THE DEMAND FOR UNIVERSAL VALUES EDUCATION GROWS

Organizations and governments join together to educate children in citizenship and other values

This time,  it is Panama and  Chevron-Texaco that have chosen the Alive to the World program to awaken in young students universal values such as self-respect, respect toward others, loyalty, perseverance, integrity, optimism and the desire to contribute to society as a self-reliant person.

Ten thousand public school students will benefit from a grant from Chevron that has enabled Alliance for the Family / AFF to donate books to the Ministry of Education. Participating at the signing  ceremony were Panamanian Minister of Education Lucy Molinar; Pedro Sigui, Chevron’s Manager for Retail Sales and Industrial Customers; and Cristina Burelli, Executive Director of AFF.

Mr. Sigui stated that the oil company always aims to promote the development of the communities where it has operations, throughout the world. For the last decade, more than ever, Chevron has been supporting the education of youth, and the company is starting to focus on character as a key element in the advancement of individuals and societies. And, he continued, in Alive to the World  Chevron has found a program that works.

Alive to the World, based on universal values, is intensive (1 hour per week for 35 weeks), extensive (grades 1 through 12) and unique (story-based).

Some 65,000 young people follow it in 11 Latin American countries, and 1,000 participate in a pilot project in the United Kingdom. After the first year of a study of 9,000 children that focuses on the transmission of “democratic values”, independent researchers have found “strong initial evidence” that the program is effective.

More information: www.infoval.org, www.allianceforfamily.org 

The study compared their answers to questionnaires administered before and after they participated in Alive to the World, a comprehensive character development program operating in 12 countries of Latin America and in the United Kingdom. The 8,000 4th, 5th and 6th graders followed the program for one hour per week during the whole school year.  In Latin America, 65,000 young people, from grades 1-12, are enrolled in Alive to the World. 

With guidance from Professor David Finifter of the Thomas Jefferson Program in Public Policy, the researchers—Erin Wilson and Danielle Peregoy—found statistically significant changes for the better in the young people’s attitudes towards statements such as “Girls and boys have equal rights, “Boys and girls deserve equal respect and treatment,”  “It’s OK to disagree with others” and “Rules are always important”.

One of the largest shifts in attitude concerns agreement that “Everyone has a right to their own opinions.”  In addition to the program’s building a foundation of values that are necessary for democratic societies, several school principals have recently credited it for dramatic declines in misbehavior and violence in their schools.  Alive to the World centers on an ongoing story of a group of friends who grow up as their readers do, and who get in and out of situations that their readers identify with.

The student books, teacher guides, and teacher training courses are secular. Based on a view of human nature as essentially enchanging, they reflect the latest advances in the understanding of child development. In addition to English (U.K.) and Spanish-language versions, the publisher, Alliance for the Family, has adaptations for Africa (in English and French) and Brazil nearing publication.For additional information, see  www.allianceforfamily.org

There is much evidence that violence can be neutralized by age-appropriate and well planned education Testimony of organizations and individuals seems to confirm the fact that where hitherto the school year was punctuated with irregularities due to the misbehavior of students, the situation changes dramatically when Alive to the World, the Values Education program of the international organization Alliance for the Family (AFF), is adopted. 

Two cases of this positive effect illustrate the benefits obtained by schools and communities with this approach.  Uncontrollable violence and inappropriate behavior at Saint Augustine School in La Pastora, a lower middle-income community of Caracas, Venezuela, was undermining scholastic achievement until 2003.  In only 5 years of the application of this program, the situation has changed radically.  

Today the students of this school are considered a model for other schools. The Directors of the school attribute this change to the one-hour per week program, grades 1-12, of Alive to the World, which was adopted in 2004. Virgilio Cartagena, director of Values Education at this school of 1000 students, explains that prior to 2004 the school was rife with problems; to the extreme that in 2003 one entire level had to be expelled.  Since the program was initiated, the level of violence has diminished to the extent that it is no longer a problem in this important city school. Another very different case involves a new public “Bolivarian school” (part of President Hugo Chavez’ “school revolution”) in a small town of mainly unemployed people, 60 miles west of Caracas. 

Martha Angulo, the valiant director of this school, Don Simon Rodriguez in the “Barrio 5^th of July,” a new and precarious section of El Consejo in  Revenga County, Aragua, has a similar tale to tell. There she has had occasion to have to salvage a teacher who was cornered by students wielding sticks and poles. She herself was told that “one of these days they are going to find you covered with flies,” she laughs. That was before she decided to adopt Alive to the World (Aprendiendo a Querer) as an experiment in 2005.  She beams with pride as she tells us that violence is gone from the school now, as her pupils have identified with the characters in the books, who live normal lives at school, at home and in the community and grow from year to year as the students do. The students say they love the books as they contain the very elements of their lives, and find the solutions to everyday situations in a way that is both positive and logical.   

“We were looking to improve their Human and Social Capital in order to give these children a chance in life”, says Christine Vollmer, a member of the group which developed this program, “and this improvement in problems of violence is a wonderful bonus.”

If we want the greatest number of children to strengthen their personality and character, it is necessary to train the greatest number of teachers to help them. Therefore, Alliance for the Family / AFF is bringing its teacher training courses to the web.

In its experimental stage, the new Virtual Education Center that will house the on-line courses will be available mainly in Mexico, Peru and Venezuela. Soon afterwards, the program will include all of Latin America. AFF will then translate the interactive materials into English, Portuguese, and French, paving the way for expansion to the US, the United Kingdom, Brazil, France, and various African countries.

The Virtual Education Center is the brainchild of a February, 2008 conference hosted by AFF with the participation of on-line training consultants and representatives of multilateral organizations such as the Organization of American States, the World Bank, and the Interamerican Network of New Technologies (known as RITLA, its Spanish acronym). The Center will open its virtual doors in 2010.

Amsterdam, August 10-12, 2009

Information available in Spanish only:

Se ha celebrado en este mes de agosto el V Congreso Mundial de las Familias, que constituye la mayor y más plural reunión de asociaciones dedicadas a la promoción de la familia en todo el mundo. Sesenta y tres países de los cinco continentes han estado representados por casi mil participantes, que se dieron cita en el Centro de congresos RAI de Amsterdam. Más de tres mil siguieron por internet el Congreso. El título de esta edición ha sido “La Familia: Más que la Suma de sus Partes”.

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