Editorial

New regulations come into force from September 2009 which mean that teachers will only be asked to cover for absent colleagues if the absence is unexpected. Good news for teachers but bad news, perhaps, for children if it means that the cost of a trip to an art gallery or theatre will have to go up to cover the cost of a supply teacher.

ACA has already heard from members that schools have begun cancelling bookings for the autumn term.

We want to monitor the impact of the new regulations on children’s access to cultural activities during school hours and will be asking you to take part in an online survey later in the year.

For now, please use the Blog to share your views.

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The English were not really interested in children

Thursday, 27 August 2009 09:32

Neil Rathmell

The Japanese were kind to children, and the two American sailors had befriended him in a fashion, but Jim knew that the English were not really interested in children.

Jim is the boy in Empire of the Sun, J.G.Ballard’s semi-autobiographical novel set in Shanghai during the Second World War.  It is a passing comment but the tone of resigned acceptance makes it all the more telling.

The English don’t like children.  Most English adults, deep down, still believe that children should be seen and not heard.  We lock up more of them than most other countries do.  Anyone who can afford it sends theirs to boarding school.  The rest are plugged into computers and kept behind closed doors.  England has a rich heritage of literature for children but it is a heritage of loss, a lament for lost childhood – little girls escaping to Wonderland, lost boys flying to Neverland, dead children turning into Water Babies – imagining what might have been but never was.

Children do two things: they watch and they pretend.  Most of what they pretend, perhaps all of it, comes from what they watch.  What they watch, mostly, is grown-ups and that, mostly, is what they pretend to be.  What they watch in England, mostly, is grown-ups that don’t like children.  So they end up not liking children either.  And so it goes on.

Children are childish and, in England, to be childish is to be silly.  Children play and, in English, playing at something means not doing it properly.  Adults do things properly, children don’t.  They’re silly.  The sooner they grow up, the better.

The language we use to describe children tells its own story.  There used to be children and adults and, in between, the time when you were neither one nor the other.  The in-betweens used to be called adolescents, now they’re called young people.  They could just as properly be called old children, but we don’t call them that because it would be demeaning.  Some people call children young people because they don’t want to offend them by calling them children.  The story this tells is one that teaches children to stop being children as soon as possible and grow up.

The point of education is to turn children into adults.  In England, we start doing this at the age when, according to A.A.Milne, children are barely conscious – when I was three I was hardly me, when I was four I was not much more, when I was five I was just alive.

Childhood begins at six, before that it’s babies and toddlers.  Now that I’m six I’m as clever as clever, so I think I’ll be six now for ever and ever.  You can’t, of course, wherever you live, but with luck, in most countries, you can go on being six for a few years.  In England, when you get past six you’re aiming at level 3 and your days are numbered.

Childhood is a state of being, adolescence is a state of becoming.  That used to be reflected in the difference between primary schools and secondary schools.  Primary schools should be places where children can be children, places where they can watch and pretend, places where they can go on being six until they’re eleven.  Secondary schools should be places where adolescents can stop being six and become adults.  Now all schools are the same.

The spirit of Gradgrind lives on.  It was Utilitarianism that provoked Dickens’s anger.  We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact.  The one thing needful now is evidence.  Nothing can be done without evidence that it will produce the desired result.  And what’s that?  The economy, stupid!

Children don’t work and pay taxes.  We need to turn them into adults who do.  A long and happy childhood is expensive.  It can only be justified if there is evidence of economic benefit.  Why do children need the arts?  Where’s the evidence?  We give Mr Gradgrind the answer we think he wants.  Creativity and risk-taking are what drives the 21st century economy, artists are creative, artists take risks.  So do pharmaceutical companies and investment bankers, he says.  They do it better and make more money.

Painters and poets and actors and singers and dancers belong, like Sissy Jupe’s father, to the horse-riding.  An objectionable calling, according to Mr Gradgrind.  Childish, silly, pointless.  We don’t want to know anything about that, here.  You mustn’t tell us about that, here.

Not in England.

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