Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.
Martin Luther King
We’d like you to try another thought experiment. It’s in two parts. In the first part you will finally meet the Ruby who gave this book its title. Imagine you are the head of a secondary school and you are walking down the street when you are stopped by an ex-student who left about two years ago. Ruby says she just wants to thank you for the great education she got at your school. You remember Ruby well, so you recall that she left at 16 with two rather poor GCSEs (a D in drama and an E in English). So you scratch around for a response. (You can tell she is being sincere.) You say, “Ah yes, I remember you had a big part in the really successful performance of The Crucible, didn’t you? And I know you made some great friendships.” “True,” says Ruby, “but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the quality of the education you gave me. It was wonderful. Really.” And now you are rather flummoxed, and you say, “Sorry, Ruby, I don’t understand what you mean.”
The question is: what does Ruby say? How can Ruby honestly feel that those years were well spent, when she was a ‘loser’ at the examination game? You might like to discuss this with someone before you read on. (You might like to be reading this book with someone else – your partner, your child, your mother – so you can discuss and argue along the way.)
Here is the kind of thing that we think Ruby might say. We’ve neatened up her words so this is partly our voice, as well as Ruby’s. But see if you think this is plausible.
You helped me develop my self-confidence. By that I mean you treated me in ways that helped me build my self-respect. You taught me that, even though I wasn’t an egg-head, I wasn’t stupid. By the way your teachers responded to me, you gave me faith that what I thought was worth thinking. You helped me to become optimistic and positive in my outlook on life. You gave me the feeling that there were many worthwhile things I could achieve and become, if I put my mind to it, even though they were not academic things. All of the teachers in your school believed in us, and so helped us to believe in ourselves. And you made me discover that, if I put in the effort, it often paid off. By pushing me and not giving up on me, you helped me learn to be a can-do sort of person.
You helped me become curious. When I asked questions your teachers didn’t make me feel stupid or tell me ‘I should have been listening’. If my questions were a bit wacky you explained why in a respectful way. You made me feel that the questions I asked were worth asking, even though there wasn’t always time in class to go into them. You encouraged us all to try new things, and made it so nobody ever laughed at anyone for having a go, even if they weren’t very good to start with. I learned that everyone makes mistakes: it doesn’t mean you are no good, it means you are learning. So I’m always up for a challenge now, and I’m exploring all kinds of things I would never have dreamed of – especially through books. You really helped me to see reading as a pleasure, not a drudgery. And you encouraged us to question what we were being told (or what we read, especially on the net). We could always say, “Hang on a minute, Miss, how do we know that’s true?” And your teachers would say, “Fair point, Ruby – how could we check?” So now I’m quite bold about challenging things I read or am being told (but in the respectful way you modelled for us).
You helped us all become collaborative kinds of people. Sometimes you called it ‘conviviality’, and talked of the friendship and comradeship that learning so often requires. Your teachers showed us how to discuss and disagree respectfully, so we naturally treated each other like that. I’m now not afraid to ask for help, or to offer it when I think someone needs it. You taught us never to laugh at anyone just because they didn’t know something. I learned to be more open and friendly to new people and to want to help them fit in and feel at home. We were a very non-cliquey school. I learned to be a good team player, and to know when to button my lip (that took some learning, but it was worth it). I think I’m more generous-spirited than I was. And I’m definitely a better friend: you helped us understand why it is so important, for our own sake, to be trustworthy and honest in our dealings with people – and to admit when we had screwed up or apologise when we said something out of order.
You definitely helped me become a better communicator. Because I learned to enjoy reading, I think I have a better understanding of people and a richer vocabulary – especially for talking about emotional or intimate kinds of things. I like looking up new words and trying them out. I love how we can be really into what Liam called ‘the craic’ one minute, just joshing and having fun, and then we can switch to being serious and soft if someone is troubled about something. We talked a lot in class, and your teachers helped us to recognise the different kinds of talk we could have, and how to be appropriate. And I learned that sometimes I need to be quiet and by myself too, and that doesn’t mean I’m shy or upset. I’ve learned that sometimes I need to stop and think before I speak – but not always. And I’m happy to talk to anyone – teachers, strangers, my friends’ grandparents … even the Queen if she came by! It’s part of being confident, I suppose, and not being on edge that what I say might be stupid.
