28 Comments on Back to character

Martin Robinson on Sat, 2nd Jan 2010 6:05 pm


Although your post is opening up a vast area of debate I would like to focus on the part where you say: ‘if you are born happy, have great parenting and then go on to live a life of self interested middle class complacency…” I like what you imply about the possibility of ‘good character’ being bland.

Conformity is not about good character. The ‘cultivated forest’ is the only area we have any real power over collectively and we should be careful to ensure we enable the forest to encourage a variety of different characters to contribute to society. Something this country has done quite well, historically, in the field of culture. Now with employers showing an increasing reliance on qualifications and with psychological ‘flaws’ being seen as damaging in a wide range of professions (e.g. G Brown as opposed to D Cameron) the forest is recruiting a narrower type of people whilst, at the same time, ironically, arguing for diversity.

Good character has a moral dimension, sure, but the difficult ‘spikeyness’ and joie de vivre, of square pegs, mighty oaks and giant red woods (mixing metaphors wildly) must not be smoothed over by a reductive, institutional and media view of what a suitable character is.

Ian Leslie on Sun, 3rd Jan 2010 11:49 am


In answer to your italicised question, obviously not. But is that what Reeve & Co are arguing (I confess I haven’t read their paper)? Aren’t they proposing that if you grow up in an unstable, low-nutritional environment, your chances of acquiring the kind of character one needs to succeed in life are lower? If that’s what they’re saying, then that doesn’t mean no one individual could overcome such circumstances and develop a strong character – as we know, they do so all the time. It just means they had to overcome a disadvantage, inherited at birth, to do so.

Livy on Mon, 4th Jan 2010 11:39 am


Not only that, but quite apart from any issue of character and ethics and what influence they have on a child’s life chances there are far more basic elements at play we cannot overlook. The development of literacy and numeracy doesn’t happen on a level playing field, I think is the point makes. Childhood ability at such an early stage dramatically impacts academic competence in late teens, occupation and therefore life time earnings.

Might sound like a broken record by now but roughly half the gap in school performance between middle class children and those from deprived backgrounds can be explained (far more eloquently than I) by things like conditions at home, quality of parenting (lets not even get into what that actually means) and the level education those parents actually have themselves.

As for residence and factors of character attributes? This is where it gets too personal, and policy research papers act like theoretical models attempting to understand the world by looking at it through a fishbowl. If, after a while that defines your field of vision then it takes a genius to find a way out.

Sure, I’ve always believed you learn more from your losses than your victories. But as any military expert would say to that, you can’t learn if you’re dead.

Livy on Mon, 4th Jan 2010 11:45 am


Was supposed to be, “I think is the the point Demos makes”, in the first paragraph.

And “Resilience” in the third.

MT…..seriously dude….sort out some edit and delete functions…

Matthew Kalman on Mon, 4th Jan 2010 1:28 pm


I would suggest that future discussions around character seek to include *both* the ‘horizontal’ elements of character that, like being right-handed, don’t change all that much through life.

I’m thinking here of things like Myers-Briggs personality type, or ‘Big 5′ traits like conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness etc.

*And* the ‘vertical’ elements of individual development that evolve significantly over our lives – eg things like your Ericksonian stage of life, your current needs on Maslow’s hierarchy, or your maturity level on Professor Kegan or Torbert’s models of cognitive complexity.

I fear that any model that ignores one of these two dimensions will turn out to be fairly crap (once it is actually tested with rigour) – even if it presents lots of MRI scans of its favoured dimension

I might be wrong though…

Re failed New Year Resolutions, Kegan’s book ‘Immunity to Change’ is great on showing why they usually fail – and how a better approach (that takes into account our hidden competing commitments and big assumptions etc) has proven much more likely to enable people to change.

Prof Kegan helps us write down the personal ‘immunity map’ we have that stands in the way of a particular goal – and once our immunity map becomes an object that we can reflect on, it’s far easier to change successfully.

