The Guardian – Will Storr
“Warren is here to change these children. For 14 years, she’s been trying to help the youngsters of Buckinghamshire become better humans. I’ve come to St Paul’s Combined School in the pretty village of Wooburn Green to watch her cast her psychological spell, a programme she calls Let’s Get Smart. This kind of thinking is increasingly common in the UK, encouraged by the coalition’s £3.5m investment in character-building, announced last December. Partly, it has come in response to a feeling, long gathering in staff rooms, that the labours of an entire childhood and adolescence should produce more than a list of letters, A to G, that show how good you are at remembering facts. What about the creation of better people? What if teachers could take a youngster and shape his or her very self? Lots of schools have started trying. More than 500 entered the Department for Education’s Character awards (St Paul’s only started Let’s Get Smart in January, so it didn’t qualify), which recently awarded prizes of £15,000 each to 27 educational organisations in England. It’s all part of coalition education secretary Nicky Morgan’s ambition to make the nation a “global leader of teaching character”.”(more)