ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates emergent discourses and practices that problematise and aim to calculate the character(s) of young people in the UK and globally. Alongside promoting the value of character education in schools in building young people's resilience and promoting character traits that purportedly enable social mobility, the Department for Education in the UK has been funding research into ways of measuring character. In this context, the educational and policy work of the increasingly influential Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues, at the University of Birmingham, is a particularly interesting example. The Jubilee Centre is a prominent voice in promoting the need for character education, and has developed a number of pedagogical resources for schools. Of particular interest for our analysis is the Jubilee Centre's work in developing techniques for measuring and evaluating the virtues and characters of individuals and school populations. Drawing on a governmentality perspective, our critical analysis explores the ways in which character is becoming intelligible and governable within a performative regime of measurement and calculation, and through which the child's soul is opened up to biopolitical management.