You helped me discover my own creativity. Your teachers often set us puzzles and asked us for our ideas, so we got used to thinking aloud and building on what other people had said. We learned not to dismiss things that sounded daft too quickly, because they could often lead to interesting and novel ideas. Your teachers often set us great projects that really stretched us to achieve more than we thought we could. And there were plenty of opportunities (though not always in lessons) for us to pursue our own interests and experiments, and to learn to think for ourselves and come up with our own proposals. You gave us opportunities to be funny and zany, and you also made us think about our own education and come up with suggestions for improvement that you took seriously. Some teachers even taught us how to do wacky things like learn to toggle between being clear and logical and then going dreamy and imaginative – how to control our own minds better to get the most out of them.
You helped us all discover the value of being committed to what we do. Through being given the chance to learn independently, you helped me learn to take responsibility, to sort things out for myself and to stick with hard things and not wait to be rescued. (I remember one assembly where you talked about Ricky Gervais discovering what he called ‘the joy of the struggle’: I’ve never forgotten that.) Teachers used to go on a bit about ‘resilience’, but I think I have really learned how to be patient and persistent, and to know when to push myself and when it is smart to take a break and cool off. I’m not afraid of hard work, and you showed me that worthwhile things usually don’t come easily, so when I do go to university (I will, you know) I will be ready for the self-discipline and slog I will need to put in.
And you also taught me the pleasures of craftsmanship. I used to be a bit slapdash, but now I take a real pride in producing work that is as good as I can make it. I mean college work – homework assignments and so on – but also when I practise the guitar the week before we have band rehearsal. I don’t want to let the others down, but, more importantly, I don’t want to let myself down. It’s not just about determination; it’s about being careful, and thinking about what you are doing, and taking time to reflect and improve, and going over your mistakes and practising the hard parts. You used to talk to us about the three Es of ‘good work’ – being engaging, being excellent and being ethical (I think it was from some prof at Harvard). I liked the ethical bit. My friends laugh, but when we are writing lyrics I won’t stand for anything sexist or abusive these days! I want what I do to be, not goody-goody, but good in all three ways.
Now, obviously we have made Ruby up, but we think what she says is really important. She is trying to capture another side to what goes on in schools which, when it works well, produces more young people who are enterprising, friendly, moral and imaginative. She has tried to capture them in what we call the seven Cs: confidence, curiosity, collaboration, communication, creativity, commitment and craftsmanship. This, in a nutshell, is the ‘other game’ of school. If you cannot be a winner at the grade game, you can still come away having been a winner at the character game. The first requires losers; anyone can win the second. And the second actually counts for more in the long term, in real life.
If you had longer, Ruby could have told you about her friend, Nadezna, who was not so fortunate. She went to a school down the road where instead of the seven Cs she learned the seven Ds. Instead of becoming confident she became defeated. Instead of developing curiosity Nadezna became disengaged. Instead of collaboration she developed distance from all but members of her own gang – her world became split into a very narrow group of us and a very large group consisting of everyone else called them. Instead of communicative she became, with the wider world, largely dumb (or at least monosyllabic). Instead of becoming creative she became deadbeat: passive and lethargic. Instead of committed she has become a drifter, unable to stick at anything, moving on whenever things threaten to get difficult. And instead of cultivating craftsmanship she has become a dogsbody, capable only of menial tasks and unable to raise her game when greater precision or responsibility is required. Between Ruby and Nadezna there is, of course, a whole spectrum of attitudes – but we know which end we want our children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews to head towards.
* * *
One of the absurdities of the current education system is the single-minded obsession with results at any price – especially at secondary school. Schools are judged on the examination performance – mainly at GCSE and A level – they manage to wring out of children, regardless of whether this is appropriate or of any collateral damage that may be caused. We’ll come back to this later, but just a quick illustration here will do. In England, there is a very important metric by which schools are judged. It is the percentage of students who manage to attain a C grade or better in at least five subjects, of which two must be English and maths (soon to be superseded by the even more stringent Progress 8).1 If your 15-year-old son is heading for a D in one of his GCSE subjects, but the school thinks that, with a bit of help he might just make a C, in many schools he will get extra tuition and a lot of coaxing and coaching. Transforming a D into a C counts for a lot, whereas transforming an E into a D doesn’t. If he is not judged to be capable of getting a C, he won’t get that attention. The quality of his teaching will vary dramatically, depending not on what suits him, nor on trying to get the best out of all pupils, but because schools need to game the system – and your son becomes a pawn in that game.
