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towards Enlightened Living in a Technocratic World

by Richard House, Ph.D., Roehampton University, London On 12 September the Daily Telegraph published an open letter titled 'Modern life leads to more depression among children', signed by over 100 prominent public and professional figures. The letter (see http://ipnosis.postle.net/childhood.htm) expressed grave concerns about the loss of childhood in contemporary life - and the urgent need for an informed public debate about what we might do about it. An accompanying front-page lead story was headlined 'Junk culture "is poisoning our children"', and on the following day, the Telegraph launched an ongoing campaign titled 'Hold on to Childhood'.
The press story precipitated a reaction that resonated around the world's media channels for days afterwards. This extraordinary story shows just how effective the media can sometimes be in seeding what are crucial public debates; and it could serve as a model for how other progressive causes might get their holistic views out into a public sphere which is not always welcoming of the messages we have to bring.
In this article, one the letter's organisers, Dr Richard House of Roehampton University, London, describes the backdrop to the letter, and outlines some possible constructive responses to 'the state of childhood we're in'

'Switch off the technological wonders, forgo the convenient pushchair, concentrate for a year or so on the ancient virtues of attachment, interaction, communication. If every parent does that, all but the most unfortunate souls could learn to fly.'
Sue Palmer, author of Toxic Childhood

In the 1950s and 1960s, years before television became such a dominating fixture in most people's lives, every week-day there was a special 15-minute radio programme on the (then) British Home Service - a programme for children and parents (usually mothers) to listen to, together. 'Listen with Mother' clearly made a very deep impression on me - it was an important and much looked-forward-to, even magical part of my own early learning. Not least, this wonderful programme gave the 'parent-child couple' of the time a cultural treasure trove of rhymes and stories; yet as the march of 'progress' continued apace, the BBC inevitably dropped the programme in the 1970s because of its 'old-fashioned' nature.

It would be both naïvely nostalgic and even over-sentimental to advocate an uncritical return to this (no doubt idealised) past - and yet there are surely some crucial perennial wisdoms about the loving, unhurried early learning environment which 'Listen with Mother' typified which urgently need to be re-affirmed - not least because such wholesome values and practices have been largely relinquished and lost sight of in our hyper-modernised, breathlessly accelerating technological world.

I have worked as a Steiner early-years teacher for some years and my colleague Sue Palmer, with whom I conceived and initiated this open press letter, is an internationally recognised writer on literacy matters, an ex- primary headteacher, and an independent literacy specialist, whose recently published book Toxic Childhood soared on to the best-seller list literally overnight, once the media story had broken.

There are certainly legitimate concerns to be raised about whether a potentially anxiety-provoking term like 'toxic' constitutes the best or most effective way of bringing 'holistic life-style' thinking into the public sphere. Yet there can be little doubt that the shock-value of the term was, at the very least, a contributory factor to the way in which the mainstream media picked up and ran with this story for some weeks once it had broken. All my past experience has been that stories like this tend to fizzle out into nothing before they even begin, or else 'bomb' into obscurity almost immediately. For whatever reason, this one certainly didn't - and hasn't, as it continues to reverberate around the globe's media channels as I write (late September). In part this is certainly due to the timely beginning of the Children's Society's national inquiry into childhood, which was launched by Arch Bishop Rowan Williams just a week after the letter-driven press story first broke. And there are already advanced plans to take the dialogue about childhood forward here at Roehampton University (where I also work). Yet the overwhelming feeling is that - and as a colleague said to me recently - this was a 'powder-keg' of a story just waiting to go off the world over; and our open letter was merely the 'triggering factor' for that to happen.

Echoing a theme that will be familiar to your readers, then, our open letter maintains that

modern technological and consumerist lifestyles are severely compromising children's healthy development and ability to learn. In the letter, we argue that 'the escalating incidence of childhood depression and children's behavioural and developmental conditions… is largely due to a lack of understanding, on the part of both politicians and the general public, of the realities and subtleties of child development…. [Children] need time. In a fast-moving hyper-competitive culture, today's children are expected to cope with an ever-earlier start to formal schoolwork and an overly academic test-driven primary curriculum. They are pushed by market forces to act and dress like mini-adults and exposed via the electronic media to material which would have been considered unsuitable for children even in the very recent past.' We conclude that, as a matter of urgency,

· 'a public debate be initiated on child-rearing in the 21st century
· this issue should be central to public policy-making in coming decades.'

