|
I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I
was born. - Henry David Thoreau
In a magazine piece I recently read about a Kenyan school that holds
its classes in a shady grove outdoors, the headmaster (who had
helped plant the trees as a child) recalled an African saying: "When
you plant a tree, never plant only one. Plant three - one for shade,
one for fruit, and one for beauty." On a continent where heat and
drought make every tree valuable, that's wise advice. It's an
intriguing educational insight too, especially in a time like ours,
when vast numbers of children are endangered by a one-sided approach
that sees them solely in terms of their ability to be fruitful -
that is, to "achieve" and "succeed."
The pressure to excel is transforming childhood as never before.
Naturally, parents have always wanted their children to "do well,"
both academically and socially. No one wants their child to be the
slowest in the class, the last to be picked for a game on the field.
But what is it about the culture we live in that has made that
natural worry into such an obsessive fear, and what is it doing to
our children? What is achievement, anyway? And what is success,
other than some vague, lofty ideal?
My mother used to say that education begins in the cradle, and not
one of today's gurus would disagree. But the differences in their
approach are instructive. Whereas women of her generation sang their
babies to sleep just as their mothers had done - because a baby
loves the sound of its mother's voice - today's tend to cite studies
on the positive effects of Mozart on the development of the infant
brain. Fifty years ago, women nursed their babies and taught their
toddlers finger games as a matter of course; today, most do neither,
despite endless chatter about the importance of bonding and nurture.
As an author I became aware, after completing my first book, of
something I had never noticed previously: the importance of white
space. White space is the room between the lines of type, the
margins, extra space at the beginning of a chapter, a page left
blank at the beginning of the book. It allows the type to "breathe"
and gives the eye a place to rest. White space is not something
you're conscious of when you read a book. It is what isn't there.
But if it were gone, you'd notice it right away. It is the key to a
well-designed page.
Just as books require white space, so do children. That is, they
need room to grow. Unfortunately, too many children aren't getting
that. In the same way that we tend to overwhelm them with material
things, we tend to over-stimulate and over-steer. We deny them the
time, space, and flexibility they need to develop at their own pace.
The ancient Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu reminds us that "it is not
the clay the potter throws that gives the jar its usefulness, but
the space within." Children need stimulation and guidance, but they
also need time to themselves. Hours spent alone in daydreams or in
quiet, unstructured activities instill a sense of security and
independence and provide a necessary lull in the rhythm of the day.
Children thrive on silence too. Without external distractions they
will often become so consumed by what they are doing that they will
be totally oblivious of everything around them. Unfortunately,
silence is such a luxury that they are rarely allowed the
opportunity for such undisturbed concentration. Whatever the setting
- mall, elevator, restaurant, or car - the low murmur (or blare) of
piped-in music or background noise is incessantly there.
As for the importance of giving children unstructured time,
nineteenth-century writer Johann Christoph Blumhardt warns against
the temptation to constantly intrude, and emphasizes the value of
spontaneous activity: "That is their first school; they are teaching
themselves, as it were. I often have the feeling that angels are
around children...and that whoever is so clumsy as to disturb a
child provokes his angel." Certainly there is nothing wrong with
giving a child chores and requiring him to carry them out on a daily
basis. But the way many parents overbook their children, emotionally
and timewise, robs them of the scope they need to develop on their
own.
It is a beautiful thing to see a child thoroughly absorbed in his
play; in fact, it is hard to think of a purer, more spiritual
activity. Play brings joy, contentment, and detachment from the
troubles of the day. And especially nowadays, in our hectic, time -
and money - driven culture, the importance of those things for every
child cannot be emphasized enough. Educator Friedrich Froebel, the
father of the modern kindergarten, goes so far as to say that "a
child who plays thoroughly and perseveringly, until physical fatigue
forbids, will be a determined adult, capable of self-sacrifice both
for his own welfare and that of others." In an age when fears of
playground injuries and the misguided idea that play interferes with
"real" learning has led some forty percent of the school districts
across the country to do away with recess, one can only hope that
the wisdom of these words will not go entirely unheeded.
Allowing children the room to grow at their own pace does not mean
ignoring them. Clearly, the bedrock of their security from day to
day is the knowledge that we who care for them are always at hand,
ready to help them, to talk with them, to give them what they need,
and simply to "be there" for them. But how often are we swayed
instead by our own ideas of what they want or need?
After the massacre at Columbine High School in April 1999,
administrators rushed to provide psychologists and counselors to
help traumatized students process their grief. But the teenagers
didn't want to see experts. Though many privately sought
professional help later, on their own terms, they first flocked to
local churches and youth centers, where they dealt with their grief
by talking to their peers.
The tendency to intervene, especially when a child is in trouble, is
a natural one, but even then (perhaps especially then) it is vital
to be sensitive to the child's needs. That's what Nicole, a mother
of four, learned when their quiet English village was rocked by a
savage murder:
"In June 1996 a local woman and her daughter were beaten to death
near the edge of our property, while walking home from the local
elementary school. A second daughter was beaten too, though she
survived. My daughters, who were six and eight, had often played
with the girls, who were the same age. Days and nights of tears
followed - in fact, my daughters still wept at intervals months
after the incident.