We were reminded of this when thinking about Ruby and Nadezna. How lovely it would be to be able to transform all of Nadezna’s Ds into Ruby’s Cs – for all the tens of thousands of Nadeznas there are out there. But that would be a very different ambition from the petty, pernicious little game that is played every year at the moment.
We don’t think Ruby is at all unrealistic. We know schools, as you probably do, where a lot of care goes into creating a culture that successfully incubates qualities like the seven Cs; and we know schools that don’t. And we don’t think this is a reversion to some feeble and discredited notion of ‘child-centred’ or ‘progressive’ education. Our guess is that millions of parents would like their children to go to schools where values like these – some of them quite ‘old fashioned’, some more specialised for the modern world – are being explicitly cultivated; and millions of teachers who are not lucky enough to be working in such schools already would love to.
● Are the seven Cs the kinds of attitudes you would like your children (or students) to have?
● Are the seven Cs ones that you think will help them to thrive in the 21st century?
● If you had to rank order the seven Cs, which would be at the top of your list? Which at the bottom? How would you adjust them?
● Do you think it is realistic to think about cultivating them explicitly (or is that pie in the sky)?
● If a school did pay more attention to this ‘other game’, do you think its results would go up or down?
● Are the seven Cs just for the ‘low achievers’ like Ruby, or are they appropriate – vital even – for the high fliers as well?
Talk amongst yourselves!
Now here’s the second part of our thought experiment. It involves you being the head teacher again, but this time you are wandering down the High Street in Cambridge. As you are passing the offices of the University Counselling Service, the door opens and out in front of you steps Eric – who was one of your brightest students in the same year as Ruby, and left to read natural sciences at Trinity Hall. You are both a little embarrassed, but after a few stilted attempts at conversation you say you can’t help but notice that he has been in the counselling offices, and you hope everything is all right. It patently isn’t: Eric, who was a confident young man at your school, is now pale, withdrawn and having great difficulty making eye contact. You are finding it hard to hear what he is saying, but he mumbles something that sounds like “Feeling like a fraud”. Overcome with concern for the dramatic change in Eric, you suggest a cup of tea which he warily accepts. What do you think is the story that he gradually reveals over tea? Do you find Eric plausible?
It turns out that Eric is all too real. A significant number of apparently bright, self-confident, articulate, high-achieving students will seek counselling during their undergraduate years at Oxford and Cambridge: that’s several thousand young people.2 There will be a variety of causes, obviously, but one of the major ones is this feeling that Eric is suffering from of having been found out, unmasked as an imposter – someone who, the evidence seems to suggest, is unworthy of being where they are. And that evidence is that they are now struggling with the weight and the difficulty of the work they are being set, yet they are supposed to be ‘bright’, and bright students are not supposed to struggle. Therefore, so the thought pattern goes, I must be more stupid than I and others believed, and so I am a fraud. This is a shattering realisation, so it is no surprise that anxiety and/or depression ensue.
So-called ‘imposter syndrome’ is on the rise, according to the directors of both the Oxford and Cambridge counselling services, and one of the reasons is that schools are getting better at force-feeding and shoehorning their students through the syllabus, so they get the grades they need, but do so in a way that fails to prepare them for the demands of life after school. More modularising, more coaching, more detailed feedback from caring teachers about what exactly you need to improve if you are going to get the coveted A* in your A levels. All of this helps to get the grades, but systematically deprives students of opportunities – as one tutor put it to us – to learn how to ‘flounder intelligently’. As we saw earlier, this is vital not only to cope when you are at university, but also to field that curve-ball question which you are sure to be tossed at interview. (We’ve used Cambridge as our example here, but we know that there are Erics in many universities and colleges.)
