How value education classes built the ethical compass I carry today

Last summer, sitting in a café in Fitzroy with a flat white going cold, I caught up with two schoolmates I hadn't seen in nearly two decades. We laughed about cricket matches, complained about Melbourne's weather flipping from sunshine to sleet in an hour, and somewhere between the second coffee and a shared lamington, the conversation drifted back to value education classes.

Those sessions at Sri Saraswathi Vidyapeetham and Shishu Mandir were never an afterthought. They sat alongside maths and Sanskrit, treated with the same weight as any other subject. The alumni network still celebrates this balance, and browsing through old photos on the site reminded me just how much those early lessons quietly shaped the adults we became.

Value education in our school wasn't a lecture list. It was storytelling, role-play, debates about honesty when nobody was watching, and guided reflections on what we owed our families, our communities, and ourselves. The framework felt ancient when I was twelve, yet every year it reveals another layer.

Looking back from a country half a world away, I see how the moral architecture built in those classrooms travelled with me. The ethics of integrity, compassion, and service, the very virtues the school aimed to instil, now shape how I run a small accounting practice in Brisbane, raise my kids in the suburbs, and show up for my neighbours.

Morning assembly lessons that stuck with me

Our mornings at the Vidyalaya began with a prayer, a sloka, and a short talk on a value for the day. Sometimes the headmaster would ask a student to share a story from the Ramayana, sometimes a teacher would pose a question: "If you found a wallet in the playground, what would you do?" The room would go quiet as we wrestled with the obvious answer and the messier reality.

Those assemblies taught us that ethics is not a list of rules handed down by grown-ups. It is a muscle you exercise, a habit you form. The repetition mattered. Hearing the same ideas about truthfulness and self-restraint week after week gave them a kind of rhythm, and the rhythm became part of us.

Many of us carried that rhythm across oceans. A friend who now works in Adelaide as a physiotherapist told me she still mentally recites a shloka before a difficult diagnosis. Another, a project manager in Perth, credits those early assemblies for his habit of starting meetings with a moment of reflection. The form has changed, the substance has not.

The teachers who made ethics feel real

A subject is only as good as the teacher in front of you, and we were lucky. Our value education teachers were not the stern, finger-wagging type. They were storytellers, patient listeners, and occasional comedians who knew how to land a punchline while making a serious point.

I remember our Sanskrit teacher turning a lesson on ahimsa into a debate about the school lunch menu. Was the sambar vegetarian in the truest sense, or did the onions in it count? The question was absurd, the principle was real. He taught us that ethics is granular, lived in small daily choices, not grand gestures.

Another educator would bring in newspaper clippings about local scams, asking us to play the role of the victim, the perpetrator, and the bystander. It was uncomfortably engaging, and it made us think about integrity as a practice, not a poster on the wall. You can see echoes of that hands-on style in the school's broader activities, and even in reflections like this field trip journal, which capture how learning stretched well past the classroom.

Stories from the Ramayana and their modern echoes

The epics were our textbook. We studied the Mahabharata for lessons on duty, the Ramayana for lessons on loyalty, and the Upanishads for lessons on inner stillness. But the teaching never felt distant. Our teachers insisted we map these stories onto our own lives, our friendships, our arguments over who would bat first.

Take the idea of dharma, often translated as duty or righteousness. As a teenager, dharma felt abstract. As a small business owner in Australia dealing with a supplier who tried to slip a defective batch past me, dharma became very concrete. Did I owe my customers transparency, even at a cost? The answer arrived without hesitation, shaped in classrooms fifteen years earlier.

The story of Harishchandra, the king who gave up everything to keep his word, came up often. We used to roll our eyes at the drama of it. Now, watching colleagues face pressure to fudge a report or massage the numbers, I think of Harishchandra. The story sits quietly in the background of decisions, a kind of moral compass that points true north even when the room is noisy.

How those lessons travelled with me to Melbourne

Moving to Melbourne in my late twenties was a culture shock in the best way. The coffee was serious, the trams ran on time, and the office banter involved more Aussie slang than I could follow. I spent my first month Googling why everyone kept saying "arvo" and "servo."

But the shock also surfaced old lessons. In a workplace that prized directness, I noticed how my school training in respectful disagreement served me well. Australians value a fair go, and that ethic maps surprisingly well onto the principles of fairness and honesty we learned in value education. The vocabulary was different, the substance familiar.

Melbourne's multicultural fabric helped too. Colleagues from Iran, Sri Lanka, China, and Zimbabwe would share their own moral traditions over lunch at Queen Victoria Market, and I'd recognise the same architecture of virtue under different names. Our school's approach, drawing from Indian wisdom traditions, turned out to be a fluent speaker in a global conversation about how to live well.

Sharing values with my children and community

My kids are growing up Australian with a Sri Lankan backbone. They speak English at school, Tamil at home, and a smattering of Hindi from their weekend cultural classes. When they ask me why we say "please" and "thank you" so often, or why we share food with neighbours before serving ourselves, I find myself repeating the same phrases my teachers used.

The other day, my daughter came home from primary school upset because a friend had taken credit for her art project. I did not have a ready answer, but I had a framework. We sat down and talked about integrity, about how the truth feels in your chest, about what the Mahabharata says about the cost of small lies. By the end, she had a plan, and so did I.

Community work is another place these lessons show up. I volunteer with a local food rescue group in Footscray, and the spirit of seva, self-giving service, which our school emphasised, makes the early Saturday mornings feel less like a chore. Whether I am packing vegie boxes for a struggling family or helping a new migrant fill in forms, the value education classes did not just give me rules. They gave me a posture toward the world.

A cousin in Sydney recently started a small creative business, and we spent an afternoon talking through how to price her work fairly and source materials ethically. She mentioned the TalenTyArt platform as a space that takes those questions seriously, and I watched her apply the same classroom logic to her venture that I had applied to my accounting practice. The thread continues.

Why alumni should keep these conversations alive

Alumni networks exist for many reasons: job leads, class reunions, friendly gossip. But they also exist to keep ideas alive across generations, and the ethics we learned deserve that ongoing conversation. When a recent graduate posts in the alumni group about a moral dilemma at work, the responses that come back are often shaped by the same value education we all shared.

The school has continued this work through various initiatives, including the social programmes documented on the community activities page. SanskarKendra centres, outreach drives, alumni mentorship circles, each one carries forward the classroom's spirit into the wider world.

I also think about platforms that help alumni turn these values into livelihood. Friends have launched ethical businesses, mentoring programmes, and creative ventures that quietly carry the school's lessons into the marketplace. It is a reminder that the lessons do not have to stay in the past. They can fund the present.

So the next time you are at an alumni meet, in a suburban hall or a virtual call from another time zone, raise a toast not just to old friends but to the quiet classroom hours that shaped how you treat a stranger, speak a truth, or keep a promise. Those lessons are the inheritance. Pass them on.