Ian on Sunday

In Guyana education some time ago deteriorated to the point where parents had little confidence that the formal system would or could produce results. This created a condition in which parental paranoia flourished. They felt compelled to step into the breach and direct their children’s education themselves. Thus did dreaded “extra lessons” come to curse a generation of our children. From the age of eight or younger children were made to suffer a double dose of schooling. It was truly an abomination.

We will not know for a while – until we see how they perform as mature human beings – what impact this recipe for burn-out and alienation had on a whole generation of children but the damage may be deeper and longer lasting then we imagine. And, even if it is not, the fact that the childhood stage of so many lives was sacrificed is a sin so cardinal that it will hardly escape retribution at the gates of the Hereafter.

If this is so, the continued deficiencies in the education system – particularly the depressed remuneration and status of teachers – which led to the infamy of institutional “extra lessons” should not escape censure even for a single day. But blame must also be on the head of over-zealous parents in this matter. Loving parents have every right to be concerned enough to try to compensate for what is missing in their children’s schooling. But let them beware they do not over-balance into a tyranny which may seriously harm their children. The pressure of parental over-expectation is a scourge.

Even a moment’s reflection must lead to the realization that a child sent to extra lessons most days in addition to going to school every day, a child experiencing the burden of two sets of homework, a child caught between different methods of teaching the same subject, a child deprived of a regular daily quota of games and relaxation, a child whose holidays are taken over by yet more tuition, a child, God forbid, enduring such a regime for a lifetime between 8 and 17 – is likely to suffer considerably in one way or another. The danger of burnout by university level and beyond is all too evident. Stunting of the personality in the awful straightjacket of duplicated schooling is a real danger. At the very least, are parents willing to bear the responsibility of reducing their children’s lives to much less than the well-rounded, enjoyable, at least partly carefree experience their young lives should be?

Adults over-anxiously trying to live out their own dreams and ambitious in the lives of their children are a particular horror. Such people are not a new phenomenon, but in this driven materialistic age they seem to be more common than ever before. And any breakdown in the educational system gives them a perfect excuse to set their own, and not a child’s, agenda and to impose their own priorities. They take pride not so much in their children but in themselves through what they keep driving their children to become. They set tasks, goals, standards which are those of their own ambitious selves and not naturally those of a child. Such driven, over-anxious egos are a menace.

Children may take after their parents but not by any means are they their parents’ replicas. So what the parent wants for the child may be crucially opposed to what gifts are waiting to emerge in the unique personality of the child. What parents want desperately to happen may not be in the nature of the child to deliver. In that case imagine the awful potential for immediate, though for the time being unexpressed, disappointment and resentment and for future hang-ups and traumas.

Adults too easily forget what it is like to be a child. Or perhaps it is not a matter of forgetting. Perhaps it is that adults remember well enough but feel that childhood is simply an unimportant preliminary to the serious business of ‘real’ life and therefore consider that the quicker children settle into adult ways the better for all concerned. That is a terrible, heart-rending mistake too many parents seem to make. The great 19th century Russian thinker, and wonderful human being, Alexander Herzen, writing about his childhood said something which we adults too often forget in dealing with our children. “We think that the purpose of the child is to grow up because the child does grow up. But its purpose is to play, to enjoy itself, to be a child. If we merely look to the end of the process, the purpose of all life is death.”

To sacrifice the joys and discoveries and wondrous adventures of childhood to meeting the entirely different and, after all, entirely unpredictable demands of future adult life is a form of delusion which pollutes the essence of childhood and runs the grave risk of stunting the real and rounded potential of humanity as it gradually blossoms and blooms in a growing child.

At the cruel heart of extra lessons is teaching by rote, the forced feeding of exam information into children. We are reminded of Dickens’s magnificent novel Hard Times in which we are introduced at the very start to Mr Thomas Gradgrind, schoolmaster. His first words make clear exactly where he stands in the matter of teaching children: “Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!”

And having said these words. Mr Gradgrind steps back a bit and sweeps with his eyes “the inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim.”

The legacy of Mr Gradgrind presides disastrously over the education of our children. God knows – and so I hope does the Minister of Education – they deserve a better legacy than that.
The feelings, the fears, the delights, the forebodings, the dreams, the torments, the triumphs of a child are no less valid in their proper time than those of an adult. The child must be given enough room and time to work out a child’s destiny before he or she graduates to tackling the challenges and enduring the trials of another stage. Soon enough another time will come for them. Soon enough the shadow of the counting house will fall across their lives. Soon enough they will find themselves calculating the main chance and how to gain the upper hand. Until then, God save us and them, let children be children.