Trouble comes to the educational psychologist in the shape of a lorry driven by a blue troll armed with a golden cutlass. The lorry’s owner is four-year-old Lucas. He’s made it out of oversized Lego bricks. It has wheels and is articulated. But it also has wings and a tailfin. Come to think of it, it might actually be some sort of plane.
“Laura?” he says, to the psychologist, Dr Laura Warren. “Alfie said this was rubbish.”
“Did he?” Warren says. “And how does that make you feel?”
“Sad,” Lucas replies.
“Why do you think he would say that?”
“He was hoping I’d be upset,” he says. “He’s just a cheeky, naughty boy.”
“He is,” she says. “He is, sweetheart. How do you think you can help him to understand that’s not a good thing to do?”
He squints at his rubbish lorry-plane. “I don’t know,” he says.
“I’m going to have a chat with him,” she promises. “We’ll all work it out together.”
I watch Lucas plod off.
“In the old world,” I say, “Alfie would be being told off right now.”
“Correct,” the doctor says, smiling proudly.
“So what happens to him instead?” I ask.
“I’ll tell him that Lucas won’t play with him any more,” she says. “And I’ll coach Lucas to say, ‘I’m not going to play with you today, because earlier you hurt me.’ That way, he’ll become the agent of his own punishment.”
Warren is here to change these children. For 14 years, she’s been trying to help the youngsters of Buckinghamshire become better humans. I’ve come to St Paul’s Combined School in the pretty village of Wooburn Green to watch her cast her psychological spell, a programme she calls Let’s Get Smart. This kind of thinking is increasingly common in the UK, encouraged by the coalition’s £3.5m investment in character-building, announced last December. Partly, it has come in response to a feeling, long gathering in staff rooms, that the labours of an entire childhood and adolescence should produce more than a list of letters, A to G, that show how good you are at remembering facts. What about the creation of better people? What if teachers could take a youngster and shape his or her very self?
Lots of schools have started trying. More than 500 entered the Department for Education’s Character awards (St Paul’s only started Let’s Get Smart in January, so it didn’t qualify), which recently awarded prizes of £15,000 each to 27 educational organisations in England. It’s all part of coalition education secretary Nicky Morgan’s ambition to make the nation a “global leader of teaching character”.
Although programmes differ from school to school, children under Warren’s regime operate under a token system, whereby they’re awarded plastic discs for doing good work, but also for being considerate and honest about their failings. If they earn enough, come Friday they can cash them in for pencils, little rubber monsters or keyrings. They can also buy privileges, such as the right to stand at the back of the line (“Kids love being at the back of the line,” Warren says). If you don’t earn enough tokens, you’re forbidden from doing things such as joining the school football team or, if you’re in year six, luxuriating in the traditional privilege of sitting on benches (and not the floor) during assembly.
Warren’s belief is that children, like all of us, are psychologically tribal, and that those primeval instincts remain overwhelmingly powerful. “We have too much of a rosy, skewed, unhelpful picture of kids in this country,” she says.
As in, we see them all as angelic and beautiful?
“Absolutely. But they’re real. They’re mini adults.” And that means they’re machiavellian. “We all want to get the most out of a situation for ourselves,” she says. “That’s a human trait. That’s basic Darwinian survival.” Warren is trying to exploit children’s desire to earn treats and tribal status by connecting such rewards to their behaviour. “There’s competing in the tribe and cooperating in it. I try to balance those instincts.”
We’re soon joined by the school’s head, Ruth Goddard. She particularly likes the fact that the behaviour of all the pupils receives focus now, not just that of the naughty ones. “Typically, when you use any sort of behavioural strategy, it’s the children who have issues who get the attention,” she says. “What we want is for all the children to have attention paid to them, and all the children to realise their part in what’s going on.”
Goddard has noticed one change already, in the way the children tell tales on each other. “They’re less likely to tittle-tattle,” she says, “because they know that, if they do, it’s going to come back to them. They come to us trying to attribute blame, but they usually know that they did something to cause what happened in the first place. You can’t just complain about other people; you’ve now got to say what your part in it was as well.” Because they know they’ll be asked, if they do rat on a classmate, the kids begin to auto-correct halfway through. “They’ll break their own sentence and say, ‘I only…’ So it’ll be, ‘He punched me! I only just touched him.’ Or, ‘My teeth didn’t break his skin.’”
As we’re talking, a boy with food on his face walks by and addresses Warren proudly. “I nearly eated all of my dinner!” he says.
I can sense her brain working, scanning the sentence for clues. “Well done!” she says. “Did you think it was important to eat nearly all of your dinner?”
The boy looks out towards the sunny playground. “Yes, but I didn’t tell my teacher because my friends are out there already.”
“Oh,” Warren says, suddenly understanding. “OK. So you didn’t eat all of your dinner?”
“I eated this much,” he says, gesturing the size of a baked potato.
“Oh,” she says.
She lets the boy run off so she can fill me in.
