The New Cornerstone of Society

I listened with interest to this morning’s news coverage about pilot parenting programmes and especially the contribution being made by Parent Gym, which is a spin off from the business focused, Mind Gym. There is something undoubtedly paradoxical about a Conservative led government peddling nanny statehood so openly but I guess if you believe society is broken, trying to fix it is only logical.

I’ve come into contact with Mind Gym before and am sure that Parent Gym is, as the company claims, based on serious psychological research. Yet my overwhelming feeling was simple sadness at the necessity for such a programme and a sense that the entire project is misdirected. Whatever happened to the commonplace notion that the family was the cornerstone of society?

Running parenting classes instead of family classes is a bit like building a skyscraper on a cornerstone made of polystyrene.

Here is what George Eliot had to say about this.

There are so many of us, and our lots are so different, what wonder that Nature's mood is often in harsh contrast with the great crisis of our lives? We are children of a large family, and must learn, as such children do, not to expect that our hurts will be made much of--to be content with little nurture and caressing, and help each other the more. (Adam Bede.)

More worryingly. Why is it that one glance across an opposition front bench that really believes it is driven by Eliot’s desire to “help,” tells me nonetheless I’d have to walk every one of those faces through this quotation, word by word, in the same pedestrian way I would a borderline A level candidate.

That Cassandra feeling...again!

Not for the first time writing these pages, I had that deeply frustrating, Cassandra moment this morning listening to news about Ofsted’s new approach to special educational needs. I suppose I should be pleased at the thought that five years ago I was highlighting the problem. (See the final section on this page.) I was flattered recently when someone who ought to know, told me I was a “pathfinder”...I just wish others wouldn’t take so long to find the path!

This is the one comment from this morning’s BBC news article that stands out for me. The proportion of children identified as having special needs, outside of those with statements, has risen sharply - up by 80% since the mid-1990s.

That little phrase, outside of those with statements is hiding almost as much as…a witness at the Levenson enquiry.

Gove and the Great Dickensian Lie

At last, an education minister with an education. No wonder the cages are rattling. I’m not the least surprised to hear Michael Gove rounding on the schools and teachers who insist on promulgating the great Dickensian lie, that the inevitable outcome of poverty is failure or crime. The creator of Little Dorrit and Oliver Twist’s guardian angel, Nancy, would have been baffled at the way literary critics and social scientists have twisted his fiction so completely to create this myth. But it is one of the most pervasive and damaging in the UK education system. The last thing any child from a poor or deprived background needs is a teacher making excuses for them when they should be inspiring and challenging them.

Like Andrew Adonis before him, Mr Gove has the strongest of personal reasons to understand the value of a good education. Something his detractors would do well to reflect on before they criticise his determination to plough up the playing field they have worked so tirelessly and damagingly to level.

Ofsted and Mobile Phones

I can hear the sound of keyboards being hammered in shock and outrage, nationwide, at the news that Ofsted is going to ban mobile phones in schools. Maybe Sir Michael has taken a leaf out of the techno-zealots’ e-reader and is thinking, Be afraid…be very afraid.

So let me make a measured and sensible attempt to avoiding stepping into the techno-hype and the 21^st century schools, digital literacy mythologizing and summarise the serious schooling issues.

No child needs to use a mobile phone in school to contact anyone. The only possible exception is the case of an emergency of some kind and then in any school, a responsible adult is only yards away. At best, one could argue it’s useful for a child to have use of their mobile after school, when the timings of activities and events can, and do, frequently change and on school trips.

The reality is that huge numbers of teenagers (irrespective of class) are genuinely addicted to their phones and that this causes continual disruption to lessons. Similarly, this addiction may be having psychological consequences we don’t yet understand. Anyone reading this, who hasn’t recently experienced a teenager disengaging rudely and narcissistically from a conversation, or social event, in order to merely check up on their phone doesn’t live on the same planet as me.

For many teenagers, the phone is anything but a pleasant, positive tool. Besides being the most effective bullying tool ever invented, especially for teenage girls, it’s internet capability now makes it a stable door to pornography for boys.

Only a few months ago the same people who today will be reaching for the sal-volatile at Sir Michael’s news, would have been equally outraged at a research report detailing looked after children’s technology use which painted the most desperately sad picture of teenagers enslaved to their Blackberries, terrified of being the last to log off at 4am in the morning, because they didn’t want to be the one everyone else abused online.

Experience-taking for beginners.

For all those countless teachers of literature the world over, who question the value of their work, and who worry that encouraging children to curl up quietly in a corner somewhere with a…Kindle, and engage with fictional characters for an hour or two might not have a purpose…worry not. Psychology researchers at Ohio State University have come to your rescue and finally worked it out.

According to a paper to be published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, it seems that what happens to some people while reading a fictional story is that they find themselves feeling the emotions, thoughts, beliefs and internal responses of some of the characters as if they were their own -- a phenomenon the researchers felt the urge to call "experience-taking." OMG! And there was I thinking they did it just to pass exams.

If there was an international award for utterly and deplorably inane research, this naïve, childish effort would have my nomination tomorrow!  Only the dullest of minds could ever even have conceived of such a project. What did they think people do when they read? Why in God’s name would anyone battle their way through War and Peace or Sons and Lovers if it wasn’t for the astonishingly wonderful reality that for those precious hours, we live, think and feel in ways outside of our own lives and experiences so deeply, that when we finish the book… it is with something akin to grief. 

But I guess if the most sophisticated, artistic relationships you’ve ever had have been with The Simpsons…what should one expect?