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RADIO 4 CURRENT AFFAIRS ANALYSIS CHARACTER FACTORIES TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY Presenter: Richard Reeves Producer: Innes Bowen Editor: Hugh Levinson BBC White City 201 Wood Lane London W12 7TS 020 8752 7279 Broadcast Date: 10.07.08 2030-2100 Repeat Date: 13.07.08 2130-2200 CD Number: Duration: 27.30 Taking part in order of appearance: Prof Anthony Grayling Reader in philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London Julia Margo Associate Director, Institute for Public Policy Research Matthew Taylor Head of Royal Society of Arts Former Head of Strategy to Tony Blair Stephen Scott Professor of Child Health and Behaviour, King’s College London and Institute of Psychiatry Director of Research and Development, National Academy of Parenting Practitioners Peter Duncan Former Blue Peter Presenter; Chief Scout Uanu Seshmi Director of Boyhood to Manhood Foundation, South London ACTUALITY: Scout Atmos REEVES: This is the 1st Radnage Beaver Scout Colony in full cry. To them I’m “Eagle”, their leader. And they’re one of the reasons why I’ve become so interested in the idea of character - what it is, how it’s formed and why it might matter. In this programme, I’m going to investigate what makes us the kind of person we are. I’ll also be asking how far we can or should be trying to improve the character of others - something we do every week at Scouts. SCOUTS: I promise … REEVES: To do my best. SCOUTS: … to do my best. REEVES: To be kind and helpful. SCOUTS: To be kind and helpful … REEVES: And to love God. SCOUTS: … and to love God. SCOUTS: Thank you beavers. REEVES: Baden-Powell, the founder of the Scout Movement, described it as a ‘character factory’, with the explicit aim of turning out young men of the right sort: in his words to instil “some of the spirit of self-negation, self-discipline, sense of humour, responsibility, helpfulness to others, loyalty and patriotism which go to make ‘character’. ACTUALITY: Scout atmos. REEVES: Baden-Powell’s models were of course army scouts, but also the great public schools: the headmaster of Stowe School once described his aim as producing men who would be “acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck.” But the reaction of liberal, metropolitan types to my odd choice of Monday night activity ranges from incredulity to open hostility - and that’s before we even mention the subject of character. All of those woggles and badges and signs and promises just seem so old-fashioned, so uncool and entirely non-PC. Perhaps, though, the ambition of creating people of good character is more topical than it seems at first glance. If we want a better society - a fairer, more decent, more productive one - then we might need better people. And there are in fact growing numbers of observers and policy- makers, even on the centre and left of the political spectrum, who are suggesting we pay more attention to what Martin Luther King once called “the content of our character.” GRAYLING: I think we’ve come to a point in the history of our society now where questions about character, character formation, the individual, individual responsibility, the degree to which individuals should be responsible for their choices and what they do and the degree to which society can have a say about these things has really reached a tipping point. This is a very, very important moment. REEVES: The philosopher Anthony Grayling. The significance of the moment is not because of a generalised breakdown of society into a state of savagery and ill-discipline. From a historical perspective at least, we’re a well-behaved community. GRAYLING: In Victorian London the streets were swarming with child prostitutes. It was too dangerous to walk almost anywhere in London after ten o’clock at night because you would be mugged or murdered. Now you know things are very different on that front. REEVES: Most people, in most of the country, have a decent enough character. The concern, according to the people I’ve spoken to for this programme, is with a relatively small group of people who are failing to develop a good character, with dire consequences for social order in the communities in which they live and for their own chances of making a success of their lives. First though, let’s try to get a sense of what we’re talking about, of what content is contained in the idea of character. Anthony Grayling again: GRAYLING: If you wanted to try to get at the very core, the essence of a person’s character, if you wanted an answer to the question of what is such and such a person like, then you look at circumstances which test their character. You know you get the braggart who is a coward when the shooting starts; you get the person who claims you know to be highly moralistic and then they’re caught out in a hotel room in a compromising situation and so on. So there are test situations where the consistency and integrity and courage and values really of a character can be tested. That was the kind of thing that Aristotle and later on the stoic philosophers of classical antiquity were looking at. Aristotle always thought that being ethical was a matter of practice, of forming habits, of becoming that kind of person. And the stoics in particular said you know the essence of the moral life is to try to get mastery over those things you actually have an influence over in yourself, so your fears and your appetites and so on, and to have an attitude towards things that you cannot control, which is one of endurance and courage. And that if you could achieve those two things, you would be a man of character. REEVES: Philosophers have of course been talking about character for millennia, and it was a near-obsession of Victorian thinkers and writers. The greatest British liberal, John Stuart Mill, insisted that