The politics of childhood

Apparently UK education minister Michael Gove thinks children should have much longer school days and much shorter holidays to bring us in line with Hong Kong. He’s also a fan of rote learning and filling children’s heads with ‘facts’ – names and dates from history and the such. Childhood can be a loaded political issue. I note how much this Gove policy resembles the attitude of early Maoist China to children. That stemmed from a deliberate intention to break family units and make everyone more engaged with the state. So, what’s Gove’s agenda, you have to wonder?

What is childhood for? Obviously children need to grow up into functional adults. They need life skills too. I would argue that developing the ability to learn, reason, analyse, research, create, innovate and the such is the best education a child can have. The world changes all the time. The young person who can flex, learn and adapt is the one who can do best for themselves and their communities. Knowing historical dates and spurious statistics won’t do you any good in the real world.

The Victorians romanticised childhood, and did away with labour for children, taking them out of the workplace and putting them into schools. But, what is education for? Is it simply to keep children out of the way while parents work? Is school there to train the employees of the future, or should learning be more about developing rounded, functional people who are capable of thinking? I don’t think the latter precludes going on to be economically successful. I’d say there’s a case that it makes for a better, smarter, more flexible country having people educated that way. It doesn’t give you cogs for your machine, or people trained to serve and obey. I have to ask, what is the Tory agenda here? I think it’s all about serving the minority at the expense of the majority.

As a Pagan, I feel strongly about creatures being able to live freely in their natural habitats. I include humans in this. Humans are not meant to be battery farmed any more than chickens or pigs are. We too need fresh air, freedom to move, time to rest. Adults and children alike should not be pushed towards ever longer work hours just to serve the corporate machine. It is a morally wrong approach. Humanity does not exist to serve GDP.

As a parent, I want to spend time with my child. I want to talk with him, play with him, share life with him. I did not become a parent with a view to handing over my child to the state and hardly ever seeing him. I suspect I’m not alone in this. Back at the last election, the Tories talked about championing family life. Well, if you want family life, you have to have time for it, and longer school hours, longer work hours doesn’t achieve that. Tired people falling into bed do not have a family life. This is not a move towards a better work life balance.

Stressed, overworked, overtired humans who lack for social and emotional contact are more likely to become sick, depressed and dysfunctional. School is tiring for young humans whose bodies are growing and changing all the time. They need periods of rest, they need unstructured time to learn and grow properly. If we go the Gove route, we will not beget success. Instead we’ll be saving for a long term crisis in mental health and social cohesion.

Hard work should only exist where it furthers human causes. We are not here to make other people wealthy. We should not sacrifice our lives to the insane, dysfunctional and wrongheaded dictats of a ruling ‘elite’ that seems to have no grip on reality whatsoever. It looks like children are the next targets or their insane and toxic policies. We have to fight.

Paganism in schools

Every time moves are made to teach younger people about paganism, we get scaremongering, panic laden reactions from people who show the most depressing levels of ignorance and bigotry. I doubt anyone who needs to read this will get anywhere near it, but perhaps someone will find some useful ammo here.

Religion can, and should be taught as an academic subject. This does not mean teaching students how to be pagans, any more than my RS lessons bleep years ago taught me how to be a Hindu, or a Muslim. Religious studies should cover ethical issues from a range of perspectives and include, in my opinion, what atheist means, and agnosticism. In terms of figures, there are a lot of pagans in the UK – we were the 6^th biggest faith at the 2001 census. Teaching about paganism would not involve any deep study of our mysteries – a broad overview of the main paths, a quick whip round the festivals, some words about polytheism and animism perhaps. Plenty of room for playing compare and contrast with other world religions too.

One of the complaints that the idea raises, is that we should, as a ‘Christian’ country only be teaching people Christian values. This makes about as much logical sense as saying we should, as an English country, only teach the English language, the geography of England, the history, literature and politics of England. Perhaps it would be a logical extension to suggest that we should not teach students what communism, fascism, tyranny, feudalism and monarchy are all about either. After all, they live in a democracy, why would they need to know? School is not a political tool for turning out obedient little clones who cannot think for themselves. Education should be there to enable young people to learn about all aspects of the world so that they can grow up able to think for themselves, and able to make good choices. Religion, is not only part of the world, but a major cause of war, genocide, conflict and hatred. I’d like to see a syllabus which pays plenty of attention to the history of religious hatred, and the violence it has inspired. Let’s teach children about the persecution of heretics, that the abuse of the Jews was not unique to Hitler, and that people have been using religion in the most disgusting ways throughout human history.

