Competitive Character Building

Here I was carefully minding my own business, wallowing in a headache that will not disappear, trying to read the newspaper through squinted eyes, darkened with sunglasses, determined that whatever article I felt needed a comment would simply have to wait until the morning.

And then I found Mr. Seldon, Mr Happiness, Mr. I can say anything I like about education because I have managed to get the combination just right at my mega bucks independent school and let’s not forget Mr. Tony Blair’s biographer.

I have been to a couple of meetings where Mr. Seldon has been a guest speaker. He talks sense. He understands the concept of a holistic education, whereby we should not be thinking purely about the academic attainment of our young people but should equally be considering their wellbeing, their “happiness”, their ability to be socially intelligent, emotionally intelligent and so forth. He concurs with ideas that creativity is important and that young people need to have quality leisure time as much as quality learning. He advocates learning outside the classroom. He deplores the league table stringency and strangulation that has happened in our state education system.

He appears to understand something about multiple intelligences and how, within our education system, we should be not be limiting learning to the mere diktat of a tiny and often anachronistic curriculum. He understands this.

“Through no fault of the teachers – the relentless pressure of league tables has dictated schools sacrifice so much of the education of the whole child for the sake of exam grades.” He says.

He talks about the importance of character building, suggesting that schools might learn something from that ever so liberal Mr Baden Powell in offering the sort of resilience training that the Scouting Movement is known for, and apparently is still as popular today. It is rumoured that there are huge waiting lists to get involved in the Scout movement in this country. There is apparently a lack of volunteers to support these young people. So much for Cameron’s Big Society.

And so this is where it starts to go rather sour. This is where Seldon suggests all manner of possibilities for state education that have been introduced in the new Free School that Toby Young is starting in the West of London, soon to be opened by that old Etonian Mr. Boris Johnson. He suggests that the Left are afraid of competitiveness at their peril. He says that competitive sport is vital, that cadet services would be a useful enhancement to any school, that mental and physical challenges where the young people fail will be extremely good for their character building. He also suggests that those students whose home lives are not conducive to their learning should automatically be given boarding places, in state schools.
Has he got any idea how many kids would be institutionalised with this sort of baseline? Has he any idea how detrimental the state system of education and housing and welfare has been on hundreds and thousands of children, crippling them emotionally, disabling them from having an education and housing appropriate to their need?

Now because I like to be contrary, I am going to say something now which may surprise the reader(s). I agree with Mr. Seldon. I think that character building is very important and I think we do not do enough to build and develop the whole child in schools, assuming this is part of what Seldon means by character building. However, I disagree with his proposed means to build character. There are other ways and too many of our schools have refused to consider the viable alternatives to character building.

Why do I disagree?

Well let us take competitive sport first.

I had the fortune or misfortune, whatever way you choose, to be responsible for the netball and football team when I was teaching. I had to juggle with parental expectations, pupils who thought they ought to be in the team because they were brilliant at sports and those poor little sods whose confidence plummeted at the suggestion that they were not good enough or strong enough to get into the team, yet their enthusiasm far outweighed the footy experts. And that is before we have even considered the little ones who didn’t even put themselves forward because they did not want to suffer the indignity of not been chosen.

The whole system, particularly in primary schools, stinks. I have been bombarded by parents who have accused me of being a liberal minded wally for putting certain children on the playing field. I have been screamed at by children who couldn’t believe that I had put a child on the netball pitch who couldn’t catch a ball. I’ve even been yelled at by colleagues who have suggested that my socialist principles have just gone too far. To my shame, I have sometimes conceded to their demands, such lack of will I sometimes have to endure. However, in the main, I stuck to my guns and insisted on every child having an opportunity, irrespective of whether we were going to win the league or not.

Luckily for me, we did, in both competitions but that is an aside and one which surely shows up that nasty little streak of competitiveness within me.

I can also remember the teacher who promised my own child that once he was in Year 6 he would automatically get a game on the football pitch each week, irrespective of the talent available in other lower-age year groups, as he had patiently and freezingly marched up and down the sideline on many a dire Saturday morning when he was younger. Alas, the aforementioned teacher forgot all about this promise when it came to the competition, deciding that my child was too feeble and too incapable of playing the glorious game. I marched in to him assertively and reminded him of his promise, stating that you just couldn’t do that to a child. You could not promise something like that and then tell a child that he was not good enough for a feeble interschool competition. It was soul destroying. It sapped the poor child’s confidence. It belittled him in front of his friends. But this damn teacher would not back down. He needed to win the cup! That was the only thing that was driving him, and it really didn’t matter how mucked up any child got en route.

I suppose this is the sort of character building that Mr. Seldon is talking about. Perhaps he thinks that this dose of reality was the perfect form of character building for my son. Perhaps certain readers do too. But I can think of other ways of building up his resilience.

Young people have to contend with far too many horrible things in their lives, so why should we project more unnecessary disappointments on them?

As it happened, the same year that my son was prevented from joining the football team, his grandfather died. I wonder which one built his character more. I wonder which one was more difficult to contend with? I wish he had not had to endure either.

