Read The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids Online
Authors: Tom Hodgkinson
The Idle Parent: Why Less Means More When Raising Kids (10 page)
While school has a superficial attraction to the idle parent as a free babysitting service, giving you peace during the day,
the idle parent will in fact have to take on much responsibility for their child’s education.
So: what are the alternatives? Well, some of you will go the whole way and embrace home-schooling, a wonderful option. The organization Education Otherwise exists to help parents who want to go down this route, and certainly some of the testimonials from parents make inspiring reading:
Having children who love to learn and are always busy making, doing and discovering has made autonomous education easy. On a sunny day any number of learning experiences happen in a few hours. Someone makes a sign to warn others of a slippery path using wood, nails and paint. Others run in and out to identify a butterfly or plant; someone else picks fruit and divides it equally for lunch; another makes cheese on toast; dens are built; complex chasing or role play games go on; tree climbing, dam building, birdwatching, leaf printing, water play and so on. Inside it is just the same only lots of paper, pens, glue, Lego, soft toys, blocks, ramps are involved and I’m often presented with a map of an island or clues for a treasure hunt (for an apple!) or a poem or a radio programme someone taped and wanted to share… My role as ‘teacher’ seems much more to listen to what they have learnt themselves than ever to ‘teach’ them anything. Apart from learning to read and a few other basics, most of what they know comes from reading, discussing and discovering for themselves.
The primary objection to home-schooling, always made by dullards who have not thought the matter through, is that ‘school provides social life’. The home educators fight back with the convincing argument that the social life they get at
school is not necessarily a healthy one: ‘The social life of most schools and classrooms is mean-spirited, status-oriented, competitive and snobbish.’ They also point out that it’s easy for parents to organize a social life for the kids: friends come and play, learning groups are formed with other home educators in the area, and there are umpteen sport, outdoor and drama classes available. They point out that these out-of-school relationships are based on mutual interest and emerge from choice rather than necessity.
Home-schooling, though, may seem daunting. Certainly the experiences that Victoria and I have had trying to teach Arthur have not been particularly successful. He seems much happier at school. Perhaps we are lucky with our school, as our kids attend a small rural primary school with only about forty kids, aged from five to eleven. We love the school, but we do a lot of reading and talking with the kids outside school. I also teach ukulele there and Victoria has helped with the drama group. It’s easy to get involved with primary schools: they appreciate the extra input as they are more used to parents moaning.
Another alternative is flexi-schooling – school is used as a resource rather than a centre of confinement. Your child may go to school two or three days a week but the rest of the time is spent at home. Like home schooling, this is perfectly legal and is a matter to be privately arranged with your school. Adherents of the idea report great success and healthy relationships built up with their schools.
The most important factor in all this is probably parents’ own mental attitude. If you have respect for your child, if you are not trying to mould the child into some perfect ideal, then all options are valid. We are not talking about a glib list of rules for you to apply in order to make your children happy.
In fact, we’re not even aiming for happiness; we are aiming for strength, freedom and joy in our children and in ourselves. We’re aiming for satisfaction. Even awareness of the limitation of school as a place for education may itself be enough to liberate your kids.
We need to abandon the quest for perfection and even the need for authority. Neill warns: ‘The adult has striven for perfection in his own life, has failed miserably to reach it, and now attempts to find it in his children.’
This danger is just as real for supposedly enlightened parents as for traditional ones. And this is perhaps another problem with Locke and Rousseau. Although their ideas on freedom and wildness are certainly to be applauded, and there is much inspiring material in their books, they can tend to make us feel failures because as imperfect people we will inevitably fail to implement their ideal schemes. Idealism can in fact be a sort of tyranny: many are the times in my own home when I have been accused by Victoria of being a bully and a tyrant, for example, when I have unplugged the television mid-show. You can’t impose freedom by authority. The other day Delilah and I were dancing to a CD in the kitchen. Arthur came in and pulled the plug out.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ I asked. ‘Why are you spoiling our fun?’
‘Well, you spoil our fun when you turn the telly off.’
‘Erm… that’s different,’ I spluttered.
So the idealist can become a bully. Better to lead by example or not lead at all. Get on with your own life and allow others to get on with theirs. Blake warns against an excess of ‘thou shalt not-ism’ in ‘The Garden of Love’:
I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I had never seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut
And ‘Thou shalt not,’ writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.
Send your children to school with some jokes that they can tell. Or a magic trick to perform (perhaps like the Colouring-in Book, where the black and white outlines magically colour themselves in, and then disappear. Available from International Magic, of Clerkenwell Road, London EC1).
What kind of school might look attractive to the idle parent? First of all, don’t dismiss the idea of boarding school, resources permitting. England has the liberated Summerhill School, founded by the above-mentioned A. S. Neill, whose book I would recommend to any parent, whether or not they send their kid or kids to his school. Summerhill is a boarding school which practices self-government. This means that the children themselves are involved in the running of the school. They vote on rules and they only go to the lessons they choose to. The authority element is removed. By these means, Neill argues, much time is saved: when children have chosen to learn they learn at a far faster rate than when the
learning has been imposed on them by an outside authority. At Summerhill kids might barely go to lessons for three years, but they will then suddenly work very hard when they realize that they need maths GCSE, for example, if they want to go to art school.