Kegan’s immunity maps are currently being used by some top public sector leaders, at the UK’s School of Government – and there are some empirical findings about very significant shifts that these leaders are making in their leadership maturity/complexity. (ie Which suggests that they have become more effective and ‘transformational’ leaders, with longer time horizons etc.).

You won’t be able to see all that if you ignore the ‘vertical’ dimension – which is, of course, what most people do.

Ken Wilber calls this a ‘Flatland’ worldview…!

Think what step-change in leaders’ effectiveness, maturity, time horizons etc might do within organisations like the NHS – if the School of Government findings panned out…!

Another speculation, do current findings from neuroscience tend to vindicate the worldview of the controversial guru GI Gurdjieff, who felt that we were far more automatic and emotional in our responses than anyone realised – and our ‘free will’ was pretty much a myth, even thought we all believe we have it….? (Though he did feel we could develop free will, through a lifetime’s focused effort to objectify our mechanical/emotional responses).

Matthew

PS I think I have an automatic response, that I have to keep writing blog posts pretty much like this one…

mas on Mon, 4th Jan 2010 3:44 pm


I’m reading one of Lehrers books at the moment and while the little I understand of neuroscience is fascinating I also find the theory that people are biologically wired to behave in certain ways a bit concerning.

Likewise those theories that place personality types in boxes. One of the problems with trying to assess soft skills is that they vary so much according to situations and circumstances – somebody who makes terrible decisions in one situation may make brilliant ones in another – so are they a good decision maker or not?

Where there is value in trying to measure character I think it’s in raising peoples awareness and understanding of themselves so they can consider how they may best function in some situations – related to that they obviously draw on their life experiences. I much prefer the idea that people really are individuals and that very often they’re surprising rather than predictable.

Martin Robinson on Tue, 5th Jan 2010 9:06 am


@Mas: I agree about the problem about assessing ‘soft skills’. That is why it is essential when such skills are assessed that a lot of observations are made, by different people, in different contexts and that this information is collected together and interpreted in a way that raises peoples awareness and understanding. Online assessment tools are the best way to do this.

On the wider question, the film ‘Nowhere Boy’ highlights how parenting impacts on character development, oh and what a character!

matthew taylor on Tue, 5th Jan 2010 4:19 pm


Great conversation, thanks folks. Just one point from me. The paradox of consciousness is this. It is only when we accept that much less of what we do is down to conscious choice that we come to see the amazing power that meta-cognition (thinking about thinking) can have. In other words the rider too often forgets the elephant and the jungle and thus gets confused and dis empowered by the weak relationship between what he wants to do and what happens. But if the rider sees the elephant and the jungle and understands the limits to what he can do he then becomes much more skillful and powerful.

mas on Tue, 5th Jan 2010 4:38 pm


nicely put – although it seems relevant to ask what is it that would more likely motivate the rider to test his limits and to have dreams/ambitions to want to do so?

matthew taylor on Tue, 5th Jan 2010 5:02 pm


Ah yes, but ambitions (which presumably have to have some basis in the possible) are surely different to dreams?

Livy on Tue, 5th Jan 2010 5:08 pm


It’s not just thinking about thinking, but learning how to learn. I’ve always felt a major problem with education in this country is this that the school system hasn’t caught up with these sort of developments…but this might just be one of those typical Livy moments where my bitter internal monologue starts with, “If I knew then what I know now….”

That weak relationship between what he wants to do and what happens is often due to an inability to accept that a few common personality traits usually determine how a person performs. Readers, listeners and writers are all shockingly different individuals. Many exceptional writers found their time in school agonising; they tend to suffer boredom, frustration and get bad grades because they weren’t allowed to learn in their own way. John Betjeman and Winston Churchill are prime examples of this; they absorb knowledge by taking copious notes which they never need to look at again once written. I think it was Beethoven who left behind stacks and stacks of notebooks but never played from sheet music.

Most people learn by either reading or listening and very few people are both. Even long after their early education this has consequences for their lives and work performance. JFK was a reader who had a great team of writers as top aides, who made sure to write to him before discussing their memos in person. Lyndon Johnson kept these people on his staff but he (apparently) never understood a word and his performance waned. However as a senator he had been far more impressive; he was a listener, and in the senate this trait served him better.