The same applies, by the way, in today’s job market. Working for Google is a plum job, and they get thousands of applications. But, again, watch out for the questions they will ask your daughter at interview. If she is asked whether she has an IQ of over 130, warn her that there are right and wrong answers. Yes is the wrong answer. At Google, they think if you have bothered to take an IQ test, and have bothered to remember the result, you may well be the kind of nerd who treasures badges of past accomplishments, rather than the kind of ‘intelligent flounderer’ they are looking for. At Google, intelligence does not mean being able to solve abstract logical puzzles under pressure. It means being able to think and question and learn in the face of unprecedented problems for which there are as yet no right answers. Likewise, if they ask your daughter whether she has a track record of success, it is much better for her to say it is patchy than to edit her CV and pretend she is Little Ms Perfect. Crowing about the past doesn’t cut it at Google; grappling with the future does. And some schools teach that, and many don’t.
Education is not the same as school
To help get a handle on your worries about school, it might be useful to remember the difference between education and schooling. Education is a vision of what it is that our children will need if they are going to flourish in the world as we predict it will be: that is to say, in their world, not ours. What knowledge and skills, what attitudes and values will stand them in good stead as they embark on life in a globalised and digitised future? To decide on the core aims of education, therefore, we need imagination and philosophy. We need to imagine, as well as we can, what their world will be like – at a fairly broad level of generality. Education has to be meaningful and relevant to the software designers, hairdressers, financial advisers, plumbers, nurses, neurosurgeons and farmers of the future. So we have to think: what will be the demands, risks and opportunities of the world that we foresee? And what are the personal resources that will enable young people to cope with those demands, capitalise on those opportunities and live good lives as a result?
If the world they will experience is likely to make complex demands on their ability to be an honest and trustworthy friend, for example, what attitudes towards online relationships do we need to help them develop? If their world is likely to be full of options and uncertainties, how do we help them get ready to deal well with uncertainty and make careful and wholesome choices? If their world is going to contain a rapidly increasing number of old people (that’s us), should education be aimed at producing young people who will naturally feel kind, caring, patient and responsible towards the elderly? That’s the conversation of education. It is to do with what’s left at the end of their formal educational experiences, the residues of that experience which will enable them to engage intelligently with the ups and downs that come their way. This is a moral conversation, and it is necessary and unavoidable. If people disagree about the aims of education, this has to be within a conversation about differing values and differing images of the future.
School, on the other hand, is a particular system that societies have invented for ‘doing education’. Education is the ends; school is the means. The only way of deciding if a school is ‘outstanding’ or not is to refer back to our list of those desirable residues (the seven Cs), and judge it by its success at producing young people who fit the bill. Are we turning out a lot of Rubies and not many Erics? Are they helpful to old ladies in the supermarket who can’t find the right money? Are they flourishing at university when the workload is a lot higher and the social safety net much weaker than they experienced at school? Are they able to have fun without becoming obnoxious or damaging their health (whether that be the arrogant posh boys of the Bullingdon Club trashing a country restaurant or local kids throwing up in a city centre on a Saturday night)?
Exams are a proxy for those desired residues, and we should be asking whether they are capturing, as well as they can, the qualities of character and mind we think our children will need. Is a medical student’s performance in their examinations a good predictor of their clinical judgement or their bedside manner? (It isn’t.) Does a theology student’s level of moral reasoning, as measured on a test, correlate well with their actual honesty or kindness? (It doesn’t.) A motor mechanic may have passed her apprenticeship exams, but if her welds break up when your car goes over a pothole then we need to find a new test. The test of schooling is not whether you can do well at school – or even whether you enjoyed your schooldays – but whether what you have done has prepared you effectively for something else: college, a job or life at large. Exams ought to do a reasonable job of predicting how someone actually functions in some context in the future. If they don’t, they just become self-referring and self-serving. If people disagree about schooling, rather than about education, then this is a technical matter. Empirically, are schools delivering the benefits they claim to? And are the instruments they use to assess how well they are working appropriate?
The really important point to stress is that schools must always be trying to enhance young people’s capabilities in some way. Which particular capabilities they are aiming at is a question of values; but at root, schools must be aiming to help people do something better out of school or after schooling has finished. Knowledge that gives you no practical purchase on the physical and social worlds beyond school is pointless. For example, if university entrance depended on your ability to recite screeds of nonsensical poetry – stuff that you mugged up just for a three-hour memory test, and then was generally agreed to have no further use or interest at all – there would surely be an outcry about wasting children’s time and insulting their intelligence, and rightly so.
What do children really need to learn?
