London: I participated in a lively discussion about character education at Policy Exchange earlier this week. For those of you who don’t follow every twist of the education debate, the idea that “character” should be taught in schools has gained a lot of traction in recent years.
And support for it doesn’t divide along party lines: both Tristram Hunt and Nicky Morgan are advocates of that.
By “character”, the supporters of this idea have various desirable traits in mind, such as tenacity, reliance and self-control. There’s plenty of evidence that a child’s possession of these qualities is a strong predictor of later success.
To give just one example, children who perform well in the marshmallow test, whereby they are given a choice between eating one now or two later, do better at school, and are less likely to go to prison. Believers in “character education”, say we must teach kids qualities like self-control, particularly in primary school.
I’m a detractor. I have no objection to teaching character outside the classroom. But I draw the line at devoting curriculum time to it. Why? Because character traits are inherited, not taught.
I’m not talking about moral qualities, such as honesty, compassion and altruism. May be they can be cultivated. I mean performance-enhancing virtues, like stick-to-it-ness and the ability to bounce back from defeat.
There’s a growing body of evidence that these traits are encoded in our DNA. If you exhibit any of these qualities, it’s overwhelmingly likely that your parents did, too.
And if a child’s upbringing has any impact on these qualities, it’s the peers they associate with during adolescence that matter, not their teachers.
This was the finding of the American psychologist Judith Rich Harris, who spent years researching the subject and published her conclusions in a book called The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do. Her hypothesis that nature not nurture is the main determinant of character has been corroborated by other studies, like a 2005 paper by John Paul Wright and Kevin Beaver entitled “Do Parents Matter in Creating Self-Control in Their Children?” By studying sets of twins separated at birth, Wright and Beaver show that when it comes to qualities we associate with a lack of self-control, such as impulsiveness, ADHD and hyperactivity, the impact of a child’s upbringing is negligible.
Children’s character traits are evident by the time they’re 19-months-old, with parents and teachers having little impact.
This flies in the face of the teachings of child psychologists and suggests there’s little we can do when it comes to correcting children’s character defects.
You can see why people resist it, particularly conservatives, since it lets negligent parents and teachers off the hook. It even calls into question the idea that prisoners can be rehabilitated. But we cannot ignorethe facts just because they’re unpalatable.
As with so many educational fads, the problem is the opportunity cost the time you’re wasting on gobbledegook that could be devoted to teaching children useful things, such as the history of their nation. Numerous studies have shown that the best predictor of academic attainment is how much knowledge children possess at an early age.
For traditionalists like me, that’s reassuring, as was the recent report by the Sutton Trust which found that the most effective teaching method is not “discovery learning” or “group work” but direct instruction.
Unfortunately, educational theorists are rarely led by the evidence, even when the brand of snake oil they’re peddling includes teaching virtues like honesty.
One of the conclusions of a report I read recently is that a strong predictor of academic success are fine motor skills. In short, if you want to maximise children’s life chances, particularly children from chaotic family backgrounds, you’d be better off teaching them handwriting than character education.
By arrangement with the Spectator