…As for all the relevant stuff you guys are talking about, I’ll come back once I collect, or rather write down, some thoughts.

mas on Tue, 5th Jan 2010 5:25 pm


@Matthew – yes I guess, what I meant to suggest is that those with either dreams or ambitions or both are perhaps more likely to try things out/push things (Also as an example would be imagery – a form of ‘dreaming’ sometimes used towards enhancing performance in sports)

@Livy – agree very much about the learning to learn. I’m very slowly writing up some resources for schools based on that principle – the idea that if young people can better understand how they make decisions, how they communicate and why they do so in different situations they’ll be better able to make better ones ie. instead of just ‘drugs are bad’ try to understand the decisions that lead to bad choices and more particularly how people can choose the most effective methods for themselves in various situations.

As for the other stuff I think there are good reasons that people often get put in boxes but there are always exceptions to keep things interesting and I much prefer that to those theories that categorise.

I’m not sure most people learn by reading or listening – within the narrow confines of formal education perhaps but is that really where most peoples learning takes place?

matthew taylor on Tue, 5th Jan 2010 5:32 pm


I am fascinated by Livy’s point that different people learn in systematically different ways and that a vital task for education systems is to diagnose how individual learners learn and then tailor learning methods to them. Anything else I can read on this this Liv?

mas on Tue, 5th Jan 2010 5:42 pm


I think there’s some movement towards that approach in the early years curriculum.

If less emphasis was placed on assessing standards by the meeting of targets and instead education was more towards supporting young people on a voyage of self discovery it could be possible to allow children & young people to learn in the ways that best suit them. I think a combination of the kinds of observations in early years and some of the stuff in the International Baccalaureate could be interesting towards that – we worked with a class at an international school who started out one of their modules by first deciding how each of them would demonstrate their knowledge in the subject which they’d then work towards doing later in the year – seems much more relevant to the real life that education supposedly should prepare them for.

Martin Robinson on Wed, 6th Jan 2010 2:28 pm


I thought I might go back to the elephant analogy. The elephant and its rider (the student) needs self awareness in order to develop through their voyage of self discovery. This meta-cognition is essential to their development as people and as learners. Learning to learn, I think, is slightly different in that it exists in the interface between the person and the domain,subject, discipline etc. Learning the rules and norms (and risking when to break or challenge them) and making their journey through the ‘cultivated forest’ demands that the student adapt. By seeing the possible ‘maps’ of their journey through the forest before they embark on it and revisiting the maps when necessary (when they get lost, or something unexpected occurs etc.) enables them to make judgements as to their own (and each others’) progress. Failures and weaknesses as well as successes and strengths when reflected upon in the light of their journey produces understanding. Students are liberated, creatively, by the very constraints that previously blocked their progress. They become more ‘skillful and powerful’ because of their limitations as well as their strengths.

It is important that students are opened up to learning in ways that don’t, always, ‘best suit’ them. It is this challenge that can often lead to life changing and enhancing moments in their lives as well as being their chance to alter the domain etc. in which they are working (in what ever context).

mas on Wed, 6th Jan 2010 2:50 pm


@Martin “It is important that students are opened up to learning in ways that don’t, always, ‘best suit’ them”

funny because I’ve been working towards a theory that there should be more opportunities for young people to learn about themselves by not restricting them to particular routes. For example in project based group work I think there’s lots of opportunities for young people to discover new skills and strengths (and weaknesses) and I think there would be much value in adults supporting them to be able to help them discover what those things are and I’m especially interested in how subsequent development in those areas can be assessed (most likely a ‘distance travelled’ approach)

But equally I agree with your last point, not least because some people do better when pushed or pulled. I think I’d argue there should be more of the set routes later in education as students get towards needing defined skills towards a profession, but that there should be considerably more of the ‘self discovery stage’ before this and much later than is currently allowed for so that they can best discover which routes will best suit them.

