Character Ed
by Jen Lexmond
Liam Byrne brought out Labour’s new white paper on social mobility last week – it tells us that Character Education is at the heart of improving children’s life chances. Labour has it half right: strong character skills like agency and application are arguably the most important possession that disadvantaged young people can use to ‘buck the trend’. Educating for character is important, but building Character Education programmes into our national curriculum is not the way to get there.
We need to stop over-engineering our education system. We have already reached a general consensus that the excesses of our exam culture need to be reigned in. The same goes with the compartmentalising of education into clear cut subjects and classes – as if we can teach ‘confidence’ or ‘initiative’ with a text book and a multiple choice exam. Not to mention how impossible it would be to win over students to the idea: “Today's topic, class, is Tolerance and Respect”. I can’t help but feel our teachers would be taking a pretty big one for the team there.
Instead, building character in schools depends on how we teach as much as what we teach. A few off the cuff ideas for how school can help develop key good character in children and young people:
• Agency describes one’s sense of personal empowerment or confidence. We need a renewed emphasis on drama, sport, and debate in schools. These are the kinds of interactive, confidence building activities that are vital to developing agency. There may be a lesson to learn from the emphasis in the US on extra-curricular activities.
• Application implies one’s ability to stick to a task through to completion. As the exam tide recedes, we should place more emphasis on course work – projects that require hard work through out the school year and which help monitor progress, not just one burst of effort in an exam hall for three hours. Success outside of the exam hall often relies far more on hard work, motivation, and dedication than on IQ or sheer intellectual ability.
• Initiative. We should give students opportunities to take initiative at school through capitalising on their creativity and ideas. Too much of the curriculum is already written. Students should play a bigger role in shaping their own curriculum – whether though turning the tables and having occasional student-led classes on topics of their choosing, giving students a stake in choosing field trips, or embedding better feedback systems that take student’s opinions into account.
It is less the qualifications that kids come out with that is important, and more what kind of kids come out.
Demos has just embarked on a new project exploring the importance of character development in shaping children’s life chances.
Robert Harding
Yes it's a good point you make but perhaps the condition of our inner cities, rust belts and low horizons landscapes does require an intervention of some kind. It may be that any form of character development wouldn't need to be examined at all nor systematic written work be carried out on it. As you say target based education needed loosening. Liam Byrne may be looking to put something back into a culture that isn't always kind to people and his suggestion can only benefit everybody .
Alex Howell
Nice comment, real shame about the apostrophe catastrophe!I think there is some merit in exams, as there is application in the 24 hours revision as well as the 3 hours sitting.I also think application implies a degree of autonomy, and teaching children how to apply their specific skills and interests to projects. This would suggest more open ended questions or assignments too.