Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

8 European Citizenship and Evidence-Based Happiness 125
A useful way to think about a school’s culture and environment is to divide it into
three aspects – the learning climate, the social climate and the physical climate. The
ongoing challenge for schools will be to establish, develop and sustain the development
of social and emotional skills work systematically across the whole school and create
and maintain a supportive environment, culture and ethos to underpin the work. (DCSF;
http://nationalstrategies.standards.dcsf.gov.uk/node/66349?uc=force_uj)
The idea of the climate suggests something subject to fluctuation, something to
which we must be able to adapt, and can be seen in relation to recent wider social
and political discourses of environmental endangerment and ethical consumerism:
the school, society and the environment must be adapted to, but are also something
that we must protect, that we are each individually responsible for as citizens.
8.5 Conclusion
I have sought to illustrate here interrelated examples of a current object of governmental
concern as a way of exploring the way in which the European citizen
is understood and addressed. The use of statistics in the construction of European
citizenship is seen here in the context of a shift from statistics as a matter of governmental
concern to an interrelationship between the governmental, the academic
and the private as sources of knowledge, and providers of expertise made available
to the citizen.
The examples I have provided suggest a particular ethics of citizenship in
this context of which statistics, data and harmonised numerical indicators form a
part. Numbers include us all; they create Europe while overcoming the historical,
political, cultural and linguistic barriers that thwart a particular idea of a United
Europe. The role of data in constituting this ethics is evident at a number of levels.
For example, in addition to the presentation and making accessible of statistical
data on Europe by the European Commission, such documents are accompanied
by the expression of the relationship between data and democracy, solidarity and
social justice. Further, the ethic of citizenship in relation to one’s self – autonomy,
self-determination, learning – is expressed in the desire to use tools and indicators,
personally or within a formal educational or professional environment, with which
to gauge one’s self in relation to a norm and to measure one’s progress. It is not
sufficient to be concerned with these aspects of one’s life however; one must seek
to make this explicit.
This requires the adoption of a particular vocabulary (for example, as in the
SEAL programme, learning to label one’s emotions appropriately and relating these
to the physical feelings that indicate them). Whether one is, for example, responding
to a survey on happiness and well-being, telling a classmate, friend, partner
or colleague, “When you said... you made me feel...”, or reporting feelings and
plans for self-improvement in a journal or blog (an increasingly formal part of the
requirements for the reflective practitioner as well as a personal pursuit) we are
asked to give voice to our emotions and opinions, to make them evident and explicit.
Such competencies are often referred to as forms of literacy: emotional literacy