What Ruby and Eric teach us is that there is always a deeper agenda going on at school, which is about the cultivation of competence and character. It is what we called earlier the ‘other game’. On the surface, school may seem to be all about the content – learning about things like the chemical elements or the Tudors – and the grades. But, implicitly or explicitly, you are also learning to do things: to respond in certain ways when particular things show up. At primary school you learned to hang up your coat, wait your turn, clear up after yourself and ‘play nicely’. Gradually, as you move up, you learn to create a PowerPoint presentation, structure an essay, solve disputes and read your teacher’s mind. Ruby has learned to hold her head up, to value her own curiosity, to get on well with people of all kinds, to pay careful attention to what she is doing, to manage her time and think for herself. Nadezna and Eric have learned different habits. Nadezna has learned to be slapdash; she doesn’t know how to take pains over something or why she should. Eric has learned to respond to pressure by waiting to be rescued and reassured – and when he finds himself in a situation where that is not happening, he goes to pieces.
School should provide children with knowledge about the major problems that the world is facing. But we never really got proper education about climate change and biodiversity loss and the energy crisis and the financial crisis, and all of these things that are affecting children as they become modern citizens and workers in the world. How can we possibly be the generation who tries to solve these problems if we’re not taught about them from an early age? I think that’s a really big problem that school should address … Instead, the school assumed that we all wanted to go to university, and that Oxbridge was right for everyone. They aren’t thinking about your true desires and embracing the uncertainty of life. They didn’t cater for us as individuals.
What school didn’t equip me with was diversity – diversity of outlook, lifestyles, career choices. You need to be open-minded and flexible; you need to be willing to make yourself vulnerable, to really be able to connect with people, to really love them. For me school was: “You will do A levels, you will go to university, you will become a good citizen, you will have babies. The end.” School is such a closed little environment. I didn’t mentally mature until I left school. Even though I only left school last year, I feel I’ve learned so much about myself and my place in society. I’ve become a much more open-minded person in general. But I’m still worried that I won’t take enough risks, that I won’t go for things if the outcome is uncertain, that I won’t travel places. It’s easier to just slip into a comfortable job and group of friends. I don’t want to do that.
Elsa, recently left an independent girls’ school
At least as important as the accumulation of knowledge and understanding is the development of a range of useful real-world competences. A good part of education ought to be, we think, focused on making sure that young people can do a whole lot of things that they will very likely find useful. But what are the core competences for living safely, sociably and satisfyingly? Obviously, it will depend on the culture and circumstances into which you were born. But, broadly, can we pick out some general ‘competences for living’? Here are some candidates. They were generated in the context of a very exciting ‘global summit on education’ held at the Perimeter Institute, an elite physics lab in Waterloo, Canada, in October 2013.3 For five days, a group of around 30 young people from all around the world explored, with the help of some ‘experts’ (of which Guy was one) what the school of 2030 ought to look like. Here is one of the lists they came up with on 21st century competences:
● Self-protection – how to look after yourself, e.g. in strange or threatening situations.
● Inter-cultural – how to get along with folks different from yourself, e.g. empathy, tolerance.
● Finance – e.g. how to manage money, budgeting, protesting effectively about financial scandals.
● Sex – e.g. how to communicate verbally and non-verbally about needs, preferences and uncertainties, and about contraception; how to be sensual and sexual and sometimes wild.
● Manual/practical – e.g. how to use basic hand and power tools safely and appropriately.
● Science – how to engage with scientific discoveries, controversies and abuses, e.g. fracking, stem cell research; how to tell valid from bogus scientific claims – assessing evidence.
● Statistics – how to weigh up probabilities and operate intelligently in probabilistic situations, e.g. the risks of different medical treatments.
● Scepticism – how to spot sophistry and sloppy thinking in all areas of life.
● Talking – e.g. how to explain yourself clearly and confidently in all kinds of situations.
● Writing – how to write effectively in a variety of different ‘voices’, e.g. a business-like email, a love letter, a request for permission, a good story, a reflective journal.
● Reading – how to read in different ways and at different rates for different practical purposes and (very importantly) for pleasure.
● Navigation – how to orient yourself in space by using wind, compass, maps, geo-positioning gizmos, etc.
● Cookery – how to plan and make a nice meal from scratch.
● Horticulture – how to grow plants and plan a garden.
