and Antivalues

School, or rather, teachers, transmit a lot of values to their pupils, and this values decide, in large part the children’s behavior and personality. For the same reason, we think this fact influences directly, considering that there is a direct contact between pupils and teachers and between classmates (also between school and family, but we are going to talk about this in other category called Relationships).
  
   This means they are going to share different opinions and ways to act. We call values to the set of guidelines or rules determined by society for people in social relationships. Some of the values that are morally accepted by most of the world's societies are freedom, love, peace, respect, justice and social tolerance.

   At school, children learn and live with these values among others, that we consider “universal values”.

Values are principles that allow us to guide our behavior in order to realize ourselves as individuals. They are fundamental beliefs that help us and give us a guideline to formulate goals and purposes, personal or collective. They refer to human needs and represent ideals, dreams and aspirations. Some authors classify the values in different categories, considering the area of life in which they are reflected. (Socio-cultural values, moral values, spiritual values, etc).


   In the field of education, we can speak of Education in values which we are subjected since we are born. This education starts at home, with the family, which is our first socializing agent, the first to transmit us ideas and feelings when we are still young. Later, the school joins this educational work.


   In the kindergarten or preschool education stage, mainly, it becomes to be important for the school to educate the child in universal and fundamental values for society wherein has started to live, as a first attempt to a good coexistence with the world around him or her. It appears from this moment the concept of "anti-values" as contrary attitude and therefore reprehensible to the moral values that society believes and establishes as correct.

  Nevertheless, this attention as for values in pre-school education is not paid in school and even more in high school. According to our experiences during primary a secondary education, teachers only think in marks and study hard for the exams, and maybe what we needed in this was emotional education or learn to respect the others and the environment.


  César Bona (2015) created simile between education and a pizza. Education is a pizza: the dough is equal to respect. The rest of the ingredients we have to add to the pizza are the subjects that teachers have to teach (maths, science, music...). If the basis does not exist (respect) there is no education. It is not so important the fact that one child get tongue-tied while he or she is reading as the fact that the rest do not laugh at this pupil who is reading. Educate is not only its cognitive-intellectual dimension, there are another dimensions that we consider they are important too. Education means transmit the ability to manage our emotions, to feel good with ourselves, to be creative, curious, critical… And the most important thing is to transmit the excitement to learn.


   If we really want a better society, we must start at school. Our mission as teachers should be give them the tools to be happy children and adults. Among all of us, we need to give back to education the place it deserves. Because a better world depends on teachers. (Bona, 2015)