The Road is a post-apocalyptic story of the struggle of one man to help his young son to survive an unspecified catastrophe that had scourged the world into a burnt out cinder.  Using all the arts of contemporary film making The Road is a harrowing account of ‘the end of days’ as father and son are equally at risk to bands of cannibals seeking to devour them, as they are to death from cold, earthquake or radiation.  In such a grey, lifeless world of utter desolation the father teaches his son about self-survival, human empathy and the power of love so that the boy lives – at least beyond the end of the story.

Several times over the weekend, as Anne and I have made our way through the snow-covered fields and negotiated the ice-covered pavements, I found myself going back over that story, haunted by the sheer horror of what might happen should the tenuous threads that hold civilisation together, actually shatter.  To my admiration for this demonstration of human love, expressed most poignantly when the father is dying, the boy is able to recognise in the genuine humanity of the little family which comes towards him on the beach, the possibility of his own salvation.  Shocked as I was by the degradation of humanity that the film portrays it is the grandeur of human possibilities which remains strongest in my mind.

The Road took me out of my preoccupation with thinking about the politics of schooling, and the raising of children, and reminded me of what really matters in human relationships.  As I looked again at the snow-covered fields sparkling in the late winter sunshine, I realised how few had been the number of children tobogganing on such perfect slopes on the previous days – days in which, to conform to requirements of health and safety regulations, their schools had been closed in case a child might slip, and its parents sue the school for negligence.

Had my own parents, I wondered, been negligent years ago in letting me and my friends play to our hearts’ content in the parks, and batter each other with well-earned snowballs, or did they know – or intuit – that this was a vital part of my learning how to look after myself?

If the worst were to happen (as the current President of the Royal Society has predicted might happen with a 50% probability within a century) are we giving children the physical, emotional and, in particular, the moral strength to deal with the unpredictable?  I am fearful that it is not, for it seems that we are bringing up children – and their parents – to believe that they can live in an ever more uncertain world, not by common sense, but by conforming minutely to endless red tape.

This morning I received an email from a colleague headteacher that exactly reflected on my own thoughts and tied them most specifically to schools in January 2010.  It went as follows:

I have jotted down a few thoughts on the recent nonsense over the snow!  I thought you might enjoy them.  There is an irony to the anger that has been expressed in the media regarding the recent “snow closures” of schools.

For the past decade at least, and with massive acceleration recently, the cumulative impact of interventionist and reactive, populist, political interference in education has led to a world where we are statutorily timid.  Indeed we are required to attempt to bureaucratically eliminate the risk from life.

Which is really odd, because learning surely is a risky activity by definition simply because learning is about thinking, not just conforming (as totalitarian regimes have sought to persuade their people).  The current political rhetoric is all about learning, but in reality it’s all about litigation – OfSTED, safeguarding, health and safety, and everything that serves to utterly choke learning.

Schools now have to assess everything.  They are required to have policies and plans and schemes that predict and offset every possible eventuality so as to make sure that everyone is safe and secure and wrapped up, and away from all the hazards that actually have always existed…. and which always will exist.  Anyone can see that the evil that caused the high profile cases which, in turn, provoked the CRB’s (Criminal Records Bureau) and the security fencing and so on, will always exist.  As they are bound to do, given the contrary nature of human behaviour and natural disasters.  They will never be checked by silly decorative (and expensive) paperwork.

The angry press thundered on about the good old days when we all trudged through the snow whatever. That was fine.  But did they also mention the good old days when we lived with the village pervert?  When husbands hit their wives as a matter of course after a great session on a Friday night?  When bullying was institutionally essential to the existence of empire, never mind encouraged?  Did they talk of the days when children just played in the road and came home at dark and talked to strangers (or got a clip for being rude)?  No, of course not.

This is the problem.  We have a culture that does not know what it wants.  It wants freedom and security, learning and the elimination of risk, true grit and bureaucratic timidity, risk assessments and freedom, litigation and liberty.  It just can’t be done!