● Care – how to take care of creatures of all kinds and sizes, especially animals, babies and the elderly.
● Religion – how to find a non-exploitative setting for exploring deep questions and expressing honest experience.
● Relationships – how to behave graciously in company; how to help make collective decisions.
● Morality – how to behave well with other people, e.g. showing honesty, trustworthiness, integrity, moral courage, appreciation, generosity, forgiveness.
● Self-presentation – how to dress and groom yourself to achieve different purposes (e.g. an interview, a date) and for satisfying self-expression; clothes, hairstyle, jewellery, piercings, tattoos, etc.
● Driving – how to drive and look after a bicycle, a car, a motorbike, etc.
● Leisure – how to amuse yourself and find humour in situations without upsetting others.
● Fitness – how to choose and pursue forms of exercise that are fun and keep you fit.
● Relaxation – how to unwind after stress and release tension; positive kinds of ‘self-soothing’ and ‘self-talk’.
● Attention – how to stay focused and concentrated when needs be, and how to detect useful, often subtle, cues in your world such as other people’s non-verbal signals.
● Craftsmanship – how to be careful and accurate when needs be; how to produce your ‘best work’.
As you read it, you might like to be mulling over these questions:
● Which of these do you think all youngsters ought to develop?
● Which do you think would happen without any special training or attention?
● Which are appropriate at what ages?
● Which do you think are appropriate/inappropriate matters for school?
● Which others would you want to add? Delete?
You’ll immediately see there is a lot of ground for disagreement. But do you agree that this kind of competence has to be the starting point for thinking about what our children really need to be taught in the future? The group of young adults who thought up this list certainly thought so.
Habits of mind
This list of competences is a bit of a rag-bag. We could tidy it up somewhat by dividing it into two groups: what we might call skills – which are techniques that can be learned or trained quite explicitly – and what we will call habits of mind – which are more general tendencies to respond to events in a particular way. Solving simultaneous equations or making meringue is a skill. Handing in lost property or owning up when you have broken something are examples of a more general habit of mind called ‘honesty’. Many people are drawing attention to the importance of these more general habits of mind these days. If children are to grow up with the ability to thrive in a challenging and fast-changing world, they say, it is things like Ruby’s seven Cs that they are going to need. Two recent books provide comprehensive reviews of the research that shows how important these habits of mind are for success in life. They are How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character by Paul Tough, and Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined by Scott Barry Kaufman.4 Ruby, with her resources of commitment and confidence – a feeling of being able to direct her own life, and to put in the disciplined effort to achieve her goals – will do better in life, in every way you can think of, than Nadezna.
And the seven Cs should be on every school curriculum, because the research shows that these habits or qualities of mind can be developed quite deliberately. Optimism and commitment are not personality traits that are genetically locked in; they are habits that can be powerfully influenced by experience – at home, with friends and in school. (From an early age, friends and playmates have a surprisingly strong effect on the development of these lasting dispositions.) A great Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky, discovered long ago that (to paraphrase a little) minds are contagious: we pick up mental habits and attitudes from the people we hang out with. Minds rub off on each other, especially when we are young.
A salutary lesson was learned from the early wave of enthusiasm for what are called ‘charter schools’ in the United States. They were new schools that were, admirably, dedicated to ‘getting poor kids to college’, by hook or by crook. And with intensive support, dedicated coaching and high expectations many more of these students enrolled in college than would have been expected. So far so good. The problem was that most of them then dropped out. When they went on to college that high-powered support team was left behind, and without it many of those young people didn’t know how to cope. They had got the grades, but they hadn’t developed the resilience, independence and self-discipline that they now really needed.5
Paul Tough argues that it is especially youngsters from difficult backgrounds who need these qualities, because their social environments often don’t provide the guidance and structure that is needed. If your family and friends aren’t supporting you in your studies, it is all the more important that you have developed those habits for yourself. And the charter schools left that bit out. But the existence of so many Erics shows us that more fortunate youngsters also need these attributes. When Eric went to Cambridge, he felt the loss of that caring, correcting support network as keenly as anyone, and was at sea without it. So the effort to build these mental and emotional habits is relevant, even essential, not just for poor kids; it is necessary for all our children. To cope well with tricky times you need more than a bag of knowledge and a clutch of certificates; you need a strong and supple mind.