we are all “under a moral obligation to improve our character.” But it looks as if contemporary policy-makers are getting interested too. MARGO: It’s not old values. I mean these are just human values. They don’t age. Being kind to other people and being able to behave responsibly is not a Victorian value. REEVES: Julia Margo, Associate Director of the Institute for Public Policy Research, resisting the Victorian label but accepting the importance of the values of character. In her work, she draws on the latest research on the links between child development and life chances. For the last half century or so, it has typically been conservatives who have stressed the importance of individual character. Why are people like Julia Margo, on the centre-left, so concerned? MARGO: Over time poverty has become more associated with differences in character development, so while in the past a poor, deprived child would have about the same chance of developing you know a good character as a more affluent child, our research did suggest that children who were born in the 70s as opposed to in the late 50s into deprivation were much less likely to develop good character than more affluent groups. REEVES: So kids from poor families are less likely to develop good characters and the link between poverty and weaker character development is growing and more of social immobility is now explained by character attributes. True or false? MARGO: True. That’s what our research shows. REEVES: So just as progressives have become increasingly uncomfortable with the language of character, so the reality of character development has become an increasingly important factor in one of the most prized progressive goals - equality of opportunity. Even now, the terminology is difficult. Julia Margo adopts the term character in our conversation, but she never uses the C-word in her own work. Why not? MARGO: In British policy circles actually, to talk about character people felt was a bit cheesy and they didn’t understand what it meant. And I was in Canada talking to them. They have a character development arm of government almost and they have a huge programme of work that they roll out in schools, which is called ‘character building’. They talk about character all the time. But we aren’t like North Americans. We aren’t comfortable with talking about morality or character, do you know what I mean? REEVES: Mmn. Well here’s a word we could use: good. (Margo laughs) Good behaviour, good people, you know. What’s wrong with the word ‘good’? MARGO: Erm … because then you’re saying … REEVES: Is it because it implies some people are bad? MARGO: Yeah, exactly, because then you’re saying someone’s bad. REEVES: But are you saying that? MARGO: But saying someone’s anti-social for some reason is acceptable. To be an anti-social young person doesn’t mean you’re a bad young person, but it says something about your development. REEVES: Julia Margo is clearly uncomfortable with some of the implied judgementalism in discussions of character. She’s not alone. Matthew Taylor used to work at the heart of the political power structure, as Head of Strategy to Tony Blair. Now he is the Head of the Royal Society of Arts where he’s pushing the idea and practice of “pro social behaviour” - another awkward, slightly anorak-ish term that may be considered more acceptable to modern ears than words like ‘good’ or ‘character’. I asked him why the political classes, especially on the left, have struggled with the idea of character. TAYLOR: I often think that the reason we find those sorts of concepts difficult in Britain is because of the kind of unresolved class conflict of unresolved class basis of British society. There was a sense that there was a notion of character handed down from a kind of patrician class to the great unwashed and that the left in fighting class stratification and class domination has thrown the baby out with the bath water, and that what the centre-left has been unable to do really is to find a sufficiently strong form of kind of organisation and a sufficiently strong basis for powerful, collective messages that bind us and encourage people to be good citizens in the absence of the kind of top down messages of the past. And that is different about- contrasts with the States because whatever you might say about the States, there is a sense of being an American citizen is kind of something you’re all entitled to and it doesn’t contain with it notions of class and hierarchy and empire and all those sorts of ideas. REEVES: The left used to avoid issues of individual character by squarely placing the blame for criminality or cruelty on financial poverty. This comfort blanket is no longer available. There is strong evidence from social science that while children in poorer households do have slimmer chances of developing valuable character attributes, it is not lack of money itself which explains lack of character. SCOTT: Financial poverty is a factor, but not a terribly important one. REEVES: Stephen Scott, Professor of Child Health and Behaviour at King’s College London and the Institute of Psychiatry. SCOTT: So I am fond of saying poverty of what? And actually it seems to be poverty of the parent-child experience and the warm relationships that leads to poor child outcomes rather than poverty of a roof over your head and good diet and central heating. REEVES: What are the incubators of character traits? In particular, I’m interested in the relationship between genetics and environment. SCOTT: Well think of whoever is listening to this, your same sex sibling, your brother, or you’re a parent - if you’ve got two children of the same sex, they’re probably quite different actually and yet you will bring them up pretty much the same, so that has to allow for a genetic component shaping their character. However, there’s an