It is great that so many of us leave school knowing so many things… how much better if we were also kind, resilient, patient, empathetic, brave, confident, caring, persevering and conscientious. The challenge, of course, is that we don’t truly know how to create learning environments that encourage and foster the most important skills of all. And it is a bigger challenge than we’ve realised so far.
The word ‘resilience’ is being increasingly used in society: since 1980, books captured by Google show that its frequency has tripled. Schools have been taking it up: it features in the motto or vision statement of many primary and secondary schools in England. St Edward’s CofE Primary School in Plymouth is typical: it strives to develop resilience. Teachers today are are more aware than previous generations that resilience matters. It isn’t just words: schools are implementing programmes to increase resilience, most often aimed at children from disadvantaged backgrounds. It is perhaps the character trait that has received the most attention in schools in recent years. Yet, we are still working to figure out how to truly embed resilience into school curricula, instead of delivering short-term projects outside of core subjects. There are many more virtues waiting even this much attention.
Consider confidence: the confidence to walk away from domestic violence, the confidence to start a business, the confidence to speak in public. We only use one word, but confidence has many different aspects that are not necessarily best developed in the same way or alongside each other. It is plausible that encouraging a child to speak in class will ultimately help their confidence in applying for jobs. But it is also possible that work to promote confidence in the classroom will only encourage students to fake a confident exterior, by merely promoting the message that it is important to be confident without giving a child a real sense of their self-worth. A seemingly confident child may in fact suffer a deep lack of self esteem and learn only to hide this. It isn’t just difficult to figure out how to improve confidence, but there in fact a risk that, in trying to do so, we actually do the opposite.
After all, in the case of building confidence, it is likely that the school system itself is working against us. Many teachers have witnessed the negative impact on a child’s confidence of our nation’s fetish for testing, setting, and constantly telling students exactly how good (or bad) they are at exams. The fact that we are so good at testing other things is in fact one of the deepest barriers in developing such things as confidence, kindness, perseverance and resilience-qualities that are not easily measurable and that we may be in fact reducing as a result of current school practices. Ofsted’s recent decision to reduce their emphasis on exam results during inspections is a small but positive change in this direction: it invites schools-other constraints notwithstanding-to expend more resources upon the softer skills of their vision.
Small steps are what we currently need in an education system that has been in a constant cyclic state of upheaval, at least if we prioritise teacher well-being. So the challenge is how to improve the softer skills without erasing current curricula: how can we promote kindness in mathematics? How can young geographers develop perseverance? Which subjects are already better than others for the development of resilience? Does, in fact, the subject content make a difference?
Faced with current national curriculum on one hand, and a vision of confident, brave, caring, persevering, kind, resilient, empathetic, conscientious young adults on the other, the size of the challenge becomes evident. We have never truly educated for life-long happiness and fulfilment. We’ve never truly aimed to get children to make wise choices and to live well. We don’t try to ensure that people don’t throw litter out of cars or don’t walk into marriage unreflectively. It has always been too difficult, but we’ve made a few strides, for example with the recognition of the importance of resilience and its promotion in schools. Character development is a huge task ahead for educators and as we go forward, we should be careful of the assumptions we make. It isn’t necessarily true that discussing resilience increases it. Our first stop, then, is finding out the effects on softer character traits of what we already teach in schools.
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