Republic of the Philippines

LEYTE NORMAL UNIVERSITY

Graduate School
Paterno St., Tacloban City

Name: DARYL YEPES PATANAO, MAT-SOCSCI - Student

Subject: FD 503: FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATION
Professor: Mr. JOSE N. LIANZA
School Year: 2019-2020 (1st Semester)

REFLECTION PAPER

Topic: Education and Values

What is education and values? Is values natural or learned by an individual? How

significant to an individual to have an education and values? What are the ideas and

contributions did Max Scheler contributed to education and values?

Education necessarily promotes and replicates values and does so in many

ways. Often, teachers and administrators use the asymmetrical power relationships

inherent in most educational settings to deliberately promulgate their own set of values.

Even when not done deliberately, values are communicated. Yet, neither the conscious

nor the implicit promulgation of values is typically designed with thought to the

appropriateness of these values for the future. This does not imply that newer values

are always better than older values; but clearly at least some values of the past must to

be re-thought in the light of huge global populations, diminishing natural resources, and

the danger and ultimate futility of armed conflict.

Children normally develop morally as well as cognitively as they mature (Piaget,

1964; Kohlberg, 1989). Ideally this comes about through acting in the social world,
observing consequences, and interacting with peers. Turiel (1983) pointed out that

children develop judgments in two separate but inter-related domains, the conventional

and the ethical. The appropriateness of clothing is a question of convention that varies

from society to society and from setting to setting. The appropriateness of killing is an

ethical issue in every society. However, disregarding a recognized convention (e.g.,

appearing nude in inappropriate circumstances), can cause sufficient disruption and

discomfort to raise genuine ethical issues.

What is a value? Sociologists see a value as a decision about the preferrability of

a mode of behaviour or an end-state. A decision about a mode of behavior or an end

state brings about the distinction between an instrumental and a terminal value. The

Scholastic philosophers already knew this, distinguishing in fact between:

i. bonum honestum: the good desirable for its sake, e.g., truth, holiness, God

ii. bonum delectabile: the delightful good which was desired for the pleasure it

yielded; e.g., ice-cream, sexual-activity, etc.

iii. bonum utile: which was sought after because it brought about some desirable

end-state, e.g., an injection, which no patient desires in itself except as a

means towards the recovery of health, or examinations, which no student

looks forward to except as a prerequisite towards a coveted degree.

It is evident then that values play some clearly identifiable roles: they are criteria

by which choices and decisions are made; they are modifiers of behaviors; they are at

work in ego-adjustive and ego-defensive modes of conduct. Values, however, are not

only an individual’s values but the values of a group, a community or a nation. Although
identifying some values as “national” can be arbitrary, the common history of a people

as well as other factors shape a certain degree of commonality in values.

Max Scheler became a prominent figure in the field of education because of his

contributions to it. Scheler’s first two major works, The Nature of Sympathy and

Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, dealt with human feelings, love,

and the nature of the person. He demonstrated that the ego, reason, and

consciousness were all attributes of the human person and that there could be no pure

ego, pure reason, or pure consciousness outside a human context. The human “heart,”

or seat of love, accounted for the essence of human existence, rather than ego, reason,

will, or the ability to receive sensory data. The human being was essentially a loving

being (ens amans). Scheler described many types of feelings and showed that love was

at their center. Like Blaise Pascal, Scheler declared that feelings and love have their

own forms of logic, different from the logic of reason.

The center of Scheler's thought was his theory of value. According to Scheler,

the value-being of an object preceded perception; the axiological reality of values exists

prior to knowing. Values could only be felt, just as color can only be seen. Reason could

not think values; the mind could only organize values in a hierarchy after they had been

experienced. Values were independent of the things that caused them to be felt; a

particular value could be experienced with a variety of objects. Formalism in Ethics and

Non-Formal Ethics of Values contended that there were also moral values of good and

evil that related directly to the person, and never to objects. The countless varieties of

value experiences had a hidden order of their own, an order based on love

("ordo amoris"), quite different from an order created by reasoning. Scheler argued that
values were objective, unchanging, a priori, and non-formal, and ranked them, and their

opposites (“disvalues”), in a hierarchy of five levels:

1. Values of pleasure vs. disvalues of displeasure: Namely pleasure to pain

(values of sensible feeling).

 the pleasant against the unpleasant

 the agreeable against the disagreeable

* sensual feelings

* experiences of pleasure or pain

2. Values of vitality and of the noble vs. disvalues of the ignoble: Namely noble

to

vulgar (values of vital feeling).

