Mapping the Moral Geographies of Education

Character, Citizenship and Values

Sarah Mills

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781351402880
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Physical Sciences
• Categoría: Geography

This book explores the growth of 'character education' in schools and youth organisations over the last decade. It delves into historical and contemporary debates through a geopolitical lens.

With a renewed focus on values and virtues such as grit, gumption, perseverance, resilience, generosity, and neighbourliness, this book charts the re-imagining and re-fashioning of a 'character agenda' in England and examines its multiscalar geographies. It explores how these moral geographies of education for children and young people have developed over time. Drawing on original research and examples from schools, military and uniformed youth organisations, and the state-led National Citizen Service, the book critically examines the wider implications of the 'character agenda' across the UK and beyond. It does so by raising a series of questions about the interconnections between character, citizenship, and values and highlighting how these moral geographies reach far beyond the classroom or campsite.

Offering critical insights on the roles of character, citizenship and values in modern education, this book will be of immense value to educationists, teachers and policymakers. It will appeal students and scholars of human geography, sociology, education studies, cultural studies and history.

1

Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9780203733066-1

In recent years, politics in the United Kingdom has been dominated by questions of character and leadership. The 2019 General Election largely focused on individual candidates’ values, moral fibre and character, despite approaches to Brexit largely leading the respective party political agendas. The character, integrity and leadership of key UK Government figures have also dominated the evaluations of its handling of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. This salience of character in contemporary social and political life echoes a more specific trend in educational spaces over the last decade, namely, the promotion of character education.

There has been a growing trend in schools and civil society to encourage ‘good character’ in children and young people. This push to improve individuals, and by extension wider society and the nation-state, builds on a long historical legacy of moral education and citizenship training. Furthermore, there is a complex genealogy to ideas of character, not least in terms of religious and class-based contexts in the nineteenth and twentieth century. This book charts the recent re-imagining and re-fashioning of a ‘character agenda’ in England specifically, shaped by the wider political landscape of the United Kingdom. In this context, characteristics such as courage, resilience, grit, perseverance, self-discipline, responsibility, trustworthiness and neighbourliness have been woven into the pedagogic landscape, shaping moral geographies and everyday lives of children and young people.

The definition of character education is contested. However, it is largely understood as a global educational movement where learning is based on values and virtues, designed to encourage certain moral and ethical characteristics in individuals. The Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills (Ofsted) – a non-ministerial department of the UK Government – define character as: “A set of personal traits, dispositions and virtues that informs their [pupil's] motivation and guides their conduct so that they reflect wisely, learn eagerly, behave with integrity and cooperate consistently well with others” (Ofsted, 2019: 58). This book demonstrates how geography matters in understanding character education. It maps these moral geographies over time and space, tracing how character and related concepts of citizenship and values are cast in space. This book traces the emergence of a ‘character nation’ in England over the past decade and its multi-scalar geographies. On the one hand, this national state-led push has been inspired by global examples such as the United States and several countries in Asia. On the other hand, it has been embraced through local activities in individual schools and within civil society organisations. Across a range of character education programmes and initiatives at the local, national or global scale, a number of different visions for character education exist that draw on different approaches, beliefs or pedagogical practices. Taken together, these activities reflect a growing focus on values, virtues and morals under the ‘umbrella’ of character, despite the nuances of philosophical and ethical traditions or scholarly distinctions. The remainder of this introductory chapter expands on the aim and objectives of the book and outlines the wider political significance of this topic, as well as provides brief chapter summaries.

Overall, there has been a shift in ideology and practice towards (or as this book argues back to) character in recent years in both formal and informal education. For example, between 2014 and 2016, the Department for Education (hereafter DfE) spent a total of £14.5 million on character education via their Character Innovation Fund and two rounds of Character Education Grants.¹ This (re)turn to ideas of moral, values or virtues-based education in England has been driven by the Conservative Government and championed by Nicky Morgan MP and later Damien Hinds MP during their respective tenures as Secretary of State for Education. Schools have been encouraged to embrace character to develop “courage, honesty, generosity, integrity, humility and a sense of justice” (DfE, 2019a: 7) through taught lessons, assemblies, partnerships with military ethos providers and extracurricular activities. Beyond school, the language of character has been resurrected within spaces of informal education such as youth movements and outdoor educational charities. The historical legacy of citizenship training and character-building adventurous activities has been rebranded, along with a shift from youth volunteering towards ‘social action’. Overall, this book explores a range of spaces and practices for children and young people designed with a ‘moral compass’ and situated within this wider character agenda.

