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THE VIRTUES OF UNCERTAINTY:A CHARACTER CURRICULUM FOR THELEARNING AGE

GUY CLAXTON

Professor of the Learning SciencesCo-Director, Centre for Real-World LearningUniversity of Winchester

guy.claxton@winchester.ac.uk

We seem to live in a morally bashful age. Perish the thought thatanyone might try to ‘impose their values’ on anyone else. Educationcolludes with this squeamishness by pretending that the onlyserious questions it faces are technical ones. How are we going toraise standards? What are the most appropriate methods for testingstudents, and when, and how much? Should we have 14-19diplomas, or a six-term year?But words like ‘standards’ and ‘appropriate’ merely finesse theunderlying moral questions. They have only the appearance of neutrality, for we have only to ask ‘Standards of what?’ and‘Appropriate to what end?’ and their value-laden nature is hauled tothe surface. Only if we assume that ‘standards’ refer, self-evidently,to performance on national tests – with a sprinkling of statisticsabout ‘attendance’, and ‘exclusions’ - do the moral questionssubside. But that assumption is looking increasingly flimsy. If, after100 years of tinkering and innovation, half of all young people stilldon’t get a clutch of good GCSEs; if millions of school-leavers stillcan’t read well; if thousands of students vote with their feet everyday – not because they are inherently lazy or stupid, but becausethey can see no value in what school is offering - you might havethought that a slightly deeper look at aims and values was timely. The idea of ‘personalising learning’ is the latest from the stable of Morally Weasley Ideas. Who could be against ‘choice’? Surely you donot prefer bondage? But choice of what? Choice for what end? Is itobviously a ‘good thing’ that students and their teachers be able tocustomise their curriculum, like they can their lattes? ‘Double shotwith skinny milk and a cinnamon shake, please’. ‘First World Wars Iand II minus the Balkans, and extra Palestine, please’. Shall wequietly drop the holocaust lest it arouse any genuine dissent, orprovoke the expression of repugnant views? Is that the extent of ourmoral vision?Education has always been about much more than the mastery of self-evidently valuable bodies of knowledge, skill and understanding

– though you have to search quite hard, in ministerialpronouncements, these days, to find the ‘more’. We can argue atthe edges about what is ‘self-evident’ (another weasel word) andwhat isn’t, and create wonderfully engaging distractions by arguingabout the relative merits of Shakespeare and Dickens and JK Rowling. But the real moral heart of education is about character.What kinds of adults does a nation want its children to become: not just with what skills, but with what dispositions and interests andconcerns, do we want them to grow up? And that means valuingsome traits over others, and being clear and up-front about whichones we don’t think matter so much. Dropping Dickens is not thepoint; it is, do we drop ‘neatness’ in favour of ‘discerningconsumption of internet-based information’, and are we going tofavour ‘resilience’ over ‘honour’?In the 19

and early 20

centuries, they didn’t pussy-foot around. The public schools talked happily of developing qualities for theleaders of the future such as team spirit, fair play, judgement andrationality. It was assumed that we only needed so many Leadersand a great many more Followers, so mass education (for theFollowers) sought to develop obedience, punctuality, precision,honesty, neatness and hygiene, as well as a degree of basic literacyand numeracy.Nowadays, quite rightly, we no longer want to be associated with aschool system that sorted children so divisively into potential‘winners’ and ‘losers’, and trained their characters differentially, andso we have become nervous about talking about character-formation at all. But the problem was not in talking about character

per se

. It was only the

particular

sets of valued characteristics thatneeded challenging and updating, and we should not have thrownout the baby of value-judgements about desirable characteristics,along with the bathwater of colonial patriarchy and inheritedprivilege.Actually, there

are

signs of a resurgence of interest in character.Countries round the world have recently been busy drawing upwish-lists of the kinds of qualities they would like education todevelop in young people. From Australia’s ‘new basics’(Queensland) and ‘essential learnings’ (Victoria, Tasmania) to theUK Qualifications and Curriculum Authority’s ‘personal learning andthinking skills’ and the Royal Society of Arts’ ‘key competencies’,the world is now buzzing with fine-sounding phrases like ‘respectsthe environment’ and ‘plays an active role in the community’. Thesemay be a start towards something more robust, but they can oftenseem more like paving slabs for the road to hell than well workedout guidelines for a revitalised education.

First, they are often phrased so vaguely that no-one could possiblydisagree – but at the unacceptable cost of no-one knowing whatthey really mean either. Does ‘respecting the environment’ meanlobbying the G8? Demanding James Lovelock come and talk to theschool? Insisting that school-meals are organic? Or merely watching

An Inconvenient Truth

, not dropping litter and trips to the bottle-bank? And second, the gulf between these fine sentiments and thedaily reality of life in lessons remains, for the vast majority of students, huge. Schools may pay lip-service to such ideas on theopening pages of their prospectuses and strategic plans, and thentacitly ignore them. Students, of course, are wise to thesedisparities and hypocrisies, and their main effect, when they arehonoured in the breach rather than the observance, is to fuelcynicism.Maybe education could learn from another area where values havemade a comeback – the ‘positive psychology’ movement inspired in1998 by American Professor Martin Seligman. Fed up with the factthat psychology had a vast vocabulary for describing pathology, butvery little to say about well-being and happiness, he and ChrisPeterson trawled the world’s literature for a preliminary list of ‘character strengths and virtues’. Some apparently timeless oneskept recurring, like integrity, generosity and forgiveness. Others,however, seemed to be particularly suitable to certain kinds orconditions of society, like physical valour or aesthetic sensibility.Given that we too would like our kids to grow up kind and honest,what then are the special virtues that 21

century living seem torequire?It is a cliché that we live in times of escalating uncertainty,complexity, ambiguity, choice and individual responsibility. Throughthe electronic media children are bombarded daily with conflictingmodels of what to value and how to live, and their communitiesoften offer little strong, unanimous guidance about how to choosewisely – or little they are willing to heed. It is also increasinglyobvious that young people (especially in the UK, according to therecent Unesco report) are not coping well with this freedom anddiversity. Classic symptoms of stress are high – escapism,recklessness, drug abuse, anxiety, depression, self-doubt. If stressreflects a widening gap between the demands of one’s life and theresources one has to cope, clearly many young people are feelingbadly under-resourced. Those resources are psychological, as muchas they are material or social.As the core function of education is precisely to develop in youngpeople the mental and emotional resources they will need, to copewell with the real demands of their real lives, it is clearly not doingits job. And one of the reasons it is floundering is because it has noclear understanding of what the virtues are; no agreed vocabulary

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The Virtues of Uncertainty by Guy Claxton

The Virtues of Uncertainty: A character curriculum for the learning age by Guy Claxton, Professor of the Learning Sciences, Co-Director for Real-World Learning, University of W... (More)

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Upload Date:	11/11/2009
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Tags:	Education Humanities young people youth work nonformal learning #ukyouth (more tags) Education Humanities young people youth work nonformal learning #ukyouth ukyouth uk youth vision not division (fewer)