As a mother, I was naturally worried about the traumatic effects of
the crime, and the whereabouts of the murderer (who is still at
large). I was tempted to question my children as to how they were
doing and what they were thinking about the whole thing. But I tried
to refrain. I knew that to help them, I needed to hear what they had
to say - what their own spontaneous reactions were - and not impose
or project my own motherly ideas on them first...
Amazingly, they never spoke once in fear of our neighbors' murderer,
as every adult in the area was doing. Instead, they asked, "Why did
that man hate them so much? They didn't do anything to him..."
In the weeks after the murder, well-meaning friends repeatedly urged
us to "move on." "Don't let your children get hung up on this
gruesome event," they warned us. "Help them get over it as quickly
as possible." But I couldn't. At that point my children needed to
grieve, and I could not bring myself to subject them to adult ideas
about healing."
In 'Ordinary Resurrections', his new book about children in the
South Bronx, Jonathan Kozol reflects on another angle of the same
issue: the way adults tend to guide children through even the most
casual conversations. He says it, too, is a result of our tendency
to hurry - and our reluctance to let them sort life out in their own
way, at their own pace.
"Children pause a lot when reaching for ideas. They get distracted.
They meander - blissfully, it seems - through acres of magnificent
irrelevance. We think we know the way they're heading in a
conversation, and we get impatient, like a traveler who wants to
"cut the travel time." We want to get there quicker. It does speed
up the pace of things, but it can also change the destination."
Of all the ways in which we push children to meet adult
expectations, the trend toward high-pressure academics may be the
most widespread, and the worst. I say "worst" because of the age at
which children begin to be subjected to it, and the fact that for
some of them school quickly becomes a place they dread, and a source
of misery they cannot escape for months at a time.
As someone whose scholastic career included plenty of mediocre
grades, I am familiar enough with the dread that accompanies
bringing home a report card. Thankfully, my parents cared far more
about whether I got along with my peers than whether I achieved an A
or a B. Even when I failed a class, they refrained from scolding me,
and eased my anxieties by assuring me that there was a lot more in
my head than I or my teachers realized; it just hadn't come to the
surface yet. According to Melinda, a veteran preschool teacher in
California, such encouragement is only a dream for many children,
especially in homes where academic failure is seen as unacceptable.
"We have parents asking whether their two-and-a-half-year-olds are
learning to read yet, and grumbling if they can't. The pressure some
parents put on children is just incredible. I see children literally
shaking and crying because they don't want to go in to testing. I've
even seen parents dragging their child into the room...
I had a little boy one year, Miles, whose parents were pushing him
to get him ready to enter a very expensive private school. I bumped
into his father at the beginning of the next school year and he
said, "You know, Miles has been so stressed out that we're going to
get him into counseling." It was true that Miles was stressed out,
but I was sure it was because of the rigorous testing they'd put him
through during the summer...He had started crying the day of the
testing, and he'd cried every day since then."
In some instances, the frenzy to compete begins even before a child
is ready to start school, as this recent newspaper column about the
trials of one New York City couple shows:
"A couple of weeks ago, she and her husband got word that their
five-year-old son had been skunked at all six private schools they
applied to for next fall's kindergarten class. "Don't worry," the
head of their nursery school had assured them. "You will certainly
get into at least one of your top choices."
Famous last words. For whatever reasons, all six schools passed on
their bright son with the winning smile and splendid test scores.
That tattoo of rejection hurt, she admits. Nor did it help to learn
that other families landed in the same boat.
Now comes the hard part...Do they move, reluctantly, out of town? Do
they keep their son in nursery school for now and try the
private-school rat race again next year? Do they sigh in resignation
and send him to the local public school?
The dilemma facing this couple is a measure of how frantic life has
become...in a world of strivers. "People are twisting themselves
inside out," the woman said. "You slap yourself around and say,
'It's only kindergarten.' We're not talking about cancer. But it
changes your life...Besides," she added, "the parental community can
be vicious... Your child's admissions profile becomes a measure of
your success. That's the yuckiest part of it. These are babies we're
talking about."
In the end, she said, she and her husband will probably keep their
son in his present nursery and then go through the private-school
drill once more, next year. "That's what tears me up," she said. "He
has to be paraded like a show horse again."
It's true the examples above represent the extreme end of the
spectrum. Still, they cannot be dismissed, because they shed light
on a disturbing trend that affects education at all levels. More and
more, it seems that we have lost sight of the "child" in childhood
and turned it into a joyless training camp for the adult world.
Jonathan Kozol writes:
"From around the age of six or seven, and up to eleven or maybe
twelve, the gentleness and honesty - the sweetness - of children is
so apparent. Our society has missed an opportunity to seize that
moment. It's almost as though we view those qualities as useless, as
though we don't value children for their gentleness, but only as
future economic units, as future workers, as future assets or
deficits.
