(no subject)
There are many things in life which seem perfectly sensible until you think about them. School, for example.
Today's Observer features an example of the kind of "new research" without which newspapers (and radio news bulletins) wouldn't know what to do:Hundreds of thousands of parents are risking hefty fines by taking their children out of school to take advantage of cheaper holidays or enjoy day trips because it is 'more convenient', according to new research.
Many of those who go on short breaks or one-day outings often tell teachers their children are ill, feeling the lie is justified because their work patterns make it difficult for their families to spend time together.
There are plenty of issues involved in the story, but the most fundamental may be the least obvious. On what basis does the state tell people what they can and can't do with their children - and levy fines for the exercise of "parental choice"?
If someone was telling me what to do, in any area of my life, I'd want to know that they spoke from a position of competence, that there was something I could learn from them. But the state's track record is not encouraging. As corporate parent, it is responsible for around 61,000 children in care. At sixteen, 6% of such children will get five good GCSE grades (A* to C) - compared to 53% of children overall.
Some other facts and figures:Between a quarter and a third of rough sleepers have been looked after by local authorities as children.
Children who have been in care are two and half times more likely to become a teenage parent
Young people who have been in care are disproportionately likely to end up in prison. 26% of prisoners have been in care as children, compared with just 2% of the general population.
Without belittling the difficulties which life has already thrown at any child who ends up in care, these figures do not suggest that the state has any great authority by virtue of experience in successful parenting. The authority it has is that of coercion, taken for granted in our political framework, but which we might tolerate less if it were less familiar.
Schools - where people are imprisoned for many of their waking hours on account of their age - are the ideal preparation for a life in which such coercion is taken for granted. Adult life will never bring most of us into an environment so saturated with the possibility of violence (physical or emotional) as school - a violence which follows from the threat of force on which they are founded. Inside them, the curiosity, ingenuity, hope and imagination of young children is more often than not crushed. Those who prosper there generally do so by learning to conform and perform obediently.
There are, of course, wonderful teachers who create enclaves of security, joy and exploration - but this is not because they are doing the job "properly", but because they are being faithful to something beyond the system in which they are working. The best response, then, is not to attempt well-intentioned reform, but to build alternative ways of doing things that may render education-as-factory-farming obsolete.
Stories such as Gloria Steinem's give me hope:I didn't go to school until I was 12 or so. My parents thought that traveling in a house trailer was as enlightening as sitting in a classroom, so I escaped being taught some of the typical lessons of my generation: for instance, that this country was "discovered" when the first white man set foot on it, that boys and girls were practically different species, that Europe deserved more textbook space than Africa and Asia combined.
Instead, I grew up seeing with my own eyes, following my curiosity, falling in love with books, and growing up mostly around grown-ups -- which, except for the books, was the way kids were raised for most of human history.
Needless to say, school hit me like a ton of bricks. I wasn't prepared for gender obsessions, race and class complexities, or the new-to-me idea that war and male leadership were part of human nature. Soon, I gave in and became an adolescent hoping for approval and trying to conform. It was a stage that lasted through college.
I owe the beginnings of re-birth to living in India for a couple of years where I fell in with a group of Gandhians, and then I came to the Kennedys, the civil rights movement and protests against the war in Vietnam.
But most women, me included, stayed in our traditional places until we began to gather, listen to each other's stories and learn from shared experience. Soon, a national and international feminist movement was challenging the idea that what happened to men was political, but what happened to women was cultural -- that the first could be changed but the second could not.
I had the feeling of coming home, of awakening from an inauthentic life. It wasn't as if I thought my self-authority was more important than external authority, but it wasn't less important either. We are both communal and uniquely ourselves, not either-or.
Since then, I've spent decades listening to kids before and after social roles hit. Faced with some inequality, the younger ones say, "It's not fair!" It's as if there were some primordial expectation of empathy and cooperation that helps the species survive. But by the time kids are teenagers, social pressures have either nourished or starved this expectation. I suspect that their natural cry for fairness -- or any whisper of it that survives -- is the root from which social justice movements grow.
So I no longer believe the conservative message that children are naturally selfish and destructive creatures who need civilizing by hierarchies or painful controls. On the contrary, I believe that hierarchy and painful controls create destructive people. And I no longer believe the liberal message that children are blank slates on which society can write anything. On the contrary, I believe that a unique core self is born into every human being -- the result of millennia of environment and heredity combined in an unpredictable way that could never happen before or again.
Now, I'm not pretending that parents taking their kids off on holiday or to Alton Towers when they should be in school is much like Steinem's experience, but the whole idea of the state punishing them for it is part of the nonsense we take for granted and call education.