From the classroom to the campsite, the book captures this shifting landscape and presents a wider argument about the relationship between formal and informal education. It does so through an analysis of historical and contemporary case studies in England including schools, military ethos providers, uniformed youth organisations and the state-led youth volunteering programme, National Citizen Service (NCS). Indeed, the originality of the research underpinning this book lies in considering spaces of formal and informal education alongside each other, considering the synergies and divergences between their ideas, practices and spatialities. This approach is vital in understanding both the historical impulses that underlie the contemporary spatialities of character education, as well as the increasingly blurred lines between schools and other learning spaces. Overall, this book traces the wider social, political and geographical implications of the character agenda in England, before examining wider global trends in schools and state-led policies on youth volunteering. This focus acts as a lens through which to view the wider relationship between character, citizenship and values.

There were three key objectives that shaped the research activities underpinning this book. First, tracing the genealogies of character education and excavating its shifting definitions, meanings and place over time. Second, critically examining the contemporary policy debate on character education in England in both formal and informal education. Finally, mapping the global geographies and geopolitics of character education, and excavating the multi-scalar politics behind its influences, formations and cultural values. In doing so, the book builds on a groundswell of recent research in human geography on childhood, youth and education, as well as long-standing work in the social sciences and humanities on educational spaces and politics. At this stage, it is important to situate the book's three central contributions to academic knowledge within the relevant wider academic debates.

First, the book's analysis contributes to debates on geographies of youth citizenship (Pykett, 2009; Staeheli, Attoh and Mitchell, 2013) by tracing the genealogies of character education and positioning these activities within wider historical attempts by the state and civil society to ‘make’ citizens (Mills, 2013; Mills and Waite, 2017) and ‘govern through pedagogy’ (Pykett, 2011). A body of vibrant work in children and young people's political geographies has spearheaded this specific agenda on the geographies of youth citizenship (i.e. Philo and Smith, 2003; Kallio and Häkli, 2011, 2015; Skelton, 2010, 2013; Wood, 2012; Staeheli, Attoh and Mitchell, 2013). This focus can also be situated within wider debates about young people as ‘beings’ or ‘becomings’ (Uprichard, 2008) and young people's transitions to adulthood (i.e. Valentine, 2003; Worth, 2009). The book also examines how character education has sought to create, shape and govern citizens of the future, tracing its key influences and features over time. Thus far in the literature, critical examinations of this shifting landscape within the United Kingdom remain underdeveloped, and research on character education tends to be either exclusively historical or practitioner focused and championing its benefits (i.e. Kristjánsson, 2015; Arthur et al., 2017; Arthur, 2020). Two important exceptions on character education in the United Kingdom are critical sociological work in Bull and Allen's special issue on the ‘turn to character’ (2018) and Jerome and Kisby's (2019) research in education studies, discussed in Chapter 2. However, this book utilises key geographical concepts, for example space, place and scale, to provide a different analytical lens to these debates in order to excavate the moral geographies of character education in England.

Second, this book contributes to vibrant and expanding work on the geographies of education (i.e. Hanson Thiem, 2009; Holloway et al., 2010; Kraftl, 2013; Mills and Kraftl, 2014). Its critical examination of the geographies of character education focuses on both formal and informal learning spaces, which Holloway and Jöns (2012) observe are often studied in isolation. What is striking, and worthy of academic attention, is the increasingly blurred connections between formal and informal education via the character agenda. For example, the recent partnership between the DfE and The Scouts to fund pilot ‘character’ Scout Groups in schools, discussed in Chapter 3. These shifts are happening in a range of contexts, for example within alternative education provision (Kraftl, 2013) and the growing use of Forest Schools by mainstream schools in the United Kingdom (Pimlott-Wilson and Coates, 2019). An examination of such trends in relation to character, however, allows for an interrogation of the wider relationship between the state and civil society. Furthermore, by excavating the geographies of character education, the book highlights the unique characteristics of the United Kingdom and the impact of devolution on educational policy. In ‘mapping’ the synergies and distinctions between the approaches in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and later analysing related trends in different international contexts, this book brings an important geographical dimension to critical interdisciplinary debates on education (Brooks, Fuller and Waters, 2012; Brock, 2016).

