Teachers and Schools as Agencies of Values Education: reflections on teachers’ perceptions

This is the first of a two‐part survey of a project conducted over a two‐year period with teachers in Scottish schools with support from the Gordon Cook Foundation. In the first episode of the project the teachers were invited to explore the inadequacies of two extreme models of the moral role of the teacher‐‐paternalism andliberalism‐‐and to try to formulate a satisfactory alternative. In this first part, the authors argue that their difficulties in so doing may have stemmed from rather uncritical subscription to an unsatisfactory ethics of popular consensus. In the next part, it will be concluded that broadly analogous consensualist assumptions about the nature of moral life gave rise to similarly unsatisfactory attempts to deal with problems concerning the hidden curriculum.