Just as every one of our ancestors were on a journey, so too were their Roads unpredictable.  Likewise today our individual Roads are made by walking.  If anyone doesn’t know how to walk – mixing my metaphors I’m afraid – they won’t know how to dig themselves out of a snowdrift, recharge their souls by wondering at the beauty of a starlit night, or know what to do when everything around them collapses into chaos.

Related posts:

1. Review: The Road to Whatever: Middle class culture & the crisis of adolescence by Elliott Currie

The Chief Rabbi hit the headlines earlier this month when he accused Europeans of caring more about shopping than spirituality, and being too selfish to accept the responsibility of becoming parents.  “Parenthood involves massive sacrifices; money, attention, time and emotional energy (and in today’s European materialistic society) there is no room for such sacrifices for the sake of generations yet to come”, warned Lord Sacks.

Last week the President of the Girls’ School Association told her colleagues that teenage girls needed to be taught a heavy dose of realism about the difficulty of balancing the raising of their children, with the demands of their careers.  Girls were under an unprecedented pressure to be “the perfect woman” – as successful in their careers as four-fifths of them would need to be in rearing children.  Her remarks sparked the obvious range of criticism in a country preoccupied with arguments about equality and flexible working rights.  “If you [girls] choose someone who undervalues you, you won’t be able to have the support [in life] you might need,” Berry warned.  So very right… but are the alpha boys being given comparable advice?

It is hard for priest, rabbi or headteacher to make this argument (as also argued by the Cambridge Primary Review) when all the pressures are on parents to work ever longer hours to earn more money to buy more things.  This was forcefully brought home to me a couple of days ago by a large canvas poster at the entrance to our local supermarket advertising a new nursery centre available “from birth to six.”  Read that carefully … not from six months to six years, but literally from the first days after birth until the age of six.  The message was all too obvious – drop off your children here as you go out to work, and return in time to put them to bed.

Such centres can look good, sound good and seem to make sense to governments because, expensive as they are, by enabling mothers to get back to work, these costs are more than compensated by a way of greater national productivity.  But is that really true?

Talking with the highly competent woman in charge of one such nursery, she admitted to a real fear that might probably undermine the whole scheme.  She explained that she had several grown-up children of her own, each of whom had had a somewhat difficult adolescence.  It had been in those bad times, when the going was really rough, that she and her husband were strengthened by the memories they had when their children were younger, and this gave them the patience and energy to stick together.  Eventually they came through this fine but, the woman stressed, the energy to do that had come from those early family memories.  “When I see the smiles of the children at the centre, and hear their shouts of joy when they have done something special, and rush up to me for a cuddle, I get very worried for their parents who don’t know their own children anything like as well as I do.  When their children go into adolescence, the parents will have none of the memories that I have of different and easier times to keep them going.”

Drawing such ideas together – the Rabbi, a headmistress and the academic – I recalled an extraordinary discussion with a group of 17-year-olds about “Why have Children?”  The conversation was lively and there was much talk of rights and opportunities, and their own relationship with their parents.  Then one of them came out with the most amazing observation.  “Parents have children to help the parents grow up.”  Maybe that was what Wordsworth meant when he said the child is father of the man.  In the bringing-up of children is the growing-up of the adults.

See Action Three of Briefing Paper and pages 234
and 235 of Overschooled but Undereducated

Related posts:

1. The “Helicopter Parents” Hovering over their Adult Children
2. Children tutoring Seniors at Internet Skills
3. A Training Program for Those Seeking to Develop Agendas that Actively Support the Learning Needs of All Children

Whether Ed Balls at the Labour Party Conference, calling for greater parental support to improve the behaviour of young people was doing this as a political strategy to attract voters or not, is largely immaterial, for the reality on the ground is often dreadful.  The behaviour of young people reflects (1) their home background, (2) the role of the school, and increasingly (3) the influence of their peer group.  For too long caring teachers and politicians looking for immediate solutions have implied that, at a time of massive social change, schools had better try to do everything.  After all it is only the school part of the equation that governments can legislate for, as parents tend to do whatever they believe they should do, and peer groups (especially in adolescence) are remarkably resistant to being told anything!