interaction if you like between your genetic predisposition, your set of genetic characters, and then how you turn out according to the way you’re raised; and when it comes to that character trait of being rather anti- social, aggressive, stealing and lying, there is a big interaction that goes on. If you have a rather twitchy, irritable, poor self-control temperament and you’re brought up in a harsh way, it’s bad news. For that group, the rate of criminality aged 17 is about 40%. If you have that twitchy character but you’re brought up in a reasonably calming, soothing way, your parents don’t overreact, they let you run around in the park after school, these kids will do well. REEVES: The twin engines of character formation, it seems, are genetic influences and the quality of childhood. But for some influential economists, all this peering into the dark glass of our soul rather misses the point. Those working in the cutting-edge discipline of ‘behavioural economics’ believe that the immediate environment often has a bigger impact on our behaviour than our innate character. We’ll eat sweets if they’re prominently displayed; we’ll save more if we have to opt out of our pension scheme rather than opt in. THALER: I think the whole idea that we have a specific character, psychology research suggests that that’s a myth. REEVES: Richard Thaler, Professor of Economics at the Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago, and a guru of behavioural economics. THALER: What I’m saying is that character is more complicated than we let on, so to say someone is prudent doesn’t really make any sense; we’d need a whole list of situations. Somebody will be prudent in one situation and not very prudent in another situation. So, for example, if we ask about whether you’re a risk taker, we tend to think of people as well they’re risk takers or they’re not, but that seems quite compartmentalised. So you might find a guy who goes skydiving on the weekends and has all of his retirement money invested in the money market account. So I’m not sure that it makes sense to put labels on people and think that those labels really explain their behaviour. REEVES: In Richard Thaler’s terms, the goal is to “nudge” people rather than coerce them. Our weaknesses are turned to strengths by changing the circumstances - what he calls the ‘choice architecture’ - within which we make decisions. If we’re too ill-disciplined to fill out a pensions form, then setting the default option as being automatically enrolled in the scheme, with the option to opt out, dramatically increases take-up. Thaler’s work shows clearly that someone’s behaviour is not only about their character - the people who save under one scheme but not under another have not somehow become magically more thrifty. Thaler’s ideas are being enthusiastically discussed by politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, and especially in the British Conservative Party. The attraction of applied behavioural economics for politicians and policy-makers is that it offers a way to change people’s behaviour for the better while still allowing them a degree of freedom. At the same time, it is clear to thoughtful members of the political classes that behavioural economics gets nowhere near explaining all of our behaviour, or the behaviour of all of us. Between the cards dealt to us by our DNA and the immediate environment in which we act, there is still, it seems, plenty of space for character to enter the equation. ACTUALITY: Scouts Atmos. REEVES: But what if a child gets a really bad start in life? By the time they join beaver scouts at the age of 6, is it too late? Am I wasting my time? Let’s ask the man who is, I guess, my boss: the chief scout and former Blue Peter presenter, Peter Duncan. If scouting is still a character factory, where should the factory sites be? DUNCAN: Not so much in the sort of richer, middle class, leafy suburbs, but in the areas where perhaps you know the ideology or the ethos of scouting is needed more where people perhaps don’t have so much love, don’t have so much social support and might be in some kind of poverty trap. That is where those ideas of character building where the normal infrastructures aren’t around a young person is important. REEVES: That’s a paradox though, isn’t it, because if we assume that the need for such character building activities is greater in poorer areas, isn’t it a paradox then that actually scouting seems to struggle? DUNCAN: That is true, but there are a few beacons of light. For example in Northampton where the leaders, who are not necessarily scouting leaders, are employed, and these people are out there taking people who are not perhaps fitting into society properly and actually providing them with some inspiration, providing them with some areas of self-expression within a structure, so that they can feel better about themselves. And then you know maybe the reason why they’re there - they can either go into education, to go into society again and actually function better than they have been. ACTUALITY: Scouts SCOUT: (crying) Look! REEVES: You promise me. Alright, I want you to shake his hand and say you’re sorry anyway. (scout cries) Alright, let’s have a look. Have you hurt your knee? Alright, I want you to go to Red Kite.. SEGUE: REEVES: As a beaver scout leader in rural Buckinghamshire, my biggest challenges tend to be rainy camps, a deafening decibel level and plenty of minor injuries and incidents like this. Those working in deprived areas face problems of a different magnitude. SESHMI: I’ve been in homes where the mother is like shouting and screaming and swearing - threatening to harm, you know. I’ve been in situations where young boys have been beaten by their father badly. And I’ve seen worse. You know I’ve seen a parent trying to knife their son. But there’s more. You