For decades, values education has been one of the most hotly contested areas of reappraisal in school curricula. This book contributes to the debate with the controversial proposition that the current modes of values education are not cultivating the qualities associated with moral judgment and character, that they are in fact producing a consciousness which merely reinforces some of the potentially destructive tendencies of modern technology.

Emberley sets the stage for his argument with an examination of the progressive initiatives in education since the 1960s. He discusses the expectations which arose with the proposals to teach values as an explicit component of the curriculum, and reveals a hidden agenda which undermines their explicit objectives. He goes on to explore the relation between values education and technology, building on the thought of Hannah Arendt and Eric Voegelin. Technology, according to Emberley, is becoming the entire context for our understanding of reason, politics, and the intellectual or spiritual life. The question is raised whether technology has become the ontology of our age, as George Grant suggested, and whether it has eclipsed essential relations and experiences which have traditionally defined our humanity. Emberley depicts technological development as proceeding through three historical phases which he characterizes as a mechanical order, an organic order, and an electric field. By the third phase, he proposes, traditional humanism has nearly disappeared.