Politicians are as reluctant as their advisors to accept that they have less power than well-thought-out people’s belief systems.  And it is parents’ belief systems that matter.  Writing just after the Second World War John Newsome, who had recently become Director of Education for Hertfordshire, did his best to address this issue by writing a short guidebook for parents entitled The Child at School.  He wrote at a time when the majority of post-war parents had not, themselves, had any form of secondary education beyond the age of fourteen.

Newsome wrote “Education is ultimately a political issue, for it is concerned with a child’s relationship to the world both as a child and as a future adult.  In other words, until you have decided what the relationship between man and God or man and other men should be, and what form of political and economic society you would like to see, you cannot tell what sort of education a child should have.”  Strong words, well expressed; issues which society ignores at its peril.  He went on, “The most significant thing is… to provide the individual child with the best that the nation can provide, not only because the child has eventually to perform an economic function in society, but because the child in his or her own right, as a personality, needs education for its full development as much as [it needs] food or shelter.”

“Children are children first” wrote Newsome, “and only school children second.”

“Behaviour”, he wrote, “is determined much more by the standards set by the home, than by the school, for children of primary age are influenced much more by the conduct of their parents than by that of their teachers.”  You can’t make a more direct statement than that.  His words should re-echo down the years: “Parents can do a great deal to make the path less hard.  They can provide in the home the sort of educational influences which are necessary to compliment what is being done at the school.  It is not so much a question of discussing at breakfast… the vagaries of French irregular verbs, but it does mean doing all you can do to see that your child is exposed to influences which are likely to assist him or her to develop intellectual curiosity, form standards of judgement, and delight in high standards of achievement.  Above all it means behaving as if you respect his efforts to find truth, and sympathise with his difficulties; in other words it means going on with your own education.”

See Actions 3 and 4 of the Briefing Paper

Related posts:

1. The “Helicopter Parents” Hovering over their Adult Children
2. Curious Teenagers, Busy Parents and Market Forces: Changing the face of education in the 21st Century

The 9:13 is the first train on which cheap day family returns are available from Bath.  Those of us wearing smart suits as we head for late morning meetings are, midway through the summer holidays, outnumbered by enthusiastic families off to see the sights of London.  The 9:13 is a happy train.

As a kid I remember going on such journeys clutching my “Eye Spy” books.  I remember one superior version which was designed specifically for the journey from London to Edinburgh.  With a series of route maps it explained the significance of each bridge we crossed, the larger and older churches, the reasons for the marshalling yards, and the importance of the different factories.  I lost that book long ago but I still look with interest out of the windows to search for an explanation for the landscape.

Two days ago my train rattled at high speed through the 3-mile Box Tunnel, stopping all conversation.  As it emerged I heard a little girl two seats away say to her mother “Tunnels are frightening.  Why can’t the train stay in the open air?”  I couldn’t hear the mother’s response but I wondered how Brunel, the great Victorian railroad engineer who built this – the largest tunnel to have been ever driven through rock at that stage – would have explained it.  He had difficulties in his own day for one sceptical Victorian had produced a calculation to show that a train entering the tunnel at 20 miles per hour would create such a vacuum in the limited air space that it would rapidly accelerate and emerge at 200 miles per hour and kill all the passengers in the process.

On the way to get some coffee I overheard a father explaining the significance of the old engine sheds at Swindon.  I wondered what others would make of the cooling towers at Didcot and why it is that the new Tesco store in Reading has been built with a clock tower that suggests this megastore is really at the heart of an old village green.

“Your children ask fascinating questions” I remarked to the mother as we left the train.  She looked at me somewhat apprehensively; “I’m sorry if they disturbed you, but they are so excited!”  All I could do was give her my best reassuring smile as her children pulled her off in another direction.

I wanted, there and then, to send emails to Ed Balls, Michael Gove and every politician claiming interest in education: “Forget about schools.  Forget about buildings, and league tables or examinations.  Just give every parent the confidence to create endless situations for their children to be inquisitive.  Do that and at least half the problems schools now face could be solved without any more money, or political legislation.”

See Part Three of Briefing Paper and Actions 1, 2, 3 and 4

Related posts:

1. Prof Charles Handy, formerly of the London Business School, and author of many books including The Hungry Spirit, The Empty Raincoat and The Elephant and the Flea