The name is absent

counselling seminar she attended gave her more confidence in her interactions with
others and taught her not to judge people. The course also taught her how to offer help
to someone without seeming patronising and how to find out what to do if she didn’t
know how to help them. Rita’s community activity is value-driven and her values
have developed from diverse life experiences. However, it is clear that her adult
education - and particularly her professional training - has given her knowledge skills
and confidence to put her beliefs into practice.

Dale provides a rather different example of school learning having a delayed but
significant impact on motivation towards involvement in altruistic activities. Dale had
a very disturbed childhood and was excluded from many of his schools until he went
to a special Prince of Wales Trust boarding school, which turned out to be a positive
experience for him. He is currently 26 years old and unemployed in Tendring but has
been quite active in community activities. He helps to raise money for charities by
doing sponsored swims, parachute and bungee jumps and other stunts of various sorts.
He also helps out with practical things for elderly neighbours and sometimes assists
on the community housing project.

He says he learnt about giving to others from his experiences at boarding school and
particularly from one adult there - the caretaker - who became an important mentor
for him. Before going to the school Dale had lived in all-white areas and was, by his
own admission, very racist and homophobic. He says the school cured him of this by
making him mix with people from other cultures, which made him realise “that they
were not as bad as people had told me they were.” Interestingly, his tutor who knew
he had racist attitudes, deliberately placed him in a room with two black students and
his experience of getting to know them seems to have been a turning point. Taking
part in various volunteer activities at school also had a major impact. Building an
adventure playground at school gave him the satisfaction of knowing “he was doing
something for the kids” and put the idea of becoming a social worker into his mind.
He also acted as a counsellor to two other students who had been sexually abused
(which may have been rather difficult for him, one imagines), and was involved in
charitable fund-raising activities at school. This made him realise it feels good to give:

“ We were raising money... it certainly gives you a boost. If you’re doing
something to help someone else out, makes you feel better about yourself. ”

He attributes his later charitable work directly to these experiences.

What is common to these examples of more altruistic forms of association is that they
are frequently connected with certain kinds of values and beliefs. They are what one
might term ‘value-driven association’. In order to determine the impact of learning on
these we must, therefore, analyse the evidence from our respondents as to how
learning is shaping their values.

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