Finally, this book contributes to work on the geographies of children, youth and families (i.e. Skelton and Valentine, 1998; Holloway and Valentine, 2000; Aitken, 2001; Hopkins, 2007; Jeffrey 2010; Holt, 2011; Holloway, 2014) by critically analysing the discourses that character education harbours about children and young people's role in society. This analysis, and how it intersects with recent moves to teach ‘Fundamental British Values’ for example, contributes a much-needed focus on the explicit moral constructions surrounding young people's ‘life skills’ within a body of literature that often focuses on youth employment and higher education (i.e. Holdsworth, 2017; Pimlott-Wilson, 2017). This focus also highlights the everyday geopolitics of children and young people's lives, whether through the increased presence of military ethos providers in schools or moves towards ‘compulsory volunteering’ under the auspices of the character agenda. Moreover, the book demonstrates how a number of these trends are extending their influence and reach towards much younger age groups, illustrating the importance of researching children's spaces. This book demonstrates the value of a geographical approach for understanding shifting yet enduring educational philosophies and agendas for children and young people, and how these are politicised and performed in everyday life.

Overall, this book has a specific focus on a set of interconnected policies and spaces of character education. More broadly though, it raises a series of provocative questions about the state's construction(s) of character, citizenship and values. Indeed, these moral geographies have wider political implications that reach far beyond school assemblies or a youth organisation's activities. For example, consider the role of ‘Good Character’ tests by the Home Office of the United Kingdom as part of its citizenship infrastructures. This test was previously only required for naturalisation as a British citizen, but since 2006 it has also been applied to other routes to registration. The good character requirement utilises no set definition of character, yet recent guidance for Home Office staff states that “consideration must be given to all aspects of a person's character, including both negative factors, for example criminality, immigration law breaches and deception, and positive factors, for example contributions a person has made to society” (Home Office, 2019: 9). This formalisation of subjective assessments about the ‘contributions’ a good citizen makes is noteworthy. These trends also have clear impacts on the everyday lives and futures of children, young people and families. As Haque (2019) argues “hundreds of children – even those born and raised in Britain – are being denied citizenship because of minor offences”. The ‘Good Character’ test, coupled with other moves in the hostile environment such as high fees for children's citizenship applications (Rickett, 2020), demonstrates the wider importance of mapping the moral geographies of education and this broader relationship between character, citizenship and values.

A further individualised example that demonstrates these tensions is the case of British-born Shamima Begum, whose experience reveals the fissures between character, citizenship and age-based rights and responsibilities. Begum had her British citizenship legally revoked in February 2019 following her plans to return to the United Kingdom from Syria. Begum, along with two other friends, left the United Kingdom aged 15 to join ISIL.² Begum has been represented in political, legal and media discourses as either an active volunteer who joined ISIL with ‘adult-like’ agency, or as a victim of grooming and child sexual exploitation whilst a minor. This complex legal and moral debate rumbles on and questions continue to be posed about her family, faith, background, schooling, values and character. At the time of writing, Begum, now aged 21 and based in a detention camp in Syria, is beginning an appeal process that has prompted deeper reflections on the moral boundaries of citizenship. As Observer columnist Kenan Malik (2020) writes, “however terrible the acts she may have committed, she remains Britain's responsibility, not the responsibility of the Kurdish forces who hold her, nor of Bangladesh, the country of her parents’ birth”. This example and the media spotlight is extreme, but nevertheless it highlights how constructions of childhood and adulthood are entangled with questions of character, citizenship and values. This book elucidates these wider conceptual connections and relationships through a range of different examples that map the moral geographies of education.

Overall, the book has three central arguments. First, the book argues that geography matters in understanding the character agenda, both in terms of the moral geographies that spatialise ideas about behaviour and youth citizenship, as well as the multi-scalar geographies of its practices. Second, the book argues there is a growing geopolitical dimension to character education that is vital to consider in any analysis, as children and young people's experiences of character education are increasingly shaped by military ethos and spaces. Finally, the book argues that the boundaries of formal and informal education have become increasingly blurred through the character agenda, shaping and reflecting changes in the wider relationship between the state and civil society.

The book is structured in seven remaining chapters. Chapter 2, “Moral geographies of childhood, youth and education: Learning to be citizens of good character”, introduces ‘moral geographies’ and outlines approaches to studying childhood, youth and education within disciplinary human geography. The chapter provides an overview of the key distinctions between citizenship and character an...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Moral geographies of childhood, youth and education: Learning to be citizens of good character
• 3 Character nation: Geographies and geopolitics of education in England
• 4 Grit and gumption
• 5 Be prepared, be resilient: British youth movements and civil society
• 6 ‘The lessons they don’t teach in class’? National Citizen Service and social action
• 7 Character, citizenship and values: From national debates to global geopolitics
• 8 Conclusion
• References
• Index