CHAIRMAN of the Electoral Advisory Committee (EAC), Professor Errol Miller, has warned of the possibility of persons using the Government’s current focus on developing values and attitudes among students to get children to behave and accept circumstances that are unacceptable.

“Education is least successful when it is attempting to do that,” Miller argued, adding that the process of learning “is most successful when it is an avenue of opportunity”.

He was speaking recently at a two-day symposium held by the Research and Policy Group at the Mona School of Business, (UWI) under the theme ‘Transforming Values and Attitudes: Policy Challenges for Jamaican Society’.

Miller went on to inform the gathering of educators and scholars that schooling was not just about learning values, but also about the future and the construction of the future.

“If you want to see what a society of the future is going to be like, look in the schools,” he said. “It either frightens you to death or consoles you, but it is the society of the future.”

He stressed that schools were very important in shaping values as they not only helped to create identities, whether it was in the arena of religion, nationalism or politics, but also were an identity in themselves.

“You carry the identity of your school for life,” Miller argued. “It’s an identity in itself. Schools not only create bonds; they bind people across generations. Schools not only help to create national solidarity, but are a source of solidarity.”.

According to Miller, it was the micro system of the school itself that was defined by the population of these institutions, and schools and colleges automatically stood for something, which was defined in large measure by the population and the agreements that were reached.

“The reason why lines in this country do not have authority, is because authority won’t join the line, because once you reach to certain positions, you have attained to privilege and once you attain to privilege, you are exempt from the ordinary conditions of everybody else,” Miller said.

“We have lost the old world definitions of humanity and what we are yet to construct, is what we are going to be,” he said. “The whole world is struggling with this issue because of the fundamental transformation that is taking place in society.”

Miller also argued that while action was needed at the higher level to address these issues, action at the micro level was just as necessary. “It comes back to who the teacher is, is as important as what the teacher does. The selection of the teacher is as important as their training and we have to select people who come with certain values from the beginning. It touches a lot of sensitive areas. It is not just what you have on paper.”

Against this background, he called on society to approach the issue of values and attitudes from a point of “resistance”, through building a just society, resisting through spirit, creativity and imagination.

Said Miller: “Many of us who benefited from the greatest explosion of opportunity in the history of our country are now presiding over the closure of opportunities to our children and grandchildren.”

Other presentations made at the session included incorporating a social mission in the agenda of the media and entertainment industries, by senior lecturer at the Caribbean Institute of Media and Communications (CARIMAC), Dr Hopeton Dunn; and changing the role and pattern of community leadership, by executive director of the Social Development Commission, Robert Bryan.