Today's Observer features an example of the kind of "new research" without which newspapers (and radio news bulletins) wouldn't know what to do:Hundreds of thousands of parents are risking hefty fines by taking their children out of school to take advantage of cheaper holidays or enjoy day trips because it is 'more convenient', according to new research.
Many of those who go on short breaks or one-day outings often tell teachers their children are ill, feeling the lie is justified because their work patterns make it difficult for their families to spend time together.
There are plenty of issues involved in the story, but the most fundamental may be the least obvious. On what basis does the state tell people what they can and can't do with their children - and levy fines for the exercise of "parental choice"?
If someone was telling me what to do, in any area of my life, I'd want to know that they spoke from a position of competence, that there was something I could learn from them. But the state's track record is not encouraging. As corporate parent, it is responsible for around 61,000 children in care. At sixteen, 6% of such children will get five good GCSE grades (A* to C) - compared to 53% of children overall.
Some other facts and figures:Between a quarter and a third of rough sleepers have been looked after by local authorities as children.
Children who have been in care are two and half times more likely to become a teenage parent
Young people who have been in care are disproportionately likely to end up in prison. 26% of prisoners have been in care as children, compared with just 2% of the general population.
Without belittling the difficulties which life has already thrown at any child who ends up in care, these figures do not suggest that the state has any great authority by virtue of experience in successful parenting. The authority it has is that of coercion, taken for granted in our political framework, but which we might tolerate less if it were less familiar.
Schools - where people are imprisoned for many of their waking hours on account of their age - are the ideal preparation for a life in which such coercion is taken for granted. Adult life will never bring most of us into an environment so saturated with the possibility of violence (physical or emotional) as school - a violence which follows from the threat of force on which they are founded. Inside them, the curiosity, ingenuity, hope and imagination of young children is more often than not crushed. Those who prosper there generally do so by learning to conform and perform obediently.
There are, of course, wonderful teachers who create enclaves of security, joy and exploration - but this is not because they are doing the job "properly", but because they are being faithful to something beyond the system in which they are working. The best response, then, is not to attempt well-intentioned reform, but to build alternative ways of doing things that may render education-as-factory-farming obsolete.
Stories such as Gloria Steinem's give me hope:I didn't go to school until I was 12 or so. My parents thought that traveling in a house trailer was as enlightening as sitting in a classroom, so I escaped being taught some of the typical lessons of my generation: for instance, that this country was "discovered" when the first white man set foot on it, that boys and girls were practically different species, that Europe deserved more textbook space than Africa and Asia combined.
Instead, I grew up seeing with my own eyes, following my curiosity, falling in love with books, and growing up mostly around grown-ups -- which, except for the books, was the way kids were raised for most of human history.
Needless to say, school hit me like a ton of bricks. I wasn't prepared for gender obsessions, race and class complexities, or the new-to-me idea that war and male leadership were part of human nature. Soon, I gave in and became an adolescent hoping for approval and trying to conform. It was a stage that lasted through college.
I owe the beginnings of re-birth to living in India for a couple of years where I fell in with a group of Gandhians, and then I came to the Kennedys, the civil rights movement and protests against the war in Vietnam.
But most women, me included, stayed in our traditional places until we began to gather, listen to each other's stories and learn from shared experience. Soon, a national and international feminist movement was challenging the idea that what happened to men was political, but what happened to women was cultural -- that the first could be changed but the second could not.
I had the feeling of coming home, of awakening from an inauthentic life. It wasn't as if I thought my self-authority was more important than external authority, but it wasn't less important either. We are both communal and uniquely ourselves, not either-or.
Since then, I've spent decades listening to kids before and after social roles hit. Faced with some inequality, the younger ones say, "It's not fair!" It's as if there were some primordial expectation of empathy and cooperation that helps the species survive. But by the time kids are teenagers, social pressures have either nourished or starved this expectation. I suspect that their natural cry for fairness -- or any whisper of it that survives -- is the root from which social justice movements grow.
So I no longer believe the conservative message that children are naturally selfish and destructive creatures who need civilizing by hierarchies or painful controls. On the contrary, I believe that hierarchy and painful controls create destructive people. And I no longer believe the liberal message that children are blank slates on which society can write anything. On the contrary, I believe that a unique core self is born into every human being -- the result of millennia of environment and heredity combined in an unpredictable way that could never happen before or again.
Now, I'm not pretending that parents taking their kids off on holiday or to Alton Towers when they should be in school is much like Steinem's experience, but the whole idea of the state punishing them for it is part of the nonsense we take for granted and call education.