Teaching Values to Students for their Holistic Development: An Analysis of Secondary School Teachers’ Beliefs

Abstract

Education helps in preparing students for holistic development—contributing to the development of not only cognitive or practical skills of students but also plays a significant role in making them an embodiment of morality and good citizenship. It is now commonly accepted that values education is an important and essential ingredient of educations’ responsibilities to inculcating values in students. All the National Education Policy documents from 1947-2009 and the National Curriculum for Islamic Studies and Pakistan Studies, Grades IX-X, 2006, have focused on inculcating values to make students compassionate, caring, hard worker, honest, trustworthy and good citizens of Pakistan. The present qualitative study aimed to explore teachers’ beliefs about the inculcation of values in students of secondary schools. The basic qualitative research design was used. Ten secondary school teachers were purposively selected as participants from a district in Punjab by using the criterion sampling technique. In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted for data collection. Qualitative content analysis was used to analyze interview data through NVivo 12 software. The findings of the study suggested that values education is a missing element in our education system. Teachers seemed to be dissatisfied with the curriculum, pedagogy, and continuous professional development training (CPD) in the field of values education. It is suggested that there should be a revision of policy, planning, and practices to enhance the priority for inculcating values to the students of secondary schools.