Recent years have seen a rise in interest in ‘character education’ in England, a broad church of initiatives aimed at developing positive personality traits like perseverance and resilience (Mills 2021). Character education’s advocates argue that the turn to character is an important corrective to the coldness of the purely civic test of ability (‘mere’ exam results), putting forward the idea that education should be about producing well-rounded individuals and not merely examination-fiends or drones for the workplace. Paradoxically, as Jerome and Kisby (2019) point out, advocates like former English Education Secretary Nicky Morgan (2017) also tend to stress, in a more outcomes-oriented way, that this turn to character will make young people particularly employable, since personality traits like adaptability can be understood as work-ready competences, or a kind of personal capital (Brown, Hesketh and Williams 2003).

Critics have argued that the character education movement often stems from a right-wing ethos. Ideas about education for character are highly individualist (as opposed to its more collectivist cousin, citizenship education), stressing hard work and personal ambition as routes to a better future: often meaning a route not just to personal fulfilment but, when it comes to working-class young people, a route out of working-class communities. Some character education initiatives in English higher education, like the University of Birmingham’s Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, have explicit links to right-wing philanthropic individuals and organisations (Allen and Bull 2018).      

In the terms of Boltanski and Thévenot (2006), I argue that we can think of the turn to character education as an increasing folding of domestic values into the educational sphere. By domestic values I mean a concern with interpersonal relationships, and with questions of character and personality, when it comes to suggesting who higher education – and specifically non-vocational and general higher education – is for. This understanding goes beyond thinking about character as a desired outcome of education, to suggest that character is here being tested for. The suitability of this or that person for a particular educational opportunity here rests, in part, upon their domestic worth, or character.

Andrew Sayer’s (2020) recent Sociology article was an important intervention in debates about character’s ‘uses and misuses’ (461), in which he argued that character can be a valuable term, notwithstanding its frequent use for conservative ends. He argued that thinking about an individual’s character is a more or less inevitable feature of human assessment (a species of his broader concept of lay normativity or everyday morality – see also Sayer 2005, 2011), and thus cannot be avoided. He argued that instead of arguing against character assessments in general, we should turn our attention to which character traits are prized. For example, he stresses that current, right-wing notions of character tend to reduce character to the ‘executive virtues’ (Sayer 2020: 464) of grit and so on, rather than moral and collectivist virtues like gratitude.    

This paper builds on Sayer’s argument by demonstrating the importance of context for ascertaining whether a concern with character is appropriate or not in different educational situations. It goes further than asking which traits are prized to asking where they are prized, and how actors make decisions about the appropriateness of thinking about character in this or that setting.

At compulsory education levels, the turn to character has been researched by investigating the way that specific policies are enacted on the ground in schools (see, for instance, Morrin 2018). Since the relationship between national policy and higher education curricula is less straightforward, it requires an expansive view to track how ideas about character education may be evolving in this context. There are certainly explicit moves in the direction of character education in higher education in England, the most well-known being that at Birmingham mentioned above, but I argue in this paper that by thinking about less explicit turns to character education in higher education, there is much to see. The paper presents some of the findings of a qualitative study looking at the growth of interdisciplinary degrees named ‘liberal arts’ in England. The liberal arts are often, although not always, presented as a holistic form of education that develops character (see for example Tubbs 2014), especially through small, discussion-based classes. The broader project included discourse analysis of institutions’ applicant-facing websites, interviews with nine academics working on liberal arts degree, and interviews with 26 students studying such degrees, at ten different institutions. This included more and less prestigious institutions, and one private one, at areas all over England. This particular paper presents findings from the student interviews.

In interviews, many students distinguished between holistic, character-building approaches in the classroom itself (what we could think of as the character-building approach), and the idea that character should be a relevant criterion when admitting students to a course, or assessing their progress. They make a distinction between qualities that can legitimately be assessed for (that is, qualities that can reasonably form the basis of differential judgement) and those that cannot, without arguing that it is only the former type that matter. In short, students questioned whether educational testing for character was fair, or whether it in fact unjustly transport values from other spheres into the assessment (Walzer 1983). The idea of the fair test is an example of Sayer’s lay normativity or everyday value-making, and students seek to disentangle a fair use of character from an educational assessment for character traits. As Sayer has argued, character may be put to work for both progressive and regressive purposes; utilising the idea of the fair test can contribute to our ability to understand when character is a fair thing to consider, and when it isn’t.

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