 values pertaining to the well-being either of the individual or of the

community

* health

* vitality

 values of vital feeling

* capability

* excellence (e.g., of a species or of off-spring)

3. Values of the mind (truth, beauty, justice vs. disvalues of their opposites):

Namely beautiful to ugly, just to unjust, pure knowledge of truth (spiritual

values).
  values independent of the whole sphere of the body and of the

environment; grasped in spiritual acts of preferring, loving and

hating;

* aesthetic values: beauty against ugliness;

* values of right and wrong

* values of pure knowledge

4. Values of the holy vs. disvalues of the unholy: Namely holy to unholy

(religious values).

 appear only in regard to objects intentionally given as

“absolute objects”;

* belief

* adoracion

* bliss

5. Values of utility vs. disvalues of the useless.

Scheler’s ethics was based on what he called “pre-rational preferring,” or the

person’s initial inclination towards certain values. A “disorder of the heart" occurred

whenever a person preferred a value of a lower rank to a higher rank, or a disvalue to a

value.

Upon learning Max Scheler’s theory and his influential woks, I agree with him on

the knowledge and ideas he had shared. I agree with Scheler’s idea that a material or a

non-formal a priori arises in experience, specifically in the experience of value. All

experience is already value latent. For example, an object of perception such as an oak

tree is not only green or large, but also pleasurable, beautiful and magnificent. Objects
of experience are bearers of values. Historical artifacts bear cultural values, religious

icons bear the value of the “holy.” To suggest that an object bears a value is not to imply

that a value inheres in an object. Just as the color red does not inhere in the tricycle, but

is only given in the act of perception, the beauty of the painting is only given in the act of

valuing. The value of an object bears is given intuitively through a type of value-

perception. We “see” the beauty of a painting just as we “see” its colors. The grasping of

value is our most original and primordial relation to the world. An object has value for us

before it is perceived or known.

Another significant idea of Scheler that I argue with is his classification of values.

He conceived of positive and negative values as given in a relation to being. Positive

values are not only given as that which entices us, but also as that which ought to be.

Similarly, negative values are given as that which ought not to be. In the relation values

bear to existence, an ideal ought is given. What ought to be is not logically derived or

categorical, but is felt, i.e., experienced. Values not only draw our attention to the world

and others, but they also bear an ideal “ought.”

Ideally, valuing is an act of giving meaning or creation and is therefore an

intentional act. The act of valuing is not an intellectual act, but an act of the “heart,” i.e.,

an emotional act. For Scheler, there are two basic emotional acts, the act of love and

the act of hate. These two acts found all value-perception and consciousness. Love and

hate are further characterized by Scheler as movements. In the act of love, the value of

an object or a person is deepened, revealing its highest or most profound significance.

Hate, by contrast, is a movement of destruction, a movement wherein the value of an

object or a person is demeaned or degraded. The feelings of love and hate are the acts
in which the world first comes to have meaning for us and a preferencing is inherent in

this process. We tend toward or are attracted to that which is of greater or positive

value, and tend to move away from or are repelled by that which is of lesser or negative

value. Present in every experience is a ranking of values, a preference of certain values

to others. That there is an order of preferencing in experience is perhaps best

demonstrated by the act of sacrifice. For the sake of a particular life value such as

health, we may sacrifice pleasurable experiences such as an overindulgence of ice-

cream. An order of value preferencing is present in every experience and every

individual possesses such an ordering, what Scheler calls “an ethos.”

In general the ideas and works of Max Scheler became a significant matter in the

field of education and in the real life also. In the experience of positive values, we, as

persons, are called to love others ever more profoundly. In the experience of negative

values, we are called to act in such a manner that ends the destructive acts of hate and

consequently brings an end to negative values. The call to act for the sake of the good

itself is, for Scheler, not general or universal, but radically individual or rather, unique.

There is no experience of the good in itself in general, but only the good in itself for me,

and this constitutes in part the experience of vocation peculiar to each unique person as

creatively becoming. The deeper the value, the more individual, the more personal, the

call to act for the sake of the good becomes. Ethical experience, the experience of

being called to act for the good, is a process of individuation. The call becomes ever

more personal as the value deepens. In acting ethically, I come to realize my unique

place and contribution, and as a result, I become more conscious of my obligation and

duties to the world and to others. A material value ethic, in contrast to a formal ethic,
reveals both the radically unique manner by which each person is called to act and the

radically unique value of each and every person.

REFERENCES:

Book

Aquino, Ranhillo Callangan, Ph.D. “A Philosophy of Education”. pp. 37-40

Internet Source

https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Max_Scheler

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scheler/

http://www.marquette.edu/mupress/Ressentiment.shtml