The Foundation

• The promotion of Health Education as it relates to Values Education

• Supporting relevant aspects of moral and religious education

• Helping parents, teachers and others to enhance the personal development of pupils and young people

• Supporting developments in school curriculum subjects that relate to Values Education

• Helping pupils and young people to develop commitment to the value of work, industry and enterprise generally
  

• Disseminating the significant results of relevant research and development

The Foundation has no affiliation of any kind with any religious, political or social society or movement.

In accordance with the Deed of Trust, the Foundation operates in the United Kingdom, and does not provide funds for work overseas unless that is such as to promote its objectives in and for Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland

• Victor Cook died in his ninety-third year on 15th March 1990. He was born in the autumn of 1897 to a family associated with a successful engineering company in Aberdeen in the North East of Scotland. From an early age he wished to be a teacher, but the premature death of his father put an end to this ambition as it fell to him to carry on in the family business. He never married and in due course sold his interest in the firm and devoted the remainder of his life to promoting the cause of his intellectual child, values education

• In 1974 he established an educational charity The Gordon Cook Foundation bearing the name of a brother who predeceased him. This creation has survived its founder’s own death and continues the task of promoting values education.

• Victor Cook’s personal contribution to the aim of education in the field with which he was most concerned took two main forms: first, producing classroom material for young children in which values, particularly moral ones, might be developed; and second, lobbying politicians, administrators and educationalists in order to have programmes of this sort adopted within schools in Scotland and beyond. Unlike some recent theoretical approaches to the subject, Cook’s idea of linking values and education was not that of purportedly uncommitted analysis.

Extracted from the Introduction to 'Values, Education, and the Human World' by John Haldane (Ed), St. Andrews 2004. A collection of essays bringing together a range of eminent contributors. Originally presented as the Victor Cook Lectures, the texts comprise a coherent set of challenges to prevailing assumptions regarding values and education.