“He knows he should’ve eaten all of his dinner. He hasn’t. He doesn’t want to get into trouble, so he’s come to influence me positively by telling me he nearly ate it all. He’s spinning his story.”
“But he did tell you,” I say. “That’s pretty good.”
“He did, but if we were having a Let’s Get Smart dialogue, I’d have said, ‘What you’re really saying is you left some of your dinner. Do you think you should have eaten all of it? Tomorrow, what will you do?’ But I would never reprimand him, because he was honest. And he knows I won’t.”
Warren believes not only that the majority of bad behaviour can be tackled relatively easily, but that traditional punishments mostly don’t work. “The first time a child does something wrong, we regard it as a mistake,” she says. “If they keep on doing it, we look at the context. If they’re refusing to follow instructions in class, nine times out of 10 it’s because the teacher hasn’t recognised the child has some sort of learning difficulty, or difficulty producing work. But I don’t want it to sound like all this is about making naughty people good. It’s about character.”
A different approach is taken by Kings Langley school in Hertfordshire, which teaches children between the ages of 11 and 18, and recently received £15,000 as Character awards regional winner.
“The reason we won the award is that character building pervades everything we do,” headteacher Gary Lewis tells me. He describes a lesson he witnessed yesterday: “The teacher was doing ratios as percentages. He said, ‘You’re going to buy a Lottery ticket. It’s a pound and you have only 75p. You borrow 25p from your friend. What percentage did you borrow?’ All the usual stuff. But then it was, ‘You win the Lottery. How much do you give to your friend?’ Each subject area has to provide these kinds of opportunities.” Kings Langley school’s 2014 Ofsted report ranked pupil behaviour as “outstanding”.
Professor James Arthur, director of the University of Birmingham’s Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, and a judge for the coalition’s recent Character awards, explains that while the idea of teaching character to schoolkids has been around since the 1880s, modern interest began 14 years ago.
“Labour brought this into play,” he says, explaining that it was a response to criticism that children were being taught only how to pass exams, as a result of schools being judged on their ranking in league tables. Unfortunately, it all became worse under the coalition. “Michael Gove, in particular, was obsessed by this idea of quantifying everything,” Arthur says. “If it moved, it had to be measured. Teaching became teaching to the test. But if you teach to the test, the child will pass the test, forget what they’ve learned, and then look to passing the next test. School becomes a series of hurdles. But when you go for a job interview, what’s being examined is not your qualifications – you’re being interviewed for your character. Is this a team player? Is this person collegial? Is this person trustworthy?”
Luckily, he says, Gove’s replacement took a more progressive view. “Nicky Morgan recognised that you can’t just have exam after exam, and that character has to be a part of it.” But how do you define character? “It’s about civic virtues, citizenship, volunteering, things like that. Then there are the moral virtues – truthfulness, honesty, developing a sense of justice, that type of thing. And then you’ve got what are called performance virtues: resilience, grit and determination.” So it’s broad. And there’s no official government definition. “There’s no blueprint,” Arthur says. “The Tories have a bottom-up approach: they want to let schools develop their own programmes.” From a total of 22,000 British schools, 570 applied for the Character awards. “And every school had a different take on it,” he says.
What can’t be measured or quantified, so far, is the success of these schemes. My own school career included stealing, shouting at teachers, smashing windows, submitting aggressively pornographic stories as GCSE coursework, getting caught having sex during a lunch break (I was expelled), earning one E at A-level, and not heading off to Oxford University, as my parents had hoped, but to a job in a shop from which I was sacked for thieving. Could I really have been moulded, from a young age, into a better student, a more moral person?
I’ve lived through the therapy and self-esteem generations. I stepped into my first counselling session at 18, and I’ve spent years talking about my problems, to shrinks and to groups, in rooms decorated with clip-framed photos of sunflowers. The last time I saw my psychotherapist, in the mess of a romantic betrayal, I was begging him for reassurance: if I gave my lover a second chance, would she change, as she’d promised? A distant look came over him. “I’ve been doing this for 25 years,” he said. “I know I shouldn’t say this, Will, but people don’t change.”
I turned 40 the other week. I’ve been trying to change since I was eight, when I was struggling to stop myself compulsively stealing. Although it took more than a decade, I did manage that. I’ve also stopped drinking and smoking and drugging. So it’s true, I have changed, through force of will. But, as far as I can tell, “character” is just another way of saying “behaviour”. Is it really possible to teach that in schools?
Professor Bruce Hood, a developmental psychologist at the University of Bristol, doesn’t think so. I meet him on a sunny spring morning in his office. There’s a skull on a bookshelf and, on the wall, a photograph of a Victorian man glaring ferociously. Hood tells me he’s dubious about schemes to improve the character of schoolchildren.
“If these are initiatives to try to get children to think about identity and prejudice, that can only be a good thing,” he says. “But I expect they’re doomed to failure. We are, by nature, tribal and we will always form in-groups and out-groups.”
