Abstract:
A new generation of children are learning the importance of democratic values at a level which
makes sense to them. Appropriate ‘democratic values’ for South Africa are set out in the
Constitution, and the national curriculum aims to equip all learners with the knowledge and
skills necessary for meaningful participation in society. In many schools, these values –
responsibility, respect and the freedom of self-expression – are merely posted on the walls of
classrooms, but are not integrated into the subject content. This article proposes that teachers
need to determine children’s perceptions of the values in question, and these should be the
starting point for teaching democratic values. Young children need to understand and
experience values in the classroom, suitable to the development of their moral reasoning. To
concretise concepts of values, we used the ‘pledge tree’ activity in an intervention, in which
9-year-old children wrote their values on paper ‘leaves’ which they then posted on a huge
polystyrene tree. The paper reports on this experience as a research investigation, capturing
children’s ideas.
