Playing with Puppets

Growing up, August was always my favourite month. I used to love the long summer days of freedom; used to love having endless sun-drenched school-less days to play; love walking with my family through the fields for evening picnics in the stubble field with dad when he had finished harvesting for the day.

I know I had a blessed childhood – I grew up in the countryside, surrounded by meadows and wildlife and the beauty of nature. I got to see the magnificence of what the world had to offer and grew up immersed in the cultures and traditions of the country.  I learned country dancing at primary school,

participated in harvest festivals each year,

lit Christingle oranges in Church (dangling naked flames mischievously close to hair-sprayed bouffants of elderly ladies sitting in the pew in-front)

and danced merrily around the maypole to celebrate the coming of balmy days after winter’s claws had released their cold grip.

I was fortunate enough to get a taste of the culture and tradition of this fair Isle, namely through my primary schooling and through my family. I was taken for nature walks, was taught how agriculture helped the country to sustain itself, was taught how to grow seeds and milk cows; taught why England has so many traditions at certain times of the year. And I was taught these things through practise, though actual hands on experience and understanding; not just stuck inside stuffy classrooms reading books. Living this charmed childhood, August was always a treat: no school days or work, just sunshine and playtime; time to enjoy what life had to offer through living it. However, the older I got, the more August lost its golden hue and became a time of fretting: fretting because I hadn’t done my holiday homework; fretting because of the dread of a new term and all of the butterflies that emerge with September’s steely call; fretting because it was the time to get GCSE results or A-level results; fretting (when I became a teacher) that the stress of a new term was nearly upon me once more. The older I got, the more the pleasure of summer was marred by the thoughts inflicted by education.

The tradition of our long summer holiday was a Victorian motion dictated by agriculture; with the endless summer weeks needed as a break from school so that children could help out at home with the harvest.

Times are a-changing and that history is fading fast, yet I wonder whether our education is reflecting our rapid changes. We are no longer an agricultural economy, and agriculture is fading fast from the core of what makes the UK strong. My own immediate family, all farmers, are having to diversify more and more to make a living; making ice-cream from the milk of their cows (as UK milk prices are now so low it is hard for farmers to make a living, with “cheapness” rather than “local” being preferred by shoppers); small fields of crops no longer making enough money to sustain income when battling against mega-farming, so innovative ideas such as my sister’s “Maize Maze” (which I have had the amusement of getting lost in several times over the past week) coming to fruition.

Agriculture is no longer the dominant culture of our rapidly industrialising country, and we no longer teach the basics of nature and agricultural self-sufficiency, yet we retain the long summer days needed for work in the fields. School holidays are also dictated by religion: we have a break in December to celebrate Christmas; a break in the spring to celebrate Easter. Yet Christianity is no longer the glue that binds the culture of the country. Ask any group of people nowadays how many of them go to church or practise a religion and the numbers are dwindling daily. Why is this? We no longer teach religion as part of our cultural identity because we are so concerned about diversification: we need to ensure that our children are aware of all religions as we develop out into the world. This is certainly an enlightening education and an important aspect of understanding diversity and culture. However, we cannot them bemoan the loss of our own country’s culture and identity, if we are choosing not to practise or preach our country’s traditions and establish it as the core of our identity.

Time and time again, I read (or hear) moans about how the youth of today are lazy, are unwilling to go for long walks outside to get fresh air, are lacking in culture, are void of religion and morals, are simply apathetic about life. I have to wonder why no-one seems to want to see that it is not a child’s fault that they are being bred into a culture of ‘no culture and identity’. No longer are children taught the history of our culture and the beauty of the natural world: knowledge of our history and traditions is dwindling fast. How many of us can name the Saints’ days, dance a Morris dance or sing the second verse of the National Anthem? How many of us could name the bushes growing in the fields, the flowers at the side of the road; know which roots are medicinal or which seasons bring which fruits?

What are we actually teaching our children in school about ourselves and the world in which we are all living? What does it actually mean to be British nowadays? If I am honest, more and more it means a lost identity. The flag of St George, once a strong and noble symbol of a powerful country, is now associated with a very different side of English living; especially when seen overseas. Whenever I travel, I love seeing the richness of other cultures: the traditions, faiths, customs, music, foods, and community celebrations. I love it more because I feel I have none of my own. When you ask about Peruvian music, or Nepalese food, or Indian faiths, or Tanzanian customs, there are long and traditional answers.

Yet, if someone asks what the English customs are, what English music is, what English food is, the answers are a little more hard to come by. British is perhaps easier, because Scottish, Irish and, to an extent, Welsh customs are still fairly strong. But England is more and more becoming a mono-culture of non-culture – and in my opinion, education is to blame. We our educating ourselves out of the knowledge of who we are and where we’ve come from. And so we bemoan this: we bemoan our loss of culture, of religion, of identity, and we readily blame others for the apathy of our children, yet we don’t teach any of it and, more and more, we don’t practise what we preach.

I hear parents moan about non-communicative children who never want to go outside and play, yet will readily buy them computer games and mobile phones – leisure activities that require solo-indoor sitting with zero verbal communication required. I hear complaints that children don’t want to help out in the kitchen or the garden, but no-one is teaching them the pleasures and methodology of cooking or exploring the natural world. I was shocked to read a study recently about primary school children that revealed how some of them had no idea what a potato was, had never seen a cow and didn’t know that apples grew on trees. We can laugh, be shocked and despair at this, but it is us that have created this ignorance of what we are and where our world comes from.