Matthew Kalman on Wed, 6th Jan 2010 2:55 pm


I put a post on Lynda Gratton’s blog explaining why I think ‘transformative learning/education’ is vital if Britain is to thrive in the 21st century – it seems fairly pertinent to what’s we’re discussing here (indeed I might have copied much of it from a previous post here on Matthew’s blog!).

Here it is:

The OECD did a 5-year project to find the key competencies that all professionals will require in the Knowledge age.

It highlighted the need for all professionals to become ‘self-authoring’ (a point Will Hutton touched on during this Tuesday’s ‘Lifelong Learning UK’ conference).

However, research by Harvard Professor Robert Kegan has found – worryingly! – that “even among highly educated, resource-rich, middle-class, professional samples” less than half of people (around 58 per cent) do not achieve this self-authoring mind.

With a more diverse sample from a wider range of backgrounds, an even higher figure of 79 percent haven’t developed a self-authoring mind.

This gap between where we need to be, and where we are now, offers – argues Prof Kegan – a ‘missing intellectual foundation’ for lifelong learning (which will require ‘transformational learning’ not the more common informational learning!).

Here’s a good para from his OECD paper about this:

Prof Kegan writes:

“If one accepts the metaphor of “culture as school,” then how should we regard the possibility that our suggested competencies may comprise a very challenging curriculum, one in which many of us are unprepared to succeed? One answer to this question might be that we should reconsider our list and revise our expectations downward. We should, perhaps in sympathy, consider our suggested competencies to be the elitist favorites of advantaged intellectuals, and comprise a less complex set of expectations. But since the world is not going to become less demanding simply because we might wish it would, I suggest another kind of answer: No good school presents its students with a curriculum they can master immediately. A challenging curriculum – one that is even at the moment beyond our grasp – is actually one of two key ingredients for an excellent school. The other is that the school must provide its students the support to master the challenging curriculum over time. The gap between the mental demands implicit in our suggested competencies and the mental capacities of the “student” actually provides a heretofore missing intellectual foundation for the purposes of adult or lifelong education that is as strong as the foundation which exists for the education of the young – namely, education not merely for the acquisition of skills or an increase in one’s fund of knowledge, but education for development, education for transformation.”

Maybe you need to factor in some of Prof Kegan’s thinking…

Martin Robinson on Wed, 6th Jan 2010 4:15 pm


@ Mas: I agree with you about the routes – I hope I didn’t imply that the map was just one journey – taking students through approaches in group and/or project work is essential to their development and learning.

@ Matthew: the concept of mastery is very important, and mastery that takes time and develops throughout the learning journey/s that the student has undertaken with the difficulties that long term engagement and delayed gratification throws up are indeed the root of all that is good in really challenging educational opportunities.

Both points are about distance travelled?

mas on Wed, 6th Jan 2010 4:35 pm


@Martin – no sorry I didn’t mean that, it was more a note to myself that I’ve been thinking so much about the ‘forming your own pathway’ approach that the ‘taking a new pathway’ approach is really important too.

Livy on Wed, 6th Jan 2010 4:48 pm


Ah, bur the map is not the territory.

@Martin,

“They become more ’skillful and powerful’ because of their limitations as well as their strengths”

That’s not bad. Did you just paraphrase Bruce Lee? “Use no way as a way, use no limitation as a limitation”.

@Matthew Kalman,

Kegan’s research definitely has legs. It would be good to wrap that up in a completely re-evaluation conception of intelligence and how we measure ability. Study after study has shown that ethnic minority candidates admitted to Ivy league colleges with lower SAT scores through affirmative action actually do no worse than whites in their later professions, or achieve less.

Gladwell has an interesting analogy with IQ. It’s like height in professional basketball, you only need to be so tall. At minimum 6 foot 1. After that other attributes of agility, court sense and team work are what separates the great from the good. A 6ft 8 player has no real advantage over one who is 6ft 2. When it comes to intelligence compared to achievement, you only have to be so intelligent. Otherwise every Nobel prize winner would be from Harvard or another Ivy League college, as opposed to roughly half.

