Having just reached my 5th year anniversary as a member of the Jubilee Centre it seems like a great moment to reflect on some of the lessons I have learnt and how I think they relate to the field of character education. What follows are five lessons I have learnt about character education, covering what its research and teaching need to do well, what makes it unusual within universities, and why the big questions the Centre researches matter more now than when I arrived.
1. Rigour needs translation
I arrived at the Centre as a methods person, and I still lead our work on methods, psychometrics, and statistics. Five years here have taught me that rigour is necessary and nowhere near sufficient. A beautifully designed study that a teacher, a doctor, or a lawyer cannot use on Monday morning has helped almost nobody, however tight its confidence intervals. This matters especially in character education, because the tradition we draw on was practical from the start. Aristotle wrote that we study ethics in order to become good, and research on character inherits that aim.
The Jubilee Centre is very good at translation. It turns research into frameworks, teaching resources, and guidance that schools and professions can use, and it treats that work as part of the research itself. If the people who educate for character cannot understand what we found, the work is only half done. I am getting better at this, slowly, helped by colleagues who can explain in two sentences what has taken me a whole paper to say. That said, this is not to say that practical experience, which is often biased, doesn’t benefit from rigourous empiricism. We absolutely need both, and the Centre has taught me more about how better to manage the conflicts that sometimes come into play when the two interact.
2. Character needs more than one discipline
The Centre brings together philosophers, psychologists, educationalists, and sociologists to work on the same problems. Character education needs this more than most fields, because virtue is a philosophical concept before it is a psychological variable, and an account of how virtues develop is of limited use to a school until someone has worked out how to cultivate them in a classroom. In practice, a philosopher will spot a conceptual muddle in a questionnaire item that a psychometrician would have validated without hesitation, and the psychometrician will then ask how the philosopher’s fine distinction could ever show up in data. (I speak as the psychometrician in that example.) Each makes the other’s work better, and occasionally more humble.
My own work on measuring practical wisdom began from a philosophical account of it and is much the better for the arguments along the way. Single-discipline departments rarely get that kind of scrutiny, because the people who would provide it work in another building and publish in other journals. So, what is the value of a discipline that only seeks critique from people who only see the world through that same discipline’s lens?
3. Character education can get beyond politics
It is generally held that British universities lean to the left politically, and the survey evidence, such as this Times Higher Education poll of university staff, tends to bear that out. Universities serve a public that splits roughly down the middle, so they need to be places where people of every persuasion can think together, not least as a matter of fiduciary duty.
Character education strikes me as a welcome example of such a place. In my experience the people who work in it come from across the political spectrum, and what draws them is the chance to get beyond politics. The questions at its centre (what makes a life go well, how people become honest, brave, or just, and what we owe the next generation) belong to no party. A persistent myth holds that character education is a conservative project, and this paper in the British Journal of Educational Studies explains why that myth, along with several others, is mistaken. Because people of every persuasion care about good character, I can sit down with someone who votes differently from me and argue about the nature of the good without either of us trying to win. A good character quality, after all, is knowing how to disagree, agreeably.
4. Europe needs more funding for the enduring questions
The United States has a tradition of private research philanthropy that Europe has nothing quite like. I should declare an interest, since the Jubilee Centre has been funded predominantly for its research by American foundations, so we benefit from exactly the generosity I wish there were more of. In Europe, research money tends to follow immediate policy priorities, which does a great deal of good, but the deepest questions in our field, about what a good life is and how people become good, rarely feature on any given year’s list.
There are excellent character education researchers across Europe, many of them connected through the European Character and Virtues Association (ECVA), doing fine work on limited budgets, the quality and importance of that work merits more tangible support than is often available. A certain productive inefficiency is one of the main reasons we have universities at all. Somebody needs to be paid to think about questions that will still matter in fifty years (i.e., not just the latest crisis or moral panic), and questions of character are urgent now as well. I would love to see more European foundations fund that work.
5. Character is technology neutral
Every few months brings a technology that its makers say will transform how we live, and some of them will be right. Whatever artificial intelligence brings next year, the question of what it means to be a good person will still be there. For most of history we told ourselves that intelligence was what set humans apart. That claim is arguably no longer safe, now that machines match or exceed us on a growing list of tasks that once seemed to need a mind. If intelligence no longer distinguishes us as a species, character is a strong candidate for what we most need to reckon with: what we value, how we judge, and what we will and will not do.
New technologies change the situations in which virtues are tested, and they raise the stakes for practical wisdom. A young person deciding when to rely on AI, when to resist it, and how far to trust what it tells them is exercising judgement of a kind character education has always cared about.
Five years in, I am more convinced than when I arrived that these questions deserve a career’s attention, in research and in teaching alike, and I feel lucky to be working on them with the colleagues and students I have. If you are thinking about the MA in Character Education, or about character education more broadly, I would be glad to hear from you.