When you read political debates on how much we should spend on
children, you'll notice that the argument usually has nothing to do
with whether children deserve a gentle and happy childhood, but
whether investment in their education will pay off economically
twenty years later. I always think, why not invest in them simply
because they're children and deserve to have some fun before they
die? Why not invest in their gentle hearts as well as in their
competitive skills?"
The answer, of course, is that we have abandoned the idea of
education as growth, and decided to see it only as a ticket to the
job market. Guided by charts and graphs, and cheered on by experts,
we have turned our backs on the value of uniqueness and creativity
and fallen instead for the lie that the only way to measure a
child's progress is a standardized test. Not only are we neglecting
to plant trees for shade and beauty - we are planting for only one
variety of fruit. Or, as Malvina Reynolds puts it in her song
"Little Boxes":
And they all play on the golf course,
and drink their martinis dry,
And they all have pretty children,
and the children go to school,
And the children go to summer camp,
and then to the university,
Where they put them all in boxes,
and they come out all the same.
Granted, children ought to be stretched and intellectually
stimulated. They should be taught to articulate their feelings, to
write, to read, to develop and defend an idea; to think critically.
But what is the purpose of the best academic education if it fails
to prepare children for the "real" world beyond the confines of the
classroom? What about those life-skills that can never be taught by
putting a child on a bus and sending him to school?
As for the things that schools are supposed to teach, even they are
not always passed on. Writer John Taylor Gatto points out that
though American children sit through an average of 12,000 hours of
compulsory academic instruction, there are plenty who leave the
system as 17- and 18-year-olds who still can't read a book or
calculate a batting average - let alone repair a faucet or change a
flat.
It is not just schools that are pressuring children into growing up
too fast. The practice of rushing children into adulthood is so
widely accepted and so thoroughly ingrained that people often go
blank when you voice your concern about the matter. Take, for
example, the number of parents who tie up their children's
after-school hours in extracurricular activities. On the surface,
the explosion of opportunities for "growth" in things like music and
sports might look like the perfect answer to the boredom faced by
millions of latchkey children. But the reality is not always so
pretty. Tom, an acquaintance with friends in suburban Baltimore,
says:
"It's one thing when a child picks up a hobby, a sport, or an
instrument on her own steam, but quite another when the driving
force is a parent with an overly competitive edge. In one family I
know - I'll call them the Joneses - Sarah showed a genuine talent
for the piano in the second grade, but by the time she was in the
sixth, she wouldn't touch a keyboard for any amount of coaxing. She
was tired of the attention, sick of lessons (her father was always
reminding her what a privilege they were), and virtually traumatized
by the strain of having been pushed through one competition after
another. Yes, Sarah played Bach beautifully at seven. But at ten she
was interested in other things."
In the case above, and countless others, the pattern is all too
familiar: ambitious expectations are followed by the pressure to
meet them, and what was once a perfectly happy part of a child's
life becomes a burden that is impossible to bear.
Einstein once wrote that if you want brilliant children, read them
fairy tales. "And if you want them to be more brilliant, read them
more fairy tales." Obviously, such a quip is not the sort of answer
an expert might give to the discouraging trends described above. But
I still believe it is a thought worth reflecting on. It is the
inventive sort of wisdom without which we will never pull ourselves
out of the ruts we are currently stuck in.
As for the parental desire to have brilliant children in the first
place, it is surely just another sign of our distorted vision - a
reflection of the way we tend to view children as little adults, no
matter how loudly we may protest such a "Victorian" idea. And the
best antidote to that is to drop all of our adult expectations
entirely, to get down on the same level as our children, to look
them in the eye. Only then will we begin to hear what they are
saying, to find out what they are thinking, and to see the goals we
have set for them from their point of view. Only then will we be
able to lay aside our ambitions and recognize, as poet Jane Tyson
Clement puts it:
child, though I am meant to teach you much,
what is it, in the end,
except that together we are
meant to be children
of the same Father,
and I must unlearn all the adult structure
and the cumbering years
and you must teach me
to look at the earth and the heaven
with your fresh wonder.
"Unlearning" our adult mindsets is never easy, especially at the end
of a long day, when children can sometimes seem more of a bother
than a gift. When there are children around, things just don't
always go as planned. Furniture gets scratched, flower beds
trampled, new clothes torn or muddied, toys lost and broken.
Children want to handle things and play with them. They want to have
fun, to run in the aisles; they need space to be rambunctious and
silly and noisy. After all, they are not china dolls or little
adults, but unpredictable rascals with sticky fingers and runny
noses who sometimes cry at night. Yet if we truly love them, we will
welcome them as they are.
************************************
Johann Christoph Arnold is a family counselor, author, and pastor
with the Bruderhof Communities (http://www.bruderhof.com).
Read more of his articles and books at
http://ChristophArnold.com.
Copyright 2003 Bruderhof Communities.
*************************************
. |