The overwhelming conclusion of all this research is that grades are not enough. Getting the grades opens doors and broadens choice, and that’s surely what any parent or teacher would want for their children. But, if they are to prosper once they have passed though those doors and made those choices, children also need these qualities and habits of mind. And it is open to any teacher to pay more attention to their cultivation. Bluntly, you can teach the Tudors in a way that develops the habits of independence, imagination, empathy and debate; or you can teach them in a way that develops passivity, compliance, credulity and memorisation. You can teach the water cycle in a way that stretches students’ ability to dig deep in their learning and ask good questions; or you can teach it in a way that makes them dependent on their teacher and frightened of making mistakes. Both can get good results. Only one reliably develops the habits of mind they are going to need; the other increases the risk of becoming a Nadezna or an Eric.
Cultivating character
There are broadly three clusters of these character strengths that are (a) predictive of success in life and (b) capable of being cultivated by schools. The first is called rather grandly ‘self-regulation’. It is the cluster of habits that enable you to concentrate despite distractions; to stay engaged despite being frustrated; to make short-term sacrifices in the interest of longer term gains; and to deal with frustration or disappointment. (‘Self-soothing’ is the fancy word for this last capacity.) These are the abilities that underpin self-control, self-discipline, emotional intelligence and will-power. Ruby called it ‘commitment’. A massive study in New Zealand showed, beyond doubt, that the lack of these damages your life chances very significantly – whatever your grades.6
Self-discipline is very different from obedience. When children are disciplined they learn to do what others tell them – and not pursue goals and projects that they want to do. Obedient children learn to behave well to gain praise or rewards, and to avoid harsh words or punishment. Sometimes that may be necessary but it doesn’t, of itself, develop those self-regulatory abilities. With self-regulation, children discover how to make life go more smoothly and satisfyingly for themselves. And it turns out that social games – whether it be creating an imaginative fantasy world, where everyone has their own ‘character’, or playing football in the yard – are powerful incubators of self-regulation. Put simply, you find out that it just doesn’t work if you suddenly decide that you want to ‘be the doctor’ or to take your cricket bat home if you are out for a duck. People get cross with you. You don’t get invited to play next time. A way of teaching pre-schoolers in the United States called Tools of the Mind structures this kind of play – and it has shown that children develop self-regulation faster, and also show better development of literacy and numeracy. Self-regulation lays the foundations of being a more effective learner: less prone to frustration or distraction.7
The other two clusters are, if you like, the two main branches that grow out of this trunk of self-control. The first branch grows into the habits and attitudes of a ‘good person’: kind, friendly, generous, tolerant, empathic, forgiving, trustworthy, honest, having moral courage and integrity, and so on. Jihadist and racist groups would probably have a different list, but both humanism and the world’s major religions agree on something like this. Most schools have some kind of moral code of this kind, though it is sometimes honoured more in rhetoric than reality. Traditionally, the ‘learning methods’ for developing these attitudes tended to focus more on the punishment of breaches than on the cultivation of strengths which, for the reasons just cited, tends to be less effective.
The second branch grows into the habits of mind that characterise a ‘good learner’. While the virtues of a ‘good person’ seem relatively stable across time and culture, those of the ‘good learner’ are less familiar. Many take it for granted, however, that they are of real, practical relevance to young people embarking on life in a time of particular change, opportunity and uncertainty. The internet makes knowledge instantly available, and while Wikipedia is astonishingly accurate, it is also fallible. Young people need to be ‘knowledge critics’ and not just ‘knowledge consumers’. In cyber-world, people are often not who they say they are, so young people, if they are to be safe, need to be ‘identity critics’ too. Learning is often hard, protracted and perplexing, so they need to be ready, willing and able to struggle and persist. Learning is often a collaborative rather than (or as well as) a solitary venture, so the inclination to be a good sounding board for others, and the ability to give feedback in a respectful and useful way and take criticism yourself without getting hurt and defensive, is also needed.