Many times I hear and read about folk lamenting at the loss of skill in our society – people don’t know how to wire a plug, cook a stew, build a table, fix a leak. But we are not teaching anyone how to do these things, so where is this knowledge supposed to come from? How can we possibly moan about the number of people from overseas coming into the country to happily work in the countless skilled jobs that we are providing daily – jobs that our own citizens don’t want/ can’t take because they are “over-qualified” to do so? When I say over-qualified, the irony is that more and more children are leaving schools with degrees that have trained them for jobs that don’t exist, whilst fewer and fewer leave school with skills that our country desperately needs. There is surely a huge flaw in the way we are developing our future.

As our world develops at such a rapid rate, I wonder whether our media is in fact giving us more of an education than our schooling. Looking at the headlines of papers in the newsagents this morning, it is getting harder and harder at a glance to discern which the tabloids are and which ones the broadsheets. When celebrity gossip is given a higher order of importance than genocide and famine, is it any wonder that our children are getting a somewhat warped view of the world and how to live in it? Advertising tells us how to live, what to buy, what to be – another pressure on parents to provide their children with what the world tells them they must have, so that they feel part of the community around them. Yet our communities are getting smaller and smaller the more we engage with the technology we are developing. I wonder how many students have spent the long summer holidays playing in fields, or in the streets or gardens with their friends, breathing in lung-fulls of fresh air, compared to how many have spent the long summer days sitting in front of screens pressing buttons.

Reading the aftermath of another cohort’s GCSE and A-level results, the papers are once again telling us that exams are failing our children, schools are not teaching anything of value and children are failing the system. My heart always breaks for those students who are the result of our fine education: the ones having to read the fact that they are a product of a warped system – how on earth does hearing this make them feel? They’ve played diligently along for however many years in the Education Puppet Show, only to be criticised for bad acting in the final performance. But what chance of doing it a better way are they ever given?  There are huge problems with our education system (seen by Michael Gove’s almost daily “bright ideas” to change something here, try something new there). We’ve got so many people qualified to do not a lot that we’re running out of people that can actually do anything useful, yet it seems that the best solution is to point the finger and lay the blame, rather than do something about the core of the problem – what we are actually teaching our children about the world that they are living in.

Having been asked to give a lecture on my recent experiences and thoughts on education to students and parents at a school in Ascot, I’m struggling during my planning to restrain and moderate my thoughts on education (hence one of the reasons I’m writing a book about them). It is a difficult thing to present an honest picture of how we are educating our children across the globe when you’re presenting that picture to the children themselves. To tell our children that we are failing them in preparing them for the world seems too cruel: no-one should ever have to hear that. Yet the papers and Mr Gove happily tell them that every day. The news headline this morning in the paper I am reading is that poor education and growing levels of poverty in the UK are causing more children to fail than they were fifty years ago when a similar study, worryingly entitled Born to Fail, was carried out. The paper quotes that we are ‘sleepwalking into a world where inequality becomes so entrenched that our children grow up in a state of social apartheid. Their statistics:

• Children from the poorest areas are nine times less likely than those living in affluent areas to have access to green space, places to play and to live in environments with better air quality. It draws comparisons with other developed nations and claims that a lack of ambition causes children in the UK to suffer unnecessarily. As a result, patterns of disadvantage could become permanent features of our society.
• If the UK emulated the example of those European countries deemed to be the best places to grow up in, the deaths of 172 children through unintentional injuries alone could be prevented every year, 320,000 more 15- to 19-year-olds would be in education or training, and nearly 45,000 fewer 11-year-olds would be obese.

So, in our rapidly developing world, we cut away the green-spaces and remove the core of agriculture to make way for industry (an industry that is developing technology at such a rapid rate, we are losing a grip on where it is taking us); we develop our education system to stop educating about skills required for living and instead teach information needed for jobs that don’t exist (with oodles of debt from university days given as a bonus leaving present when our children finally step off the stage we build for them) and we send our happy, innocent children off on their way to fail, bemoaning the fact when they do. Brilliant.

I loved seeing how development can blend the old and the new when I went out for a day with my aunt and uncle to a National Trust property a few weeks ago. Take the history of Cliveden House and grounds, retain their natural beauty and tradition, but keep develop it to appeal to children by…

…adding a mega slide down the side of the stately home! Love it!

Obviously I’ve simplified many things here (can’t write it all in a blog post) and obviously I’ve touched on some things with too much brevity, but you get my ranty point (and the reason I want to become some sort of educational activist, the more I embroil myself in the floundering education systems across the world). And the reason I am adopting the rather cheeky statue of a baboon found in the grounds of Clivedon (originally adoring a tomb of an Egyptian temple) to be my symbolic chum this year: the God of Writing and Wisdom. Could do with a bit of providence in both of those areas I reckon.

So as I sit here on a rainy Bank Holiday Sunday, and puzzle (again) at us continuing to celebrate something that we no longer celebrate, I mourn the loss of those hazy long summer days of play. The banks have indeed stopped their trading for two days, but the history of this holiday was for Victorians to head to the seaside to play. Looking through the window at the number of shops currently trading  (eg. not on holiday) and the lack of children playing in the park (sadly I am not currently by the sea to peep), I don’t see much play going on today. Then again, you don’t want to get sand in your ipod and puppets don’t like playing in the rain.