Educating Ruby (10 page)

As you read it, you might like to be mulling over these questions:

You’ll immediately see there is a lot of ground for disagreement. But do you agree that this kind of competence has to be the starting point for thinking about what our children
really need to be taught in the future? The group of young adults who thought up this list certainly thought so.

This list of competences is a bit of a rag-bag. We could tidy it up somewhat by dividing it into two groups: what we might call
skills
– which are techniques that can be learned or trained quite explicitly – and what we will call
habits of mind
– which are more general tendencies to respond to events in a particular way. Solving simultaneous equations or making meringue is a skill. Handing in lost property or owning up when you have broken something are examples of a more general habit of mind called ‘honesty’. Many people are drawing attention to the importance of these more general habits of mind these days. If children are to grow up with the ability to thrive in a challenging and fast-changing world, they say, it is things like Ruby’s seven Cs that they are going to need. Two recent books provide comprehensive reviews of the research that shows how important these habits of mind are for success in life. They are
How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity and the Hidden Power of Character
by Paul Tough, and
Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined
by Scott Barry Kaufman.
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Ruby, with her resources of commitment and confidence – a feeling of being able to direct her own life, and to put in the disciplined effort to achieve her goals – will do better in life, in every way you can think of, than Nadezna.

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.
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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.

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.
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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.
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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.
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We found instances of these ‘character specifications’ from the national governments of, for example, Singapore, Australia, 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.

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.