Interview with James Arthur
1. The early success of the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues suggests that it has become a major force in elevating the importance of good character education not only in the UK, but also in the USA and elsewhere. Can you tell us more about what you see as the most important issues facing educators as they seek to improve the quality of character education in school?
Character education needs a much more solid research base – both conceptually and empirically – than it has at the moment. Measurements of the efficiency of character education interventions have so far relied too much on self-reports, anecdotal evidence and the exploration of very general pro-social variables (such as improved school climate) rather than a rigorous, objective examination of the effects of character education on the moral character of individual students. We devoted a highly successful conference to this measurement problem recently, and all the papers are downloadable here: jubileecentre.ac.uk/485/papers/conference-papers/can-virtue-be-measured-papers/. There also needs to be much more direct co-operation between academics and practitioners in the field, who often do not seem to be speaking the same language or aiming at exactly the same goals.
2. Do you see significant differences in the nature of character education as it is conducted and researched in various countries and cultures?
Our approach to character education is essentially Aristotelian, and we share Aristotle’s general universalism about human nature. The empirical data also seems to back up the theoretical assumption that the challenges facing character education are the same wherever we go in the world. There is nothing mysterious about that; those are simply the challenges of being human. This assumption does not mean, however, that we are espousing a monolithic form of character education. How it is best designed and taught may vary considerably between societies, school types and indeed between individual schools in the same society. For example, there is no universal answer to the question if character education is best taught as a discrete school subject or as an approach permeating already existing subjects.
3. An important issue facing those planning curriculum in this area involves the various terms common in the field; for example, character education, moral education, education for virtue, and ethics education among others. How would you advise a young educator to handle these terms as they plunge into this vital topic?
I agree, this is a major problem in the field. As Marvin Berkowitz noted recently, the language of moral education constitutes a semantic minefield: ‘There is no moral GPS to help with such semantic navigation.’ We in the Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues firmly believe that the discursive theme of the flourishing student, centered on the notion of moral character understood in a broadly Aristotelian sense, can provide such a GPS for moral educators.
4. Can you highlight any recent research in this field that you found surprising and encouraging? Perhaps a story or an example from a research project that informs us about promising opportunities for school leaders and classroom teachers would help.
We are particularly proud of the success of our Knightly Virtues project which has been warmly welcomed by a number of different UK schools, see jubileecentre.ac.uk/417/projects/development-projects/knightly-virtues – and there is interest in replicating it in the U.S.A. Regarding our research projects, data gathering is now mostly complete and the data are being analyzed at the moment. We will publish a number of research reports about those later this year and in early 2015. It would not be right to pre-empt those by disclosing particular findings here. What I can say, however, is that we have already seen significant differences between teachers’ estimates of the strength of individual virtues in students and how those virtues then show themselves in response to moral dilemmas. Teachers seem, for example, to overestimate students’ honesty but underestimate their self-control. More important than individual research findings is the enthusiasm with which our work has been greeted amongst teachers, parents and even politicians. I am optimistic that character education will be high on the agenda of both the leading UK political parties before the next general election, and both parties have been inspired by our research and conceptualizations.
5. With your considerable experience in this field there are likely research topics that have not been pursued effectively or fully. Please comment on what those might be.
Unfortunately, as I indicated in response to the first question, there are very few research topics in this field that have been pursued effectively or fully so far. But that is also what makes this field so exciting and ripe for further work. At the beginning, a lot of that work needs to be conceptual. We need to make clear distinctions between, say, character and personality, and then we must make further clear distinctions between different types of character virtues: moral, civic, performance-driven and intellectual.
6. Some have argued that when all is said and done in character education that the best result we can imagine is that the graduates will have developed capacities and inclinations to make good judgments. Good judgment in this situation means something much deeper and broader than good decision-making skills. How do you respond to this way of thinking about the topic?
I fully agree. This is why we emphasized the cultivation of what we call the overarching virtue of ‘good sense’ in our Framework for Character Education: jubileecentre.ac.uk/userfiles/jubileecentre/pdf/other-centre-papers/Framework..pdf. By good sense we mean something similar to what Aristotle meant by the overseeing and adjudicating intellectual virtue of phronesis. Good sense, on this understanding, distinguishes itself clearly from mere calculation, namely means-end instrumental thinking, which is essentially amoral. Good sense is irreducibly moral, in our view, and aims at the intrinsic goodness of human flourishing.
7. Can you describe the kinds of resistance you have encountered in your efforts to enrich this field and further describe how you and your colleagues have been able to respond to or overcome challenges to expanding student’s opportunities in schools to enrich their character virtues and values?
Of course, we initially encountered the standard objections about character education being essentially conservative, individualist and old-fashioned. However, we responded early on to those concerns, see: jubileecentre.ac.uk/userfiles/jubileecentre/pdf/other-centre-papers/Kristjansson-PESGB-keynote.pdf. The resistance that our message meets with at present has more to do with simplistic and misleading alternatives being offered, which reduce the cultivation of character to the development of so-called ‘soft skills’ or ‘cognitive skills’. These alternatives are often offered by policy makers and politicians who are well meaning but have too narrow a conception of what constitutes good character. I have tried to correct those misconceptions, jubileecentre.ac.uk/userfiles/jubileecentre/pdf/insight-series/being-of-good-character-arthur.pdf, and so has my Deputy Director for Research: theconversation.com/schools-can-teach-character-but-what-sort-of-person-do-we-want-to-produce-23201. I am sure we will be successful in the end. However, rather than ending this interview on a negative note by focusing on resistance, I reiterate that the response to our work has been positive almost across the board. That is not surprising, given the overwhelming opinion of parents that the education of moral character is one of the most significant missions of any school: jubileecentre.ac.uk/471/character-education/populus-survey.
