by Guy Claxton
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, Austr
alia, 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.
Chapter 4
What’s worth learning these days?
It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.
Margaret Mead
As far as we can see, there are three kinds of things that deserve to be in the school curriculum. We call them utilities, treasures and exercise-machines. Utilities are things which are self-evidently useful for young people to know or be able to do. They include being able to tie your shoelaces (if this is still essential since the invention of Velcro), tell the time, check your change, read a newspaper, a timetable and a good book, fill in a form, write a coherent letter, behave sensibly if you get lost, ride a bike, swim and so on. To read the newspaper, or join in a conversation, it is necessary not just to have mastered the skills of reading and speaking but also to have some knowledge and understanding about the world and current affairs.
Much of this information is picked up by children – as by adults – on the fly. Much learning happens by inferring what people must be talking about (assuming they are making sense), and we all get very good at doing this without any formal instruction. If we can’t fill in the gaps in this way, we ask people to stop and explain. But understanding how a city works or what the rules of football are, in a more systematic way, is also useful. To become informed and effective citizens, young people need to know something about, for example, the global financial crisis, climate change, neuroscience, sectarian violence, how it is possible for people to be ‘groomed’ or ‘radicalised’, the pros and cons of different forms of government and how the idea of the nation state is changing in an era of globalisation. We can argue about the detail, the ages at which each of the utilities should be introduced, and how to tell when they have been mastered to a good enough level, but the value of teaching or coaching things that are genuinely practical and useful in their own right is, in principle, pretty obvious.
Then there are treasures: things which we all agree may not be directly useful, in a rather utilitarian sense, but which, we broadly agree, form such an important part of our (however we define ‘our’) cultural heritage that everyone who lives here should have encountered them. This is much more contentious, because there are strong opinions but no practical touchstones against which to assess competing claims for inclusion. The traditional curriculum has been largely built around the discussion of treasures: discussions that have often become dull and formulaic under the pressure of traditional exams. There are also unintended consequences when selections of content are made on the basis of tradition and inertia, or in terms of the traditional cultural interests and values of one subset of the population. There is nothing inherently wrong with making children from Somalia, Romania or Pakistan study Twelfth Night or Wuthering Heights, if we agree that everyone who lives here should have encountered them, but the price is often that this exposure functions not as a lure for further appreciation of British culture, but an inoculation against it. A disagreeable dose of Shakespeare at school may stop you ever contracting Shakespeare again.
Selecting these treasures involves complex issues about which all of us have strong feelings – and traditional education doesn’t like it when things get heated. It tries to organise the curriculum so that things are kept cool. In a multicultural society, there are going to be many different histories and beliefs at play, even in a primary school. But if we avoid such discussions, children are not going to learn how to address differences in an open-minded and respectful way, and the curriculum itself becomes populated with dull topics about which nobody car
es enough to disagree. Few (except perhaps the odd Trad) can get terribly worked up about relative clauses or the difference between ionic and covalent bonding, so some schools spend a lot of time on those and not much on the rise of Islamic State or child sexual exploitation.
Finally there are exercise-machines. Topics and activities can justify their place in the curriculum, even if they are not utilities or treasures themselves, if studying them, in a particular way, does develop something that is useful. For example, learning to add fractions has become neither particularly useful (when was the last time you needed to?) nor, to many people’s thinking, intrinsically valuable enough to count as a treasure. Children are growing up in a decimal and binary world, and while it may be useful to know what a third is in decimals, weeks spent laboriously trying to get bemused children to understand why ½ + ⅓ does not equal ⅖ could well have been spent more usefully. Unless, in the process of wrestling with the fractions, the children are developing some other capacity or habit that is useful – perseverance, patience or their powers of logical analysis, perhaps.
But, if this justification is to be used, we will want to know exactly what the target capability is, how adding fractions is going to be used to develop that capability (i.e. what activities will turn it from a pointless drag into a meaningful form of mental exercise), whether adding fractions is the most effective exercise-machine for developing that capability there is, and what the evidence is that the capability does, in fact, generalise to other contexts and materials. Could it not have been exercised even better by getting the children to spend half an hour each morning doing Sudoku? It’s an empirical question, and the onus is on those who would defend the compulsory teaching of fractions (or the Tudors, or French irregular verbs) to present the evidence. With so many important and interesting things to be learned, jostling for time in the curriculum, such hard questions have to be asked. Strident assertions of value are not good enough. You could argue that adding fractions is only seen as a cultural treasure because of its long-standing, privileged place in the school curriculum, not the other way round. It’s truly a sabre-toothed topic.