Moving Forward With Your Back to the Future The Experiences of Three Values-Communities in New Zealand for Re-Orientation of Modernity towards a Sustainable Society

As “sustainability” has gathered more attention globally, many academics and bureaucrats have placed faith in the capacity of education to provide young people with the values to confront the problems of the 21 century. This thesis questions the underlying assumption that values can be propagated and sustained through communication alone in education. Following a Durkheimian approach to religion, it investigates the importance of community for values by comparing three contemporary values-movements in New Zealand: Political-Green Environmentalism, Tikanga Maori (Maori customary values and practices) and Fundamentalist Christianity. On the basis of analysis of twelve in-depth interviews with members from the three different groups, theory is generated which argues that “universal values” are universal precisely because they originate in the common experience of human interaction within community. The thesis is critical of values-education proponents’ lack of acknowledgement of the structural forces which have discouraged value-internalisation in mainstream New Zealand, and concludes with a suggestion that the most important role for education is to help restore Durkheimian “collective consciousness” through a postcolonial process analogous to that pioneered by Maori educational reforms since the 1980s. This would first and foremost involve a complete re-orientation of the time perspective of the education system, from one promoting a positivist belief in progress and modernist belief in future-liberation to one promoting social history, family roots and a history-focused temporal orientation.