The nice thing about private education is that it is not run by the state. Everyone who is there has chosen to be there. This immediately gives a self-governed feeling of independence to the school. Many private schools are curiously much closer to the anarchist idea of what a school should look like than state-run schools. Recently, a former Eton schoolmaster wrote an article praising the system and the attitudes at Eton in an anarchist magazine called
Total Liberty
:
If schooling is the regimented, hierarchical, disciplined, closing down of young people, then education is the free cooperative opening up of young people… education is the facilitation of environments where people can develop their own interests, can learn to be autonomous individuals, and have the space and opportunity to interact in groups characterized by flat, open forms of organization. In schools like Eton, there exists an active culture, driven by the young people, which can be seen to match this paradigm…
He argues that this way the élite are given the education to be free while the rest of us are tied down to target-driven government ideologies. He goes on to talk about the huge number of societies run by the boys, for example, the Orwell Society:
These young men were absolutely dedicated to the anti-war campaign, and organized an endless stream of events to support the anti-war movement. They attended all the
London demonstrations, they handed out leaflets in the local towns, and they campaigned within the school. Interestingly, the government’s attitude to state-school pupils being involved in much of the anti-war activity was that any absences would be treated as ‘truancy’, and punished. The members of the Orwell Society spoke to the Head Master, and convinced him that their involvement was necessary and that it was right. His response was to accept these arguments.
Certainly I’ve noticed that boys who went to Eton have an enviable degree of self-assurance, whatever their chosen path through life. And that is good. The idle parent wants strong, resilient, bright-eyed, fearless children. We want confidence and courage. Remember also that Eton gave us George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, the two great prophets of the twentieth century.
The author of the piece also mentions the short hours at Eton: ‘Etonians were always horrified to learn that the school day for most pupils in the UK is from 8.45–3.30, without interruption. Etonians spend only half a day in the classroom each day.’ Which itself would tend to prove that paradox stated at the beginning of this chapter: less is more. At my own school, Westminster, the school terms were at least two weeks shorter than state-school terms, but the exam results were infinitely better. Also, we enjoyed ourselves. There was a huge degree of freedom, and I think it was a result of the attitudes of the teachers to the pupils and vice versa. That attitude can be summed up in the phrase mutual respect.
We also had the most fantastic teachers, such as Richard Jacobs, who taught us English. Sometimes he would spend the entire lesson talking about red wine, and he’d hold tastings in his flat. Other times he would take us to stare at the
Rothkos in the Tate Gallery for half an hour. Once he gave us a free lesson because he said he was going to find it ‘too painful’ to read over with us the scene in
Othello
where he throws money at Desdemona. That was one of the best lessons I ever had. He would also tell us about his nights out at Heaven, the gay nightclub. He never had any problem with discipline for the simple reason that he never tried to impose authority. One day he came in and said, bemoaning his lack of literary achievements: ‘I’m twenty-five today. Keats
died
at twenty-five!’ He also taught us about Roland Barthes and the post-structuralists, and introduced us to poets like Geoffrey Hill. He taught us about Piero della Francesca and the
Annunciation
. None of this stuff was anywhere near the syllabus, I might add. All these stories and more have remained firmly lodged in my mind. He brought pleasure and intensity to learning.
Yes, I know. I can hear programmed liberal voice whingeing that not everybody can afford private school. What I am trying to do is open your minds to other possibilities. And certainly not everybody at Westminster was exactly rich in my day: the parents were doctors, journalists, architects, actors, writers. They were working professionals rather than filthy-rich city types or aristocrats.
Think about your priorities. Eve Libertine of CRASS wanted to send her son Nemo to Summerhill. But she had no money. So she lived frugally – in a shared house – and ran a market stall at the weekends. With the profits of her stall, she was able to pay Nemo’s fees. People today spend money on cars, holidays, enormous televisions, usury charges and mobile phones but will not spend a single penny on their own children’s education. Most families could save £10,000 a year at a stroke by cutting out all such luxuries. Think about your
priorities. Most of those rich people that you see are not really rich. They are merely massively in debt. They have chosen to shoulder a debt in order to pay for things like school fees. What I’m saying is: don’t complain. Just live.
What really is astonishing is when the upper middle classes, people who in every other respect elevate themselves above others by their spending habits, suddenly come over all socialist when it comes to their own child’s education. They go out for meals twice a week in restaurants and take taxis, they take on big houses with big mortgages, but they witter on about the unfairness of private schools. This is the beauty of taking an anarchist position: it frees you to do what you want, private school, state school or some kind of home-based system.
Another answer is to make your local school more like Eton. Encourage your kids to start societies and to question the authorities at their school. Take them off a week early. Take Fridays off and go camping. We often take the kids off on a Friday or a Monday.
I would like to see a total destruction of the educational system as it stands, and for it to be replaced with a chaotic free for all, where individual teachers can advertise their services, where schools could consist of three kids or a thousand, where parents would get together and hire a tutor for their children.
Our local primary school is good because of the teachers, who do their job in spite of, not helped by, the state with its absurd panoply of tick boxes and attainment targets, which have nothing to do with the real purpose of education. State education means a poor education for everyone and it means an education that is centrally controlled and operated by the state. And as the group of people who operate the state is
constantly changing, so teachers have to put up with new approaches and new ideologies every couple of years. The problem here is not whether or not we agree with the ideology – certain elements we will, others not. The point is that ideologies themselves are by nature totalitarian.
One option that has not been well explored would be some kind of community school. A group of local families could get together and pay one or two teachers to teach their kids. This approach would be far cheaper than private school. I imagine four hours each morning of hard work, followed by outdoor activities. My ideal term would be just eleven weeks long. But the real advantage of community schools is that each would be different, each would be uniquely adapted to its own distinctive area and its own distinctive group of pupils and parents. One of my main objections to state schooling is the stifling uniformity that it places on diverse people. This crushing of individuality has led to an outbreak of schoolyard massacres in the US, like Columbine, for example. Let that be a lesson to us.