Better, perhaps, to teach a more useful form of thinking. “Anything that breaks out of the curriculum is a good thing,” he says. “The problem is, they’ve been trained to pass exams. I’m seeing this at the other end of the tunnel, where they’re coming out of schools and into universities. They lack a lot of the creative thinking that we like to see. We have to almost break them again, in order to build them up to learn how to argue and to think creatively.”
In fact, Hood is sceptical about the possibility of long-lasting change. “For some, something like therapy will be completely life-changing. But I suspect, for most people, it has a temporary effect.” Yet we live in a culture that tells us we can be whoever we want to be. Is that true in any sense? “My hunch is probably not,” Hood replies. “I think temperament is pretty biological.”
Hood’s notion of “temperament” is a set of traits that personality psychologists believe we’re born with and that remain surprisingly steady over the course of a life. Back at home, I discover a simple quiz, developed by psychologists at the University of Newcastle, that’s designed to reveal an individual’s temperament. It’s called the Newcastle Personality Assessor (NPA) and it gives you a level for each of five main traits: extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness and openness. I’m pleased to discover I’m high in openness (which is about art, adventure and curiosity), unsurprised to discover I’m low in extraversion and agreeableness (I’m a grumpy loner), and curious to note I’m high in neuroticism.
The test was designed by Professor Daniel Nettle. In his book, Personality, I learn that “high neuroticism infuses everything with suffering… it is not just a risk factor for depression. It is so closely associated with it that it is hard to see them as completely distinct.”
I meet Nettle at a noisy student restaurant in Newcastle. He’s pale, thin and has a runner’s face, his eyes bright, his cheeks slightly sunken. As he orders a prawn salad, he explains that, just as we’re born with different eyes, hips and voices, we’re also born with different brains. These natural variations in neural structure and function should, if the theory holds, result in different personality traits. “Take extraversion,” he says. “There’s a huge [amount of] literature on brain mechanisms of reward – animals doing things associated with pleasure and acquisition of stuff. Those mechanisms relate pretty well to extraversion.” Similarly, there’s a lot of research on how a brain region called the amygdala regulates anxiety. Nettle suggests that the individual characteristics of a person’s amygdala directly influence how neurotic they are. The cause of variations in traits such as openness and agreeableness, meanwhile, remains largely mysterious. So can we change? Can a person’s character be improved?
“You can make a real effort to, say, improve your social relationships or stop being a workaholic, and you might manage that for a while,” Nettle says. “But habits will out.”
The best hope we can have of finding peace, according to Nettle’s colleague Professor Brian Little, a personality researcher and director of the Social Ecology Research Group at Cambridge University, is by changing not who we are, but what we do. His recent book, Me, Myself And Us, takes the view that one of the most important facets of the self is the “personal project”. This encompasses the things we do with our lives, the goals we have – be they trying to foment socialist revolution or teaching our dog to sit.
It’s good to have meaningful projects, of course, but far more important that they be achievable. If your goals are unachievable, Nettle believes, you should have the honesty to admit defeat and change them. “You can redesign your goals and your projects. You can hand them off to other individuals. You can renegotiate.” And this, he thinks, is the form of character building that schools should encourage. “Instead of trying to change personality, we should give children fresh lenses through which to view their daily doings. It gets us away from saying, ‘Make Johnny a good boy’ and into, ‘Let’s advise Johnny on what he’s doing and give him ideas for how he might do them better.’”
Little’s concern for the wider project of trying to engineer better children is that “bad” behaviour is sometimes useful. “One of the dangers is that emphasis on propriety and good can be constricting. It might lead to a lessening of the emphasis on audacious creativity and strategic bloody-mindedness that, although it may not redound to the common good, can lead to acts of brilliance that change us all.”
As for the schools and their character-building schemes, naturally, everyone involved insists they work. But when I ask Professor Arthur about studies that prove this to be so, he struggles to point to any. “There’s evidence from research that says we can raise children’s awareness of ethical issues. What we can’t measure is how that leads into practice, in what sense it changes their behaviour.”
Back at St Paul’s, I tell Warren about the first time I was caught stealing, aged five. I’d picked up a Twix that a boy dropped in the playground. The teacher gathered the class, then identified me as the thief in front of everyone. My parents made me apologise to the boy and save my pocket money to buy him a double Twix.
“I’d have dealt with it privately,” Warren says. “I’d have said, ‘When you took that Twix, what was in your head?’ I’d have to work out: what was your motivation for stealing? How can we rechannel that motivation into a positive action?”
I can see the sense in much of what Warren is trying to do, but I don’t believe I’d have been any more able to answer her question at five as I am at 40. Why do we do what we know we’ll regret? Why do we make the same mistakes for years and years? How much can nurture change nature?
“It’s a lot to ask of a child,” I tell her.
“It isn’t,” she says. “It isn’t.”
Source:Character classes: can you teach a six-year-old how to be good?