9 minute read
by Edward Cain 3
When surveyed, 98% of RE specialists agreed that ‘RE contributes to pupils’ character development’ and 94% that ‘RE teachers should model good behaviour for their pupils’ (Arthur, Moulin-Stożek, Metcalfe, & Moller, 2019). It is not clear, though, that this amounts to a mandate from teachers for explicitly educating character and virtues in the RE classroom. There is rather a difference between modelling good classroom behaviour and modelling a virtuous life! Respondents may have had the former in mind. Some further cause for doubt lies in the detail: teachers who themselves have a religious faith tended in the interviews to see exposure to religious teachings as the vehicle for pupils’ character development, while nonreligious teachers tended to attribute it to the practice of critical inquiry instead. So there seems to be fundamental disagreement here on the means and nature of implicit character education currently happening in RE.
Nonetheless, one popular theme emerges from those interviews. RE teachers feel that their subject offers a particularly strong contribution to the development of virtue literacy (Metcalfe & Moulin-Stożek, 2020). Specifically, the perception of specific virtues in action, reasoning about their wider application, and reflecting on one’s own development of them. This is in line with the opportunities outlined above, and is ripe for further research. My continuing MSc study explores how it could be practically implemented.
So, pending teacher buy-in and debate on the details, this is what RE might contribute to character education: ready-made historical examples of realistic moral and civic virtue with all its imperfections, through which students can become literate in what the virtues are and what they look like in reality. Ethical frameworks, both religious and philosophical, to analyse moral claims. Critical thinking skills – intellectual virtues – with which to do that reasonably. The potential outcome is well-developed practical wisdom, phronesis, which can then be exercised in other areas of school life.
What can your subject contribute?
BIO Edward Cain is currently studying towards an MSc in Learning and Teaching at the University of Oxford. He joined Berkhamsted in 2018, having previously taught RE, Politics, and History at a state boarding school in Dover. Edward’s scepticism of employability as the aim of education can be blamed on his rather gloomy first career in marketing.
Character - Universal or Just Vital?
While there is evidence that both China and Egypt saw the first schools spring up approximately 2000 years ago, the earliest forms of character education are usually ascribed to the Greeks (Doyle, 1997).
In the UK, character education has been seen as one of the advantages of a system of education which was established in boarding schools, and flourishes still in private schools. Successive Secretaries of State for Education have seen the breadth of education in independent schools as better educating character, and have sought to emulate it (DfE, 2019).
Character education is regarded by many as having a moral dimension. The Jubilee Centre at Birmingham University advocates a Neo-Aristotelian Virtue Development which is congruent with its Character Education focus. CS Lewis is often quoted as having said that 'Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil', but this is widely thought now to be a misquotation (O’Flaherty, 2014). He did say that education has intrinsic moral value: 'The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes' (Lewis, 1943).
The universality of underpinning values links CS Lewis’ writings to the programme put in place more than 20 years ago on the other side of the world, in New Zealand: Cornerstone Values sought to establish basic programmes to teach honesty and truthfulness, kindness, consideration and concern for others, compassion, obedience, responsibility, respect and duty in schools (Keown et al., 2005).
More recently still, the work of James Heckman, Nobel Laureate in Economics, demonstrates that ‘non-cognitive skills’ (which we may call character, or virtues) have at least as much effect on post-education ‘success’ as cognitive ability – or intelligence (Heckman et al., 2006).
If character education helps people both to do well and be well, then the question is: how? In the remainder of this article, three different approaches are outlined in three different contexts.
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St. Michaels University School,
Vancouver (Mark Turner, Head of School)
Here at St. Michaels University School, based in Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, Canada, we have an interesting perspective on character education. Of course, many of the leading HMC schools have several centuries of tradition that inform their view of character education in the present. Here in Canada, we are relatively unencumbered by the precedent and traditions of the past. Although our School has been in existence since 1906, it has only grown to full maturity since a merger between St. Michael’s School and University School in 1971.
Given that we are situated at the southern point of Vancouver Island, we have always been committed to the notion that the ‘great outdoors’ is the best classroom. Even though our campus is now urbanized, many faculty and staff will regularly take their classes outside in preference to the confines of four walls. This sense of engagement in the environment is of course very relevant today, with the rise in international concern for climate change and environment degradation.
