There was\u00a0much talk last\u00a0week of British values, and\u00a0the need for schools to teach them \u2013 and not just in Birmingham. \u00a0Not for the first time schools are asked to step up at times of moral crisis.<\/p>\n
In\u00a0a piece I was struggling to finish in the same week, I suggested that values and values-informed practices would be central to a university that wanted to become, and thence be, sustainable<\/em>. \u00a0But I have long known (not just thought) that values are caught and not taught; and they are absorbed through and from experience, rather than formally learned \u2013 though formal schooling can surely help this along. \u00a0Some of these points were\u00a0made by\u00a0Frank Cottrell Boyce in an Observer<\/a> piece on Sunday. \u00a0In this, he deprecates the tendency for a discussion of British values to default to a list of things we value \u2013 which is not the same thing at all.<\/p>\n Cottrell Boyce\u00a0said that he rather liked the following comment, but who said it?<\/p>\n Britishness is best understood as an identity shaped by an understanding of the common law, refined by the struggle between the people's representatives and arbitrary power, rooted in a presumption in favour of individual freedom, enriched by a love of the quirky, local and unique, buttressed by anger at injustice, constantly open to the world and engaged with suffering of others, sustained through adversity by subversive humour and better understood through literature than any other art.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n If you scroll down the page, you will find out:<\/p>\n .<\/p>\n ..<\/p>\n ...<\/p>\n ....<\/p>\n .... .<\/p>\n .... ..<\/p>\n .... ...<\/p>\n .... ....<\/p>\n