Enabling a Creative and Fulfilling Childhood

When I look back on my childhood, I remember happy times on family holidays, playing in the garden or playing in the snow. The memories are selective and often avoid difficult periods when I experienced failure and times when I felt alone. This rather idyllic and selective view also ignores the back-drop of some of my childhood anxieties. I remember being frightened by war and violence, seeing the struggles over apartheid taking place in South Africa, the violence in Central and South America, the Vietnam war and closer to home the troubles in Northern Ireland. I also remember been terrified of nuclear obliteration.

When my own children were born I wanted to protect them and hoped they wouldn’t experience some of the difficulties I had had. I wanted them to grow up free from pressure and to become self-assured and confident adults. If I am brutally honest, I also wanted them to be successful. Looking at them now as adults, I also want them to be their own person. As children mature they need to ‘stand on their own two feet’, they need to make their own mistakes and they need to find their own solutions to their own problems. In this journey through life, I hope I can remain of some use to them and that they will, on occasions, listen to what I have to say.

This moment of self-reflection was sparked by the recently published report from Cambridge University, which talked in terms of a ‘deep anxiety’ about childhood1. This rather stark view led the Daily Mail2 to warn that children are ‘being robbed of their innocence by ‘guns, gangs and celebrities’. This report from Cambridge is part of an ongoing three-year study which is looking at ‘the condition and future of primary education in England’. It also appears to support the evidence that was published earlier in the year by Unicef which suggested that Britain is one of the worst performing industrial nations when it comes to the care of our children3.

What this and subsequent interim reports are in part trying to do is foster a debate about childhood, not in a narrow curriculum sense, but locating primary education in the wider societal context, taking account of issues as diverse as climate change and family breakdown. This is vital because it recognises childhood for what it is, a social construct defined by, and a reflection of, the society in which we live.

This debate will hopefully not only generate discussion about the pressures put on children within school, in particular the myopic obsession with targets and grades, but also about other wider societal issues. It is only by discussing, and talking about the issues of the day that children can understand, put issues in perspective and ultimately be part of the solution. It also recognises that we cannot separate children from the wider world and protect them from all risk, and if we are to help them cope with some of the issues they need to understand the problems.

As Galileo said, “All truths are easy to understand, once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.”4 By understanding, they also may feel they are not alone, and in turn help reduce some of their anxieties. In essence what we are looking at is transformative learning, linked, I would suggest, to a much more creative and fulfilling educational experience.


1 The Primary Review http://www.primaryreview.org.uk (accessed 14/10/2007)
2 CLARK L Children being robbed of their innocence by ‘guns, gangs and celebrities’ http://www.dailymail.co.uk (accessed 14/10/2007)
3https://thetcj.org
4 See: http://thinkexist.com/quotations/understanding/ (accessed 14/10/2007)

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