We say we want to develop character, nurture citizens, build values, but what we often teach are just norms.
Words like integrity, respect, or responsibility appear on walls and websites, but rarely in practice. These aren't personal values, they are social expectations, assumed to be shared, but mostly unexamined.
The result is that moral education becomes performance. Students memorize slogans instead of discovering what truly matters to them. They learn to comply, not reflect.
Ask someone what values guide their decisions, not in theory, but in daily life. Most can’t say. Not because they don’t have values, but because they’ve never been asked to notice them, to test them, or to give them language.
When they do answer, they say things like honesty or equality. But those are vague. One person’s honesty might mean admitting they stole the cookie. Another’s might mean showing up vulnerably in a hard conversation. Same word, different commitments.
Without that nuance, values lose their usefulness. We tell students what to value, then place them in systems that reward something else, and wonder why they check out.
The problem isn’t that we’re not talking about values.
It’s that we’re not talking about what values actually are.
Before working in education, I spent years at the Meaning Alignment Institute, where our team developed one of the first applied theories of human values. That framework helped shape product and social decisions at places like Google, Facebook, and Extinction Rebellion. Since then, the work has been extended and supported by OpenAI, where it now informs research on aligning AI systems with human values using tools like the moral graph and GPT-powered values discovery agents.
Now I’m bringing those insights into the context of education, because this is where moral development actually begins.
In this essay, I’ll outline the distinction between personal values and social norms, and offer a framework I call expressive pedagogy. It is both a theory and a practice of moral development. It helps predict and describe how personal values emerge, and shows what educators can do to support that process at every level.
Not by enforcing values,
but by helping learners discover, name, and live by their own.
Most schools treat moral development like vocabulary acquisition: pick a word off the poster, define it, then move on.
But values don’t work that way.
Choosing from a list — Honesty. Kindness. Courage. — might feel reflective, but without context and self-inquiry, it’s just branding.