My blog

Tag: Character

  • Entelechy Academy CEO David Carter on the Case for Character in Education

    By David CM Carter

    The UK government’s focus on adult lifelong learning is welcome. Everyone should indeed have the opportunity to actualise their potential, their entelechy.

    However, having slid from #1 to #30 in global league tables of productivity over the last 40 years, the UK needs to quickly wake up and accept Einstein’s wisdom that ‘doing the same thing, over and over again, expecting a different result’ is the definition of insanity.

    The problems of work readiness identified by the CBI are a matter of Character, not skills. Character is the foundation of our success in all areas of life. If we can learn how to be better, we will do better by extension. For that to happen, our innate Character needs to be unlocked.

    The barrier to unleashing this potential is a lack of an appropriate structure to aid educationalists. The Entelechy approach, based on years of research, codifies Character, soft skills, and behaviours for the first time. It is a framework of 54 Character Qualities that define what we need to evolve, to become our best self.

    Entelechy has codified the 77 soft skills demanded by employers as ‘missing’ and mapped the 54 Character Qualities against them, that underpin their development.

    The Entelechy innovation is the teaching of Character Qualities – in their own right.

    The Entelechy disruption is to how they are taught. With Character Qualities, such as kind, adaptable, resilient, accountable, and reliable, the Entelechy heutagogy not only assesses that the learner understands what each one means (which is how they are taught and assessed today) but more importantly assesses that the learner ‘becomes’ more kind, adaptable, resilient, accountable, and reliable – and that these new behaviours are validated by two 3rd party qualified and appropriate assessors.

    What sets ‘the best’ above ‘the rest’?

    Its three simple things:

    1. A Dream – they imagine their future, and make it happen.
    2. Skills – they proactively and consistently take action to improve their skill set
    3. Character – they are self-aware, and consciously choose to evolve who they are as they show up in the world

    The capabilities to achieve our entelechy – the best version of ourselves – is a combination of ‘dreams’, ‘skills’ and ‘character’.

    Some believe that a skill is something you learn, but your character is something you are born with. Moreover, the character that you are born with will result in it being easier (or harder) to learn skills.

    We believe that we all have the same set of innate capabilities to develop ‘skills’ and ‘character’ and its working on both, that sets apart the ‘best’ from ‘the rest’. Character can be learned – just like any skill. Character capability is innate in all of us and it’s easy to unlock and develop.

    When people start thinking about the skills they need for the future, they often miss out on thinking about who they are and need to become.

    Here are some steps to imagining and becoming your desired FUTURE SELF:

    • Imagine who you want to be
    • Journal about who you want to be in 3 years from now and how you want to feel
    • Decide who you want to be
    • Enrol people in your dream
    • Create a daily routine.  Activate your future-self mindset
    • Invest in your future self—courses, skills, mentors, experiences
    • Change your environment to match your future self—including the information, food, people, and experiences you choose to engage with

    Dr. Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist, found that people don’t do a very good job predicting their future, not because they can’t… but because they don’t! The reason why, from Gilbert’s research, is that very few people spend much time imagining their future selves. They assume that who they are today is who they’ll always be.

    If we asked 1m people to comment on the thesis above, that the 3 simple things that are required to achieve success are a) a dream b) skills and c) character I am sure that 90% would agree. Despite agreeing, 90 per cent would normally do nothing about it. We can help the 90% become like the 10% who resonate with the new information and become lifelong learners. To do things to become a better version of themselves. To develop their entelechy through character.

    David Carter is CEO of Entelechy Academy

  • Akosua Bonsu on Character

    Akosua Bonsu on Character

    THE DIRECTOR OF STUDIES AT REGENT GROUP ON CHARACTER

    The trouble with education is that it’s full of buzzwords, and too rarely do we pause to think about practical implications.

    In the Blair years, citizenship education was a prominent preoccupation of schools and colleges in England and Wales – but the term sometimes lacked definition, and in any case, wasn’t citizenship an implication of the Cameron government’s Big Society agenda? Definitions tend to blur.

    With the coalition government – and latterly the single party conservative governments – we have seen a shift in preoccupation, away from citizenship education and towards character education. So how do we avoid falling into generality and making the same mistakes again?

    Fostering character sounds well and good – who could seriously object to it – but what does it mean? Simply, character seeks to cultivate resilience, courage, and personal responsibility. It also has intellectual pedigree, dating all the way back to Aristotle. In his Nicomachean Ethics the philosopher argues that character education creates virtuous individuals who live a good and meaningful life, a life full of happiness, purpose and achievement: this he called Eudemonia.

    What’s interesting is that in character education these individual traits – resilience, grit, courage and so on – do not exist in isolation. They exist together: you cannot be courageous without being resilient, for example. What we seek to do at Regent College is to develop these psychological states so that students learn to better act, overcome obstacles and embrace challenges.

    For Aristotle a person of good character has practical wisdom – phronesis: the ability to act in the right way, with courage, with resilience etc., because they have developed the correct habits. Furthermore, a good character can only be developed by choosing right actions over and over again until that right action becomes a habit. The goal is to repeat certain behaviours associated with the development of a good character, initially under guidance and instruction, until they become embedded as habits.

    So does it work? At Regent College, we have founded a framework for character education to be delivered alongside our core curriculum. The project began in May 2019, and we have called it Thinking Into Character.

