Mapping the Moral Geographies of Education: Character, Citizenship and Values

146 Pages·2021·4.132 MB·English

by  Sarah Mills

Mapping the Moral Geographies
of Education
This book explores the growth of ‘character education’ in schools and youth
organisations over the last decade. It delves into historical and contempo-
rary debates through a geopolitical lens.
With a renewed focus on values and virtues such as grit, gumption, per-
severance, resilience, generosity and neighbourliness, this book charts the
re-imagining and re-fashioning of a ‘character agenda’ in England and
examines its multi-scalar geographies. It explores how these moral geogra-
phies of education for children and young people have developed over time.
Drawing on original research and examples from schools, military and uni-
formed youth organisations, and the state-led National Citizen Service, the
book critically examines the wider implications of the ‘character agenda’
across the United Kingdom 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 to students and scholars of human
geography, sociology, education studies, cultural studies and history.
Sarah Mills is a Reader in Human Geography at Loughborough University,
UK. Her research focuses on the geographies of youth citizenship, informal
education and volunteering across contemporary and historical contexts. In
2017, she received the Gill Memorial Award from the Royal Geographical
Society with the Institute of British Geographers.
Routledge Spaces of Childhood and Youth Series
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The Routledge Spaces of Childhood and Youth Series provides a forum for orig-
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Why Garden in Schools?
Lexi Earl and Pat Thomson
Latin American Transnational Children and Youth
Experiences of Nature and Place, Culture and Care Across the Americas
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Mapping the Moral Geographies of Education
Character, Citizenship and Values
Sarah Mills
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.
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Mapping the Moral
Geographies of Education
Character, Citizenship and Values
Sarah Mills
First published 2022
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© 2022 Sarah Mills
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ISBN: 978-1-138-30082-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-10728-8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-73306-6 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9780203733066
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
1 Introduction 1
2 Moral geographies of childhood, youth and education:
Learning to be citizens of good character 8
3 Character nation: Geographies and geopolitics of
education in England 22
4 Grit and gumption 40
5 Be prepared, be resilient: British youth movements
and civil society 58
6 ‘The lessons they don’t teach in class’? National Citizen
Service and social action 76
7 Character, citizenship and values: From national debates
to global geopolitics 91
8 Conclusion 104
References 109
Index 131
Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I want to thank my family and loved ones for their sup-
port with my career and always keeping my feet firmly on the ground. All of
those who mean so much to me know who they are – thank you.
Second, this book represents the final stage and step beyond an Economic
and Social Research Council (ESRC) Future Research Leader Award
(2014–2017). I want to thank the ESRC for their financial support of my early
career and especially that award [ES/L009315/I]. Although the research for
this book has now taken me beyond the example of National Citizen Service
(NCS), unpublished data from that project features in Chapter 7. I therefore
want to gratefully acknowledge Dr Catherine Waite’s role as PDRA on the
linked research project that formed part of my ESRC fellowship. I also wish
to acknowledge ESRC support via ES/F00737X/1, as unpublished data from
that research on The Scouts now features in Chapter 5. Thanks are extended
to The Scouts Heritage Service for kind permission to reference original
material in Chapter 5. Furthermore, I am grateful for a School Fellowship
from Loughborough University that supported research activities also
underpinning this book.
Third, I am grateful to my colleagues at Geography and Environment,
Loughborough University for their support and friendship. I have also been
lucky enough to co-supervise a fantastic group of doctoral students dur-
ing my time at Loughborough University and want to extend my thanks
to Jonathan Duckett, Tim Fewtrell, Jo Hickman Dunne, Laura Crawford,
Rosie Austin and Catherine Wilson.
Finally, I want to acknowledge my own geography of education and thank
the countless teachers, lecturers, researchers, students and professional sup-
port staff that have shaped my journey to this point. Thank you to Milking
Bank Primary School, Bishop Milner Secondary School and Sixth Form,
and Aberystwyth University. A special thanks to Gornal Library in Dudley,
West Midlands, where I fell in love with reading and writing.
1 Introduction
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 indi-
viduals, 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, resil-
ience, 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 char-
acteristics 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 coop-
erate consistently well with others” (Ofsted, 2019: 58). This book demon-
strates 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
DOI: 10.4324/9780203733066-1
2 Introduction
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 remain-
der 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 infor-
mal education. For example, between 2014 and 2016, the Department for
Education (hereafter DfE) spent a total of £14.5 million on character edu-
cation 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 extra-
curricular activities. Beyond school, the language of character has been res-
urrected 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 land-
scape and presents a wider argument about the relationship between for-
mal 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 volun-
teering 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 con-
temporary spatialities of character education, as well as the increasingly
Introduction 3
blurred lines between schools and other learning spaces. Overall, this book
traces the wider social, political and geographical implications of the char-
acter 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 under-
pinning 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 champi-
oning 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 geographi-
cal concepts, for example space, place and scale, to provide a different ana-
lytical 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;