Living Education Extract

Ignoring the life-curriculum

Ignoring the 'life curriculum' in favour of the work project has also been shown to place children under undue stress.

In a survey commissioned by Phil Willis (Lib Dem education spokesman) in 2002, 147 representative schools, teachers and parents reported that 55% of children aged 7 were showing stress. Their stress manifested in various ways, including the following - excessive anxiety; loss of appetite; insomnia; bed-wetting; forgetfulness and depression.

Teachers were reported to be concerned that children were no longer allowed to be children; the case of a girl who started bed-wetting again unexpectedly was used as an example. She had been taken to the doctor to get to the root of her problem, and it transpired she was preparing for tests and had been told that her teacher's job depended on the results. How sad for her. The burden of responsibility was simply too much to bear. We are putting weighty sacks upon our children’s backs again. In the industrial past they deformed the body; now they weigh down the soul.

A piece of older but, I believe, still valid research from the United States directs our gaze to a very different paradigm for childhood:
'After finding that about one child in 30 is brilliant and happy... a great deal of research [was done] to determine what demographic or psychological characteristics distinguished those children. But the children came from a wide variety of backgrounds - rich and poor, small families and large, broken and stable homes, poorly and well-educated parents - and from all parts of the USA.

Finally, through extensive questioning, [White] determined that the bright and happy children had only one thing in common: All of them spent noticeable amounts of time staring peacefully and wordlessly into space.