These learning attributes go by different names: 21st century skills, wider skills for learning, soft skills, non-cognitive skills, dispositions, character strengths or traits, attitudes and values. As we have explained, we think it’s better not to use the word ‘skills’, but many people still do. And we could argue with some of these descriptions. Calling them ‘soft’ undervalues them and encourages people who don’t immediately understand them to use such pejorative labels as ‘touchy-feely’, as if ‘persisting in the face of difficulty’ or ‘looking at things through someone else’s eyes’ were too embarrassingly Californian to be taken really seriously by hard-headed grown-ups. ‘Non-cognitive’ isn’t right either because that seems to imply ‘emotional’, and feeds into the mistaken view that emotions are somehow subversive of rigorous thinking. Concentration and imagination are highly ‘cognitive’ – if by that you mean ‘essential to effective and creative problem-solving’.
In 2009, we were commissioned by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) to do a review of these different frameworks.8 We found instances of these ‘character specifications’ from the national governments of, for example, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Finland and Ireland. Interestingly, several of these countries are at the top of the PISA tables, but they have become dissatisfied with a form of education that merely turns out, as some of them put it, ‘test-passing robots’. They know that success in the modern world depends on attributes of mind and heart that are deeper than the ability to get your sums right. And they are desperately keen to know how these traits can be cultivated more systematically and more successfully in schools.
In brief
The best schools have always concerned themselves with the development of ‘character’. Traditionally this meant being honourable, erudite and a ‘good sport’. But today we need to think again: not about whether this concern is relevant – of course it is – but about exactly what characteristics are relevant for all in a socially, geographically, politically, digitally and cognitively complicated world.
Is this some kind of wishy-washy liberal agenda, designed to dumb down our youth by letting them run around like little savages and be completely self-indulgent, and fail to learn to read and write? Does this mean taking our eye off the acquisition of literacy and numeracy, assuming that children don’t need any knowledge, and neglecting the elegance of algebra and the insight of Shakespeare? Absolutely not. Children need interesting, engaging and important things to learn about. But there is more to school than knowledge. Attitudes and beliefs will be formed there that will influence, for good or ill, the rest of young people’s lives. To ignore these layers of the curriculum is not hard-nosed but bone-headed.
Is this an ill-conceived experiment with the next generation? Are we suggesting they be used as guinea pigs for some new-fangled, untried, radical revolution in education? Manifestly not. The status quo, or the image of the ‘good grammar school’ of the past, is neither safe nor neutral. To focus our attention exclusively on such schools is wilfully to ignore all the bright, interesting youngsters who are dying to learn, for whom the grammar school model is neither available nor appropriate.
All the methods we are going to illustrate in the next two chapters are already in use in good schools, where children are well-behaved and getting good results. They are just not as widely spread and as widely known as they should be. There is good empirical evidence to trust and support these methods, and encourage their use. But we have to stand up to a few noisy people who are mired in the past, unconcerned (despite their protestations) about the education of all those who must, of necessity, fail to do well in traditional exams, and too lazy to get to grips with the detail of these new methods or to read the research that supports them.
1 Progress 8 is the latest term for EBacc (a short form of English Baccalaureate), a deliberate attempt by government to control the subjects by which a school’s success is measured.
2 Warwick Mansell, ‘Spoonfed’ students lack confidence at Oxbridge, TES (10 December 2010). Available at: https://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6065624.
3 For more information, see Michael Brooks and Bob Holmes, Equinox Blueprint: Learning 2030. A Report on the Outcomes of the Equinox Summit: Learning 2030 convened by the Waterloo Global Science Initiative, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, September 29 to October 3, 2013. Available at: http://www.wgsi.org/sites/wgsi-
live.pi.local/files/Learning%
202030%20Equinox%20Blueprint.pdf.
4 Paul Tough, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character (London: Random House, 2013); Scott Barry Kaufman, Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined (New York: Basic Books, 2013).
5 For a critique of charter schools, you could try Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (London: Penguin, 2008).
6 See Terrie Moffitt, Louise Arseneault, Daniel Belsky, et al., A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 108(7) (2011): 2693–2698.
7 See Paul Tough, Can the right kinds of play teach self-control?, New York Times (27 September 2009). Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/27/magazine/
27tools-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
8 Bill Lucas and Guy Claxton, Wider Skills for Learning: What Are They, How Can They Be Cultivated, How Could They Be Measured and Why Are They Important for Innovation? (London: NESTA, 2009). Available at: http://www.nesta.org.uk/sites/default/
files/wider_skills_for_learning_report.pdf.