When a government says its "committed to helping schools ensure that more children develop a set of character traits, attributes and behaviours that underpin success in education and work", you know there's a certain desperation in the air, or an election in the offing.
I'm not completely against this, and obviously in favour, generally speaking, of successful children, adults, schools, and societies, but it's that weasel word "ensure" that's the problem. Schools cannot "ensure" this; all they can do is to make a start – with parents and others – on a long process of development: actually, a life-long process, because you never stop such development until you give up on life itself. Further, it's a development that is only really done through continuing practice and reflection in real contexts, which is where schools have a problem. [Note 1]
This is the Department's exemplar list of such traits, attributes and behaviours:
- perseverance, resilience and grit
- confidence and optimism
- motivation, drive and ambition
- neighbourliness and community spirit
- tolerance and respect
- honesty, integrity and dignity
- conscientiousness, curiosity and focus
Such lists always have a grab-bag quality to them, and this is no exception.. I was surprised not to see "hard working" in the mix, or even "continence". In the good old days, we'd have had obedience of authority / knowing your place / deference to your elders and betters. I was brought up with all that and learned to dislike and distrust it. Many might have included politeness, and being nice to other people and animals in the DfE list – or common sense (which is far from common), and nous – which would fit well alongside Yorkshire grit.
But, as David Starkey reminds us, we did not acquire the fundamental values of our liberal democracy by being nice to people or tolerating injustice; these were accrued by struggle, mostly a "struggle with religion.” In that vein, if I were ever rash enough to construct such a list, it would start with intolerance – intolerance of discrimination and bigotry in all its forms – and go on to the promotion of liberty, the development of skills of scepticism, and finish with stubborn bloody-mindedness.
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Note 1. My previous post contains an expanded form of this idea. Here it is again:
Young people aren’t fully able to develop social and citizenly skills (read: character traits etc) until they can practice these for real. Clearly, these are important, and schools are right to put stress on them. However, there are limitations about what can be achieved if the context is not realistic. My colleague Andy Stables writes about schools’ roles as nurseries of responsible citizenship. He argues that students in school are only ever likely to pick up a general, rather diffuse, sense of concern about, and for, the world’s problems that is either led, or reinforced by any involvement they may have in the overall public debate in the media. For Stables, this implies that the curriculum focus should be on the development of skills of critical thinking, dialogue and debate, with environment and sustainability only one of many possible foci to enable this. It is, essentially, an education for life-long, open-ended, open-minded, participatory citizenship. Stables also argues that, whilst openness to the real public debate is crucial, it is vital to remember that capacities are not outcomes, and that they do not simply precede outcomes. He says that, to a large extent, it is the making of real-life decisions that most fully enables, in an iterative, developmental manner, the capacity for exercising responsible citizenship.
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