know I mean young girls being abused by their parents, fathers, and a lot of it happening. REEVES: Uanu Seshmi, Director of the Boyhood to Manhood Foundation in Peckham, South London, which works with black teenage boys who have been excluded or suspended from school. SESHMI: What we say to them, we replace the father that they don’t have. We tell, “I am not your father, but I am an adult in your life.” And I have to earn the position as an adult because a lot of the young peoples experience of relationship with adults is very poor. And you know we have to earn our position and we earn our position by taking their abuse. But it’s how you react to the abuse because they will test you, you know. I had one guy spat in my face in front of the group, and to him, he thought that was a severe challenge for me. But it is not a challenge for me because I’ve experienced another guy spat in my face seven years ago and it was a challenge for me then, you know - a big challenge, you know, because I felt humiliated. But I had to question my character, you know. (laughs) I had to say to myself pride is getting in your way. REEVES: So what did you do when that happened? SESHMI: What I did, I excused myself from the group. I tell everyone that I’m sorry. I went to the bathroom, I wiped myself off. Then I came back to the group and I just said that, “Look, at this moment in time I’m a bit disappointed with what happened and I’d just like to remove myself because I would like to reflect on my reaction, okay?” And then I came back the next day and I said to them, “Look, what you did, okay I could have reacted like an animal. I could have jumped up. And I can do that, but I choose not to do that. The fact that I care about you is I’m very mindful of my reaction.” So I challenge that guy and I challenge the group to comment on that. I make it become everyone’s problem. And in the end that boy apologised and that boy is very good. REEVES: Inspiring stories like this one - of a bad boy turned good - can give us the hope, but not yet the proof, that organisations like the Foundation can have a lasting impact on a person’s character. Uanu Seshmi’s experiences, however, have left him a confirmed optimist. SESHMI: I believe you can change your spots, okay. What distinguishes us from animals is that we have the ability to choose; animals are fixed. It’s all to do with your beliefs, your rational beliefs, your ideas about yourself, and people develop bad character because they have made wrong choices and they may not see people who reflect good character, you know. So I believe that it’s a learned thing. You know it’s not an innate thing. You know it doesn’t … You know we’re not just born with it. It’s something that we have to be taught. REEVES: If it is possible to improve the character of even poorly- raised, inner-city adolescents, perhaps the government should be aiming similar schemes at the whole age range. Why not build a kind of national ‘toddler to teenhood’ programme? Julia Margo from the centre-left think tank, the IPPR, explains why not. MARGO: We found that poor parents - not as in deprived parents, I mean bad parents - don’t want their kids to go to after school activities, so the most deprived children don’t benefit. And you hurl resources at it and middle class children start going to free activities in their local area and you haven’t solved the problem at all. REEVES: Why don’t poor parents want to send their children to these after school activities? MARGO: There are … Well (sighs) … REEVES: Just say what you really think. MARGO: Okay, if you take away all the physical blocks to a child being taken to one of these activities - the cost of it and the accessibility and make sure the parent has time to take their child there - if a parent isn’t taking their child to that activity, the only other reason might be because they’re suspicious because they didn’t do anything like that themselves. I mean you know … REEVES: What are they suspicious of? MARGO: We didn’t manage to get to the root of it, but there are lots of reasons. They don’t want their child to be like a middle class child who’s into dance and blah-blah-blah. They think it’s a waste of time. The most disadvantaged tend to be people who’ve had a really terrible experience of school themselves. Maybe they were bullied, maybe they had low intelligence and so were made to feel really stupid and had a really horrible time. They don’t enjoy being there and it does take a bit of confidence as a parent to like go back into those institutions again with your child and go through all of that again. None of this stuff’s an excuse, but the fact is there will always be some parents who you might say are bad parents, I might say you know through disadvantage, terrible life experience and you know poor socialisation themselves are not able to be adequate parents who will let their kids down, and they need … we need to find some other method of making sure their kids don’t lose out. I’m in favour of making it compulsory. I know there are problems to do with that and I know the government doesn’t like it, but no-one’s got a better answer at the moment. REEVES: Julia Margo is honest enough to recognise that if some parents simply won’t do the best for their children, and if the government is committed to improving social mobility, that compulsion is the logical answer. Rather than a nudge, these parents need a shove. And the temptation of policy-makers will be to compel everyone in order to avoid stigmatising the few who need compelling. But to make all of us send our children to character-building after school activities would be not only highly expensive, but also deeply illiberal. An alternative is to more precisely target the failing parents with interventions designed to make them better ones. Psychiatrist Stephen Scott is also Director