    The programme is designed by Dr. Selva Pankaj and aims to give students a solid foundation in character education. Topics covered by the programme include goal setting, habit formation and the principles of personal leadership. Each lesson is designed to encourage students to take responsibility for their results and to develop the confidence to believe that they can achieve dream goals. Among some of the values and attitudes developed by the programme are personal responsibility, a positive mind set, resilience, grit and self-confidence.

    It has had startling results. One example was Abdi Raman Fara, a bus-driver who wants to be a transport manager with his company. He felt he’d been with the company a long time and wasn’t progressing. Under our instruction, he spoke to his manager, who agreed to be his mentor. As a result a career action plan was implemented and he decided to start his own business. ‘My entire life has to be geared towards goals that I am happy to pursue. It’s about achieving your life goals, and not just in the short or medium term,’ he says.

    Another case study was Amelia Giurgiu who had been too nervous to start turning her photography in Provence into painting. She was facing what we would call ‘the terror barrier’. For her character education enabled her to ‘take action and to show courage in the face of previously acknowledged fears’.

    Meanwhile, Ahasan Habib, the founder and CEO of H&K Associates, found that an immersion in the programme ‘helped my business by showing me where I lacked discipline and holding me responsible for all my results.’

    So the effectiveness of this character development programme is measured both objectively and subjectively. The subjective benefits are there for all to see in testimonials like those above. Objectively, we are looking at data such as grade attendance and assignment submission rates as well as external ventures that students have set up following their engagement with the programme. These ventures could be study groups, entrepreneurial businesses or engagement in voluntary programmes.

    We still have a way to go and are at the data compilation phase, but the signs are very encouraging. And we hope that our programme will give others the impetus to think hard about the language we use in education theory, and to turn the theoretical into pragmatic and meaningful steps. Aristotle would be  proud.

     

  • China Focus: Behind the Red Wall

    China Focus: Behind the Red Wall

    Our Woman in China gives us her take on the nuclear arms race in education between China and the rest of the world

    This is going to be quite a year in China. There’s going to be about eight and a half million graduates in China – and that’s a figure which dwarfs any figure you can imagine in the UK. They’ll be graduating into the toughest job market in living memory.

    It’s worth considering the history. Before 1990, China’s was essentially a planned economy and everybody had roles given by the state. Since then, the economy has grown by around ten percent a year. Unemployment has been incredibly low. Now lots of factors are happening at once. With Covid-19, there’s speculation that you have 100 million unemployed people in China right now.

    Concurrently, you have automation which is happening dramatically in China, with every company becoming leaner. So all these graduates are going to be piling in to this very problematic situation. And there is such faith in education in China. In the 1980s and 90s, if you went abroad and studied, let’s say engineering, and you came back to China, it’s quite likely you’re a millionaire at this point, or senior in the government. Why? Because you brought back information that was incredibly valuable and gave you a massive strategic advantage. Because of that, you now have a generation of parents who believe education is a fast track to employment. That’s heart-breaking as the young today are ill-equipped for the modern world in terms of creativethinking and communication skills.

    It’s an incredibly depressing situation. I speak to a lot of students doing undergraduate degrees and they’re looking at the realities of the economy and thinking, ‘Should I go and get a Masters?’ But even that doesn’t guarantee a job now – when for their parents’ generation, it did.

    That means there’s a major problem for Chinese students studying in the UK: they’re not getting their return on investment. In China, these young people are called ‘sea turtles’: even after having studied in a good, solid university in the UK, they’re unable to get jobs. All this will be detrimental to the higher education system in the UK. There are 900,000 graduates from UK universities in China, and there could be a big shift where Chinese students start to wonder whether it’s worth studying abroad if you don’t get a job at the end of it.

    I don’t think the effects will be felt immediately. Xi Jinping sent his daughter to Harvard. These wealthy people will have better connections, and so they’ll end up with jobs and power, and will end up running the country and the biggest companies. That’s a powerful example; it might take 20 or 30 years for these trends to be felt.

    Working against all this is the fact that China is going to go global at some point. So if a young person understands the UK, they are going to be a natural person to go and work in that London office at some point. The historical trends are clear. In the 50s and 60s, China was all about manufacturing; suddenly in the 70s and 80s, we had Sony and all these other companies booming around the world. But global China is in the future. This year’s graduates will fall through the cracks because none of this will have kicked in yet.

    As someone who has been here for 15 years, I would say the UK doesn’t understand that China is absolutely zero sum. China doesn’t want its students to go to the UK and spend lots of money. It wants to learn as much as it can from the UK, the US and Australia and then it wants to export its own education. You only need to read the state media to understand the undertones of what they’re really thinking and what they’re really plotting right now. The longerterm goal is that they don’t want to send anyone to the UK. That’s not explicit, but I would guarantee you it’s the case if you speak to the highest levels of government in China. Why would they want to give money to the UK?

    I’ve probably become a bit more patriotic since I’ve been here: if I had to back a team, I’d like to back the UK. The UK education system is filled with people for whom education is a vocation. They believe in the system. They’re autonomous, and opinionated: it’s filled with brilliant people. In China, nobody has any autonomy; it is control-based. I don’t want that system to win. China’s version of history is that there is only one version of history. Our discipline of history is that you have analysis and the past is open to interpretation. It’s not a good thing when education is used as a weapon to control a population or to politicise everything. I would love to see the UK compete, but I fear that a lot of UK universities are very slow, siloed and very complacent. China is moving incredibly quickly.