So I have suggested why I do not think competitive sport is a good idea, and I have merely scratched the surface of this debate. So what would I suggest instead?

Seldon is right in some respects when mentioning Baden Powell but can we please lose the allegiance to God and the Queen, and the uniform? If we strip the organisation of its ritualistic barriers and get down to the nitty gritty of what the organisation should be about, then yes, there is certainly place for activities that are challenging and conducive to team work that should be happening in our schools. But they should be happening anyway. Any decent primary school teacher should be making their activities exciting and challenging. Every decent school leader should be instructing their teachers to ensure that there are abundant times outside of the classroom to explore local parks, if there are any, or certainly their local environment.

Again, as a dib, dib, dib trained person, I took plenty of my Baden Powell activities into the classroom. Nowadays though, I would probably go further, inviting the children to come up with challenges that they can develop for themselves, rather than have me direct them.

Of course, one of the best ways of developing the individual child, including his character, is allow him or her to learn what they want in the way they want, with the possibility of enabling them to share their learning with others, becoming a leader and a learner simultaneously, opting to listen and learn from their peers’ particular interest too.

But that takes a lot of planning and requires the teacher to stop directing and become an enabler and a facilitator; some of them find that tricky.

There is also creativity. How often do we enable our young people to develop their creative side, something that is particularly personal to them? Not every child can be a perfect artist or musician but that does not stop them trying or wishing to create something. Who says that one piece of art is better than another? It is all subjective. And those who cannot draw can use their creativity in another way; writing, photography, singing, film-making. Don’t you think that these activities could be character building too?

But we are overseeing another way of developing resilience and character, one that many a school would not consider.

Let us look east.

I wish to goodness someone had suggested meditation, philosophy and the study of certain eastern writings when I was a youngster. Maybe I might be more resilient to life’s difficulties now had I had this ingrained within me, had I had the opportunity to find another way to develop my mind, my soul and my confidence in myself.

Perhaps yoga or Tai Chi could offer the same character building as the disappointment of not being chosen for the school football team. Who knows?

I may have been a scout but I wasn’t a very good one. I hated doing all those badges and felt that I could never match up to the ones who did. I was never a brilliant sportsperson and as soon as I lost my place in the netball team, that was me and sport finished. I could play a couple of musical instruments but I could never play in the way that I really wanted, improvising and being able to play a tune that I had heard on the radio immediately. I was bright enough at school but was never going to be as successful academically as others, including my sister. Competition and comparison never did me any good. In fact, I don’t need to look very far to see the lasting damage that its powerful revoltingness has left me with. What resilience did I manage to achieve through these constant comparisons and never being the ‘best’?

It does not work. It does not develop character whereas learning to believe in my ability to take photographs or write might have been more beneficial. Finding my own voice earlier might have helped but I had an O level and A Level syllabus to deal with. The only person who ever spoke to me about philosophy was a PE teacher who never actually taught me in a formal lesson. If only I had listened to him more often, then perhaps my own character building might have been more successful.

Seldon is right. School is far more than the conventional and sometimes tedious lessons we prepare for our children because we have a National Curriculum to comply with. School is a place where all sorts of learning could and should take place. I refer to my previous blog about allowing local communities to use the premises so that young people have somewhere to go after hours.

Seldon is wrong, however, to suggest that the only way we can character build is through some sort of army camp or competition. It did me no good. It did my child no good and I am absolutely confident that we are not alone.

Toby Young – let’s just get this over and done with. Toby Young may be introducing these elements into his school for other reasons and not for the alleged altruistic reasons that Seldon suggests, i.e. a character building activity.  I suspect may be introducing such measures because he has a serious chip on his shoulder that he did not go to Eton, and he wants to offer his kids this wonderful form of confidence. I suspect that he likes the regimentation of ‘character building’ and may end up adopting a similar style to Sir Michael Wilshaw of the Mossbourne Academy, whereby all pupils chant together daily “Yes we are all individuals” “Yes we will achieve our best as long as our best is 27 A star GCSEs”. Indoctrination, brainwashing.

I suspect Toby Young wants character building brought in so that his pupils succeed academically and not because he particularly concerned about the individual children involved, but I could of course be being unfair.

Toby Young and his Etonian antics is not the answer to character building, and I suspect that Seldon probably knows that too. There is far more to character building than failing to get into the school rugger team. There is far more to developing resilience than ramming a shed load of failure on a child’s back. And where do the perpetual successes learn resilience? If they succeed at everything, how are they ever to develop humility? How will they cope when someone tells them that they are wrong? How will they cope with the competition when their intellect or physical prowess is not as brilliant as they had been led to believe?

Perhaps we ought to be looking far more carefully at how we really develop resilience through meditation, through emptying our minds, through appreciating the value of oneself than any of these measures could possibly provide.

Perhaps we ought to be looking at shared values and the vital virtues that all should have or certainly strive for because that is going to make for a more contented world where hopefully resilience becomes a natural acceptance of disappointments in life without it shrouding people completely.

Surely Mr. Seldon could go along with that.