of Research and Development at the National Academy of Parenting Practitioners. SCOTT: What you see is in families which are doing less well in bringing up their children, actually when these children make these nice, sociable, good character overtures, they’re often ignored - the parents are watching TV, they’re too tired, they’re depressed, they’re in bed, they’re off their head on drugs. And also, vice versa, when they behave in an unsatisfactory way, they get away with it. They kick their brother, no-one is noticing. They say, “No, I’m not going to go to bed now. You know I want to watch my TV programme.” The parents are tired, they don’t haul them up on it. So they learn that by doing that, they can go to bed later. What would you do next time? You’d whine even more. REEVES: But the question is whether this is stuff that parents either know by instinct or never will. Can these skills really be learnt? SCOTT: They are teachable, so what we find works and what the literature suggests works is very practical skills building stuff. So you’d get down on the floor and say, “I’d like you to play with your child this way and I’ll whisper in your ear some suggestions.” Not for long because it’s quite tiring and boring playing with children for some parents for ten minutes. We would practice what if they stick their tongue out. We make a decision is that something that’s going to go away if we ignore it? So for some minor demeanours, you’ll find they stop if you ignore them; but for the bigger things we need discipline and we teach them how to for example put them on a naughty chair or somewhere quiet very quickly. But always we want to bring out the good in a child. It sounds terribly Mickey Mouse, doesn’t it? It sounds rather American and simple and crass, but it’s actually very powerful. REEVES: Isn’t there a selection problem - that the ones who most need help will be the ones who are least likely to ask for it? SCOTT: Well I think the way services are traditionally set up, it’s quite difficult to get people to turn up on a regular basis initially. Our skill has to be to get alongside them. And my general experience would be after two or three sessions they’re saying, “My goodness, if only I could have had that five years ago.” So it’s not me saying I’ve got this good, correct, middle class way of parenting that’s right for you. It has been said that wanting to have warm and encouraging background and firm limits is a middle class value. The surveys suggest that’s not at all the case; those values are equally held in people of less advantaged backgrounds, so-called working class, and I find very few parents who don’t at base love their children and want the best for them. REEVES: Stephen Scott’s programme shows impressive results, but one of the drawbacks of many similar interventions is that the benefits wear off over time; that people revert, often quite quickly, to their previous behaviour. But Scott and his team have just completed a follow-up study of parents who were given lessons in parenting skills ten years ago. The results, which are shortly to be published in the British Medical Journal, show that between one third and one-half of the improvements in parental performance and children’s behaviour is still apparent. By comparison to many interventions, this level of ‘stickability’ after a decade is extremely encouraging. The job of raising children well, to have a good character, is itself a character- testing and, for sure, character-building experience too. And the task of constructing and reconstructing our own character is of course never fully complete. Philosopher Anthony Grayling again. GRAYLING: I think it matters tremendously to keep up the endeavour of trying oneself to be a person of character and of good character and of helping others to do that, of bringing up our children to do that. Even if it turned out that it’s a very uphill task - the uphill-ness being our genetic endowment - because I remain sufficiently sceptical about the genetic endowment story to feel that when you hear that somebody is changed radically, you know because they’ve had some kind of conversion from one political viewpoint or another or become religious because of some tragedy in their lives or something like that, when you hear that kind of thing, you see the possibility for change. It needn’t be radical - it could be incremental, people can work on themselves - but the hope and the aim of being able to do it has to be part of the human story. REEVES: The story of character turns out to be a complex but vital one. The factories of character are the twirling helixes of our DNA, the love and discipline of our parents, the temptations and affirmations of our peers, and, finally, our own work on ourselves. As Uanu Seshmi reminded us, we are not animals - we can choose to change. Character is an old-fashioned word which cuts across some of our most pressing contemporary concerns. It is instrumental to the traditionally conservative concern with social order, but it is increasingly important to the typically progressive goal of greater social mobility. There is a reluctance to pass judgement on another person’s character, which seems to me to be based on an unjustified fear of being seen to impose middle-class values on the poor - a kind of bourgeois moral imperialism. But the values of respect, kindness, love, self-control, loyalty and honesty are not middle class values. They are good values; and ones which most middle class parents make great efforts to instil in their own offspring. The real victims of our reticence to address the issue of character and its formation are the children of the parents who are failing them. Perhaps the deepest and most damaging inequality in our society today is not in the ability to accumulate cash, but in the opportunity to develop a good character.