Matthew Kalman on Wed, 6th Jan 2010 5:10 pm


Hi Livy,

It would certainly be great to be over near Harvard – listening to Professors like Robert Kegan and Howard Gardner (whose ‘Multiple Intelligences’ idea is part of the foundation for the personalised learning agenda – even though the long-promised empirical validation of it all never seems to really emerge).

I’m not sure you should go with what Malcolm Gladwell says about IQ, rather than, say, a psychometrician who has studied it for decades. Gladwell recently had to apologise for falsely ascribing a noxious view to Charles Murray, the co-author of The Bell Curve (the book about IQ and social policy) – which was the opposite of Murray’s actual view stated in the book (which Gladwell presumably hasn’t even read).

Gladwell also got into a row with Steven Pinker, as his journalistic assertions about IQ were so wrong-headed (in Pinker’s view).

However Gladwell speaks to the current egalitarian orthodoxy that is deeply reluctant to allow any explanatory role to IQ.

If you have a reference for a good study I can read about how minorities with low SAT scores do just as well as others in their professional careers, I’d appreciate it.

I thought I’d seen somewhere that the drop-out rates from US law schools are very different between affirmative action and non-affirmative action groups, suggesting that affirmative action isn’t always the great help we hope it will be.

Matthew

Martin Robinson on Wed, 6th Jan 2010 5:39 pm


@ Livy,

I am honoured by the ‘Bruce Lee comparison!

No the map is not the territory, but it is a way to help understand some ways through the territory.

Ian Leslie on Wed, 6th Jan 2010 9:09 pm


There are many psychometricians and psychologists who take Gladwell’s position rather than Pinker’s. Those interested in the Gladwell-Pinker debate on IQ can follow it at Gladwell’s blog (there are links to Pinker’s pieces on it – scroll down to the first post on the subject).

http://gladwell.typepad.com/gladwellcom/

Livy on Wed, 6th Jan 2010 11:38 pm


Phew….glad somebody came to my rescue after being “called out” there!

I’d be surprised if Gladwell hasn’t read The Bell Curve. By ‘noxious’ view I take it you mean the genetic / racial profiling approach to measuring intelligence in chapter 13?

It wasn’t just The New York Times and ‘liberal’ types who were a tad indignant about that. Part of The Bell Curve’s analysis is bases on the AFQT which has flaws in its testing. I think James Heckman (Nobel in Economics) talks about this; essentially the test was used to predict success in military training schools and mostly measure achievement and factual knowledge rather than ability. Not only that, but Murray removed from the AFQT score a respected timed numeracy test as it didn’t correlate highly enough with the other tests.

As for the affirmative action side, I’d have to get back to you with something more concrete Admittedly the one I’m thinking is a bit old, from 2000 and appeared in Law and Social Inquiry.

But you have a point. Some comparisons between minority and non minority grad students in the states show that whites get better grades. Which isn’t surprising if they also had higher test scores as undergrads. (An example of this at the University of Michigan sparked so much controversy it actually went to the Supreme Court) The revealing part of this however comes when you look at how those minority students fare after they graduate. Generally no worse than whites.

I think Gladwell’s point is that minority students, like ‘relativity’ tall basket players, need only be above a certain threshold in order to succeed. There’s a bigger picture here. They’re no less ‘qualified’ in terms of how they perform in the real world, only marginally behind with their academic credentials.

End of the day, if IQ was the be all and end all then Mr Taylor here probably wouldn’t have mistaken me for a woman.

Livy

Matthew Kalman on Thu, 7th Jan 2010 11:11 am


Hi Livy,

Here’s the apology that the New Yorker had to print – after Malcolm Gladwell reversed the actual views of the authors of ‘The Bell Curve’ to make them look like Nazis:

“CORRECTION: In his December 17th piece, “None of the Above,” Malcolm Gladwell states that Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, in their 1994 book “The Bell Curve,” proposed that Americans with low I.Q.s be “sequestered in a ‘high-tech’ version of an Indian reservation.” In fact, Herrnstein and Murray deplored the prospect of such “custodialism” and recommended that steps be taken to avert it. We regret the error.”

