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By Root 1138 0

a citizen and act with others, does it always have to be like this—and why should there always be this phenomenon, people weary and angry with what is provided by society, why did we take that for granted—that it was so always, always had been so, must be so. Why is what happens, what is provided, always so dull and flat and negligible compared with what any ordinary person in the street can imagine as possible and desirable—let alone these young professional parents, all rather highly educated, in the hall. Twenty years ago I had been part of such a group of young parents, on behalf of my own children. Recently again, on behalf of friends’ children. But what we had dreamed of, and then discussed, and then planned, and then tried to put into action, had not taken the shape we had originally dreamed of. Not anywhere near it … There had been results, but nothing that even approached what we knew was possible. Why? What went wrong? What always went wrong? I was sitting very still between my host and hostess, sizzling with exasperation and rebellion and impatience, emotions all quite unsuitable for a retired head-mistress, when you said what struck me so deeply. I remember exactly what you said, because I was in a state of concentrated attention on what you are saying, in spite of my physical restlessness.

“Everybody in this room believes, without knowing it, or perhaps without having formulated it, or at least behaves as if he believes—that children up to the age of seven or eight are of a different species from ourselves. We see children as creatures about to be trapped and corrupted by what trapped and corrupted ourselves. We speak of them, treat them, as if it were possible to make happen events which are almost unimaginable. We speak of them as beings who could grow up into a race altogether superior to ourselves. And this feeling is in everyone. It is why the field of education is always so bitter and embattled, and why no one ever, in any country, is satisfied with what is offered to children—except in dictatorships where the future of children is scaled to the needs of the State. Yet we have become used to this and don’t realise how extraordinary it is, and what the fact of it is saying. For it should be enough to teach the young of a species to survive, to approximate the skills of its elders, to acquire current technical skills. Yet every generation seems to give out a bellow of anguish at some point, as if it had been betrayed, sold out, sold short. Every generation dreams of something better for its young, every generation greets the emergence of its young into adulthood with a profound and secret disappointment, even if these children are in every way paragons from society’s point of view. This is due to the strong but unacknowledged belief that something better than oneself is possible. It is as if the young creatures of humanity grow towards adulthood in a kind of obstacle race, beset by hazards, with the adults trying futilely but gallantly to provide something better. Once adulthood is reached the newly grown ones join with the older ones, their parents, as they turn about and look back into their own infancy. They watch the infancy of their own children with the same futile anguish. Can we prevent these children from being trapped, and spoiled as we have been, what can we do … ? Who has not at least once looked into a young child’s eyes and seen the criticism there, a hostility, the sullen knowledgeable look of a prisoner? This happens very young, before the young child is forced to become like the parents, before its own individuality is covered over by what the parents say he is. Their ‘this is right, that is wrong, see things my way.’ This meeting tonight, of young parents joining together to try and provide something better, a better ‘education,’ was nothing more nor less than this phenomenon that repeats itself in every generation. Every person sitting there on hard chairs in front of you felt as if his or her potential had been left unfulfilled. Something had gone wrong. Some painful and wrong process