Why schools can’t teach character

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 character education.

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, are more likely to go to university and less likely to go to prison. According to believers in ‘character education’, it follows that we should teach children qualities like self-control, particularly in primary school.

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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 genuinely useful things, such as the history of the British Isles. Numerous research 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 and truthfulness. One of the conclusions of a piece of research 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 wasting time on character education.

Read his full column here.