To diametrically misstate one of the central arguments of The Bell Curve suggests that Gladwell hasn’t actually read it. (Or perhaps was too stupid to understand it, or just wanted to lie about it anyway). To make such a huge ‘mistake’ obviously suggests we can’t fully trust anything he writes, but we’ll leave that for now… (He tells us what we want to hear, so it would be hard to stop listening anyway!).

I actually find it interesting to read a libertarian/conservative book that warns about how the ‘cognitive elite’ – like us RSA members?! – have increasingly come to dominate society and how below-average cognitive ability is a growing handicap. And that unless something is done to heal this widening rift we may drift into an increasingly totalitarian custodial state (Which is – to repeat – something the authors were arguing against).

The final chapter is about how to build a society with “A Place for Everyone” – so that we can avoid increasing custodialism. I’m not saying I agree with it – just that I was fairly shocked to realise the book wasn’t actually somehow ‘Mein Kampf’ updated as we’re often led to believe (by popular liberal commentators like Gladwell), but was actually about possible solutions to the problems of cognitive stratification in modern society, that they argue is occurring, and how this stratification is destroying the ideal they support of a society with “the opportunity for everyone, not just the lucky ones, to live a satisfying life”.

Most critics of the book – including me – hadn’t read it and didn’t even know it was about this.

Bizarre really…

Or not, of course.

The current liberal response around this topic – in a 2009 debate in the journal ‘Nature’, with Steven Rose and others – is that any research around IQ differences between groups should simply be banned.

I guess that’s the liberal approach to science: ban any research that risks uncovering anything politically inconvenient…

Luckily a few people could still be found to argue against such a Lysenkoist view…

Matt

PS I though I read somewhere about some kind of legal battle over US law school academic data – which a Professor wants to analyse to gauge the effects of affirmative action, but the institution(s) are very cagey about letting this work go ahead. I think it was this professor who was concerned about high drop-out rates amongst minority students. I might be muddled on this…!

Livy on Thu, 7th Jan 2010 11:34 am


“I guess that’s the liberal approach to science: ban any research that risks uncovering anything politically inconvenient…”

I suppose in the wake of ‘emailgate’ I really have no leg to stand on. This may be the point where I flip over my king and walk away from the board.

Fair observations, and well put. I’m compelled however to hold my ground on affirmative action; I’ll get into this when I’m home from work and have time.

26 posts so far? Not bad.

P.S. Just so I’m clear… you guys over at the RSA constitute the ‘cognitive elite’ who dominate society? Funny how most of the cognitive elite who I’ve met tend also to be the same people who can’t change a plug.

For some reason MT’s blog always reminds me of Chris Rock jokes. The best was his take on education; I’ll paraphrase as best I can.

An average classroom is 30 kids, 5 smart, 5 dumb, and the rest just average “C” students in the middle. Now, if you’re a black “C” student, its doubtful you can ever run a company. But if you’re a white “C” student, you can be president of the United States.

Matthew Kalman on Thu, 7th Jan 2010 1:00 pm


Hi Livy,

Re:… Chris Rock jokes…

For a slightly less PC take by Chris Rock look up his piece on the civil war between blacks – there are lots of versions of it on YouTube. (No-one white would ever be allowed to say any of this; I can’t even tell you the full title of the sketch!)

But it’s such an important sketch that President Obama even referred to part of it once (in some famous speech, or whatever; it was certainly in the news anyway).

Here’s one version:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui6-Wc0PDc4

It’s funny as s**t!

Matthew

Livy on Thu, 7th Jan 2010 1:20 pm


Yeah, I remember this. I think the Bush joke might have been in the same performance.

His best material has to be the observations about women….sheer quality.

I think it was on this blog I got chastised for my enui at political correctness. Chris Rock is the perfect example of why it’s mostly bogus; comedy is comedy. Whatever makes people laugh, say it. If it’s funny and devoid of malice then anybody of any gender, colour, race or religion will find it funny.

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