Living Values

"Education is a process of search meaning and purpose that's why educates heart and minds are important" -LVE-

Living values education program is practical methodology and experiential values activities for educators, facilitators, parents, and caregivers to help them provide the opportunity for children and young children to explore and develop universal values, associated with intrapersonal and interpersonal social and also emotional skills. The curriculum includes of several main values such as peace, respect, love, cooperation, happiness, honesty, humility, responsibility, simplicity, tolerance, freedom, and unity. LVE support the development of the individual and a culture of positive values in each society and believing that education can help humanity flourish. You can get more explanation, with open this link 

(http://www.livingvalues.net/about/docspdfs/Press%20Kit%20Int%20Fact%20Sheet%202011.pdf )

I knew about living values education for someone who worked at Green School Bali (Pak Scholastica), and he so passionate with Living Values Education Program. At first, I didn't understand about living values. I thought that living values was focusing on understand and live with values in our self. I didn't understand how people live in their own values in our variety society. I remembered when I made my thesis and talked about moral, which is so confusing. Moral, values, ethics are different or same? Do we have same moral or values across the world? Even, there's so hard to find questionnaire who exactly explain about the morality across countries. If I found several journal, they will explain in term of job culture, but how we define our universal values. 

I search definition of values, moral, and ethics from  

(http://www.tcls.org.au/01_cms/details.asp?ID=39) 

- ethics describes a generally accepted set of moral principles

- moral describes the goodness or badness or right or wrong of actions

- values describes individual or personal standards of what is valuable or important

From this simple definition we can define that values is based on personal standards which come from our knowledge about society principle. Then we originally define our principle into good and bad or right and wrong action. We can conclude that our values is actually based on our society and our self. That's why I agree with how the living values education mission to understand their own values in our society. 

These are several ways I get from LVE website to apply this program in our class:

1. Take time before start the lesson (I would like to say it's better to take a time for mindfulness session with short meditation)

2. Help the children to reflect and get positive environment before start the class ( I agree with this one, because not only the children but also the teacher need to get positive energy before start the class and put their personal problem).

3. Help children to understand their freedom and build relationship with society and nature (If you have a garden you can walk a while with them or you can easily get them say "hello" to each other student in the class with beautiful smile)

4. Build their self esteem (Based on my experience worked with special need children, we really need to build their understanding to value their self and help them to understand that every people is unique and worth it)

5. Give them confidence to responsible for what they do (I love to make them confidence with themselves because it's increase their self esteem. For the first time, I thought that they need our help with their limitation. Then I realized that who build the limitation is actually me, they can do it very well if we give them chance to responsible for what they do).

6. Open discussion to share their ideas (This moment not use just for evaluate about subject in our class, but discuss about many thing from their life and a good time to evaluate teacher performance. I learn not to afraid of critics!)

7. The most important things to share and grow the understanding of values also living in values. 

I found the interesting point of LVE program, that they based on twelve values which I think can apply very well in every situation. If we take one example like love value which all peoples know in every places in this world. Every people can describe differently about love, but they will agree that how to love is like how to give, caring, being kind, sharing, and become lovable to everyone around us.  That's the clever thing to put universal values in our education system. Children learn to build their own values based on the universal values which is important to build the connection with other human being and nature around them. Living Values Education give attention to build good relationship with our mother nature. We can get those values also from unconditional love of our mother nature.

 (My class in Gerakan UI Mengajar , 2015)

(Social Project @GriyoSabinCommunity Jogjakarta, 2016)

I'm not specialized with LVE, I just a person who attract and want to know more about it. So if you have any recommendation for me to understand more about LVE, please let me know in comment below.

*Sorry for the wrong grammar or words, I'm on the process to make it better*