We are also committed to the notion of leadership opportunity for all. My experience in the UK led me to believe that schools provided many wonderful leadership opportunities, but often unfairly biased towards the most capable. Here, we have a very egalitarian commitment to ensure that every individual is able to develop their own potential. Naturally enough, maximizing the advantages of our position, there are numerous programmes in the world of outdoor and adventure recreation. Winter survival training, constructing snow holes, and operating as a team take on a new urgency when the temperature outside is minus 25.
Although our School does not have the strong religious traditions of many in the UK, we do seize every opportunity to emphasize our values, courage, honesty, respect and service. These four themes are repeated like a mantra and used in a plethora of different contexts multiple times every day. On arrival in 2018, I have to confess to a degree of cynicism about how effective this would be. Four years of experience has taught me that it actually works. Every student from Kindergarten to Grade 12 knows our values and has to relate to them as they make every day decisions around the School. Of course, failure to live up to any of these values presents a tremendous learning opportunity. Almost everyone can recognize when they fall short.
Here in Canada, since the publication of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Final Report in 2015, all schools have taken steps to engage with their Indigenous neighbours in a spirit of learning, and in a desire to reconcile some of those aspects of history of which we are least proud.
This year started off with a whole-school ceremony where we received four spindle whorls, which are the manifestation of our four values as depicted by Indigenous artist, Dylan Thomas. 1 A deliberate attempt to connect more meaningfully with Indigenous heritage and culture gives us a new perspective on the future, with opportunities to take character education in a different direction.
Proximity to nature, respect for the environment, sustainability, non-hierarchical structure, and the importance of serving the community, particularly helping the disadvantaged members of it, are given new expression as we plan our character education for the future. All very much in line with Indigenous cultures evolved over millennia.
Words of Recognition
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Introduction The Society of Jesus (the ‘Jesuits’) was founded by Ignatius of Loyola, a Spanish soldier turned priest, in 1540. Ignatius arguably started one of the greatest educational movements the world has ever known. The Jesuits were known as ‘the schoolmasters of Europe’ and the Ratio Studiorum of 1599 standardised regulations of their schools globally. Today approximately one million young people attend a Jesuit school or university worldwide. Jesuits were innovators in education and created the concept that each year group should have a different curriculum. Year groups were named (and still are) Figures, Rudiments, Grammar, Syntax, Poetry, Rhetoric, etc. The foundations of the curriculum were the classics (theology, philosophy, Latin and Greek), but also including the study of native languages, history, geography, mathematics and the natural sciences. Astronomy is still taught in some Jesuit schools (including Stonyhurst) and the Vatican Astronomer is a Jesuit!
What do we do in a Jesuit School?
The Jesuit Pupil Profile has been developed by the schools of the British Jesuit Province as a successor to the Jesuit School Leaver Profile published in 1995. The new Jesuit Pupil Profile was launched in the schools in the autumn term of 2013.
Our aims in creating the new Jesuit Pupil Profile (JPP) have been: • to propose a simple but challenging statement of the qualities we seek to develop in pupils in Jesuit schools, using key words which unfold Ignatius' own stated aim of 'improvement in living and learning for the greater glory of God and the common good.' • to produce a profile that describes the whole process of Jesuit education (from age 3 or 5 or 11 or 17 - the common ages of entry into our schools in Britain) rather than that of a school leaver. • to create a JPP image in the style of a tag-cloud which can be used alongside the formal statement. Both image and statement are designed to provide a rich resource to stimulate discussion in class, assemblies, retreats and liturgy, in meetings of governors, with school leaders, teachers, support staff and parents; and which can be used to explain to prospective parents the aims of Jesuit education.
The JPP proposes eight pairs of virtues that sum up what a pupil in a Jesuit school is growing to be. Alongside the pupil profile itself, we have developed a parallel statement of what a Jesuit school does to help its pupils grow in the virtues listed in the JPP. There is also a brief expansion of the profile explaining its gospel and Ignatian roots.
Jesuit Pupil Profile
Pupils in a Jesuit school are growing to be . . . Grateful for their own gifts, for the gift of other people, and for the blessings of each day; and generous with their gifts, becoming men and women for others. Attentive to their experience and to their vocation; and discerning about the choices they make and the effects of those choices. Compassionate towards others, near and far, especially the less fortunate; and loving by their just actions and forgiving words. Faith-filled in their beliefs and hopeful for the future. Eloquent and truthful in what they say of themselves, the relations between people, and the world. Learned, finding God in all things; and wise in the ways they use their learning for the common good. Curious about everything; and active in their engagement with the world, changing what they can for the better. Intentional in the way they live and use the resources of the earth, guided by conscience; and prophetic in the example they set to others.