Another standard complaint is that not teaching just ‘Christian values’ is either about wishy washy liberalism, bowing to multiculturalism, or not upholding proper ethical values. Tolerance is a value. Inclusivity is a value. Respect is a value. Wasn’t it Jesus who said ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’? I don’t remember any caveats about checking their faith position first. When you start exploring religions, you find that the same core values turn up in all of them – variations on a theme of care and respect. Usually with more individual rules about how to honour the deity/deities. When you start looking at the history of religions, what emerges is a sense that the power hungry will happily use them to control and manipulate others, to justify war, and commit atrocities. The more mutual understanding there is between non-violent people of faith, the better a chance we have of not being collectively manipulated into aggression that is all about serving the egos and bank accounts of leaders. Now, why would anyone not want us to do that? Hmm.

When people say ‘Christian values’ do they mean all of Christianity? Are they proposing to teach children not only Protestant values, but also the subtly different values of Catholics, Methodists, Quakers, Unitarians, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Evangelicals, Seventh Day Adventists, Baptists… and what about the more extreme Christian cults? The sort that encourage mass suicide and practice brainwashing? Are we talking all of those variations on a theme of ‘Christian values’? You can bet we aren’t. We’re talking the Christianity approved of by the speaker, who probably has no better grasp of the diversity of their own faith, than they do anyone else’s. This is not really a debate about religion at all, or even about education, it’s about who has the right to tell us what to think. The answer should be ‘no one.’

Not being stupid in public is a really good reason for education. What could be more embarrassing than watching a journalist, politician or other public figure spouting their uninformed prejudices? Making judgements based on prejudice, imagination and the idiotic pronouncements of other uninformed bigots, is a reliable route to looking dumb. It’ also a guarantor of dreadful, unworkable policies.  Decent level of school education about religion will at least prevent our politicians and journalists of the future from publically shaming all of us with their atrocious levels of ignorance.

Philosophy without history

Generally speaking, if you dive into philosophy as a subject, what you get is a history lesson about who thought what, when. Compare and contrast different ways of understanding the world. I’ve stuck my nose in a few such books over the years and mostly they depress me. In much the same way that literature courses teach you about the history of fiction, philosophy tends to throw you at the thinking of others.

Now, compare this with maths. Can you imagine sitting in a maths class and being told all about who came up with what equations, when, who disagreed with them, who got in there with some totally unworkable theories about calculating the circumference of a circle and so forth? Of course not. When you study maths, you learn little or nothing about the history of maths, and everything about how to do it right now. The sciences all tend this way, which is a shame because a little more attention to the history of science as a subject would make clearer how flawed, subjective and politically motivated it can be.

Going through school, I found that art and music as subjects struck a decent balance between doing the thing and learning about grand masters who had previously done it a lot better than you could ever hope to do. So why is it that we teach some subjects with a view to being able to do them, and others with the intention of making sure people know all about the other people who did them?

I can say from experience that a degree in English literature gives you very few of the tools you need to write a novel. About the most useful one I picked up, was how to do research.

Philosophy, as a subject, is all about asking questions. Why are we here? What is life for? How do we live well? As well as a whole host of others. These are questions philosophers keep coming back to because there is no way of establishing a definite right answer. Philosophy is all about the things we cannot define, pin down or be certain about, and as a consequence takes us into areas of doubt that have huge significance for how we understand ourselves and how we live our lives.

What would happen if we started teaching philosophy to school children? Not in terms of Descartes thought this and Plato said that… but in terms of flagging up those big questions and inviting people to think about the answers. Throw in the wise words from history, by all means, but make people think for themselves! I would love to see philosophy taught as a practical subject, a ‘how to think and question’ topic, as much hands on as any pottery class. What I’m most interested in is not historical philosophy, but how each of us crafts the individual philosophy that guides us in life. So many people seem to do that unconsciously, not knowing there even could be an alternative.

Your homework for today, with all due reference to Douglas Adams, what is the ultimate question about life, the universe, and everything?