In short, then, we believe that the 'toxic' ingredients of modern life are making children harder to teach than 30 years ago, with a damaging mix of technology, family breakdown and poor diet that, taken together, account in large part for children's worsening behaviour and the explosion in the numbers of special needs pupils. Yet we also recognize that raising anxieties without offering solutions can be alarmist, and can even encourage a helplessness that is 'infantising' rather than empowering. And just as the origins of 'toxic childhood' are diverse and manifold, so must its antidotes move on a series of fronts - and magazines like your own have been, and continue to be, excellent at showing parents and educationalists some of the ways in which such antidotes can be mobilised.

Just a few hours after the launch of our 'open letter', a chilling event occurred in Montreal, Canada that made global news headlines, with a young man indiscriminately shooting a large number of students in a Montreal college. The young man was quoted as saying: 'Work sucks, school sucks, life sucks. What else can I say? Life is a video game, you've got to die sometime.' This appalling event seemed presciently symptomatic of precisely the concerns we have raised in our open letter - namely, that a potentially catastrophic loss of meaning and spiritual malaise seems to be engulfing our increasingly hyper-modernised lives - and, virus-like, is infecting our children's experience and consciousness in insidious and quite unpredictable ways. In short, what we might call a hyper-modernity is laying waste the sensitivities and subtleties of children's development in modern western culture.

Not that we should for one moment underestimate the extraordinary power of children, and their capacity and initiative to find ways of surviving and retaining what is most soul-nourishing for them, even in the most unconducive of circumstances. For one of the dangers of a campaign like ours is that it can promote the unwarranted assumption that children are hapless victims of the environments in which they find themselves. On the contrary, I strongly believe in children's innate capacity ultimately to adjust effectively to their life circumstances - and in the 'strength of the spirit' to withstand and healthily transform whatever technological 'slings and arrows' are thrown at them. But we as adults do at least need to give them a helping hand with all this - and for me this is what this campaign for childhood is all about.

In the education realm, where I have a strong professional involvement as a Steiner early-years teacher, editor and writer, I have for some years been drawing attention to what I see as the parlous state of mainstream British education, with its one-sidedly 'utilitarian' and aridly 'managerialist' approach to modern education, and its erroneous pedagogical assumption that 'earlier is necessarily better'.. I could refer at length to issues like the effect on young children of prematurely intellectual learning shorn of authentic creative play; the effects on teachers and children alike of a competitive schooling system based on a narrow utilitarian set of performance targets, not least the way in which such a system betrays the love of learning that should be every child's birthright…; but this is not the place to rehearse those arguments, which have been eloquently made by others at length elsewhere. But it is in the realm of play and its degradation that I see perhaps the biggest challenge - for the loss of play is arguably the most telling symptom of a hyper-active materialistic culture whose arid utilitarianism and loss of spiritual meaning are in danger of doing - at best - a kind of cultural violence to play, and, at worst, leaving it irretrievably laying in ruins.

In the Daily Telegraph of 15 September, for example, the journalist who broke the original 'junk culture' story wrote another piece called 'The space for playing is disappearing fast'.. In it, we hear that our parents enjoyed nine times more space in which to play when they were eight, compared with the average child of the same age today (drawn from Professor Hugh Cunningham's new book, The Invention of Childhood). Echoing the arguments of both our Open Letter and of Rowan Williams, Professor Cunningham said, '[I]n earlier times, [children] were not treated like little adults as the popular image of history would have us think.' He welcomed the recent attention to the issue of modern childhood, particularly in relation to the increased use of television and computers by children. He further said, 'The internet and screen entertainment as a whole are, I think, the biggest change in children's lives since the invention of the printing press and of course, with that technology, it took centuries for its effect to filter down to children. I think it is the acceleration of the pace of change that has made us all question the way in which we bring up our children.'

Play, then - free, unintruded-upon, creative and imaginative play - is the very life-blood and birth right of children; and in the photographs that accompany this story, of children at Norwich Steiner School (Britain's newest established Steiner school), I hope you will see in our children's expressions just how, in Steiner education (and in common with other approaches like Montessori and human-scale education), we strive to allow both the joy and the gravity of children's play to have free reign, enabling and empowering them to find their place in the world in as natural and unforced a way as possible. Perhaps now, as this media story on childhood storms the globe, the Department for Education sponsored Woods Report, which came out in 2004 and concluded that the mainstream has much to learn from the Steiner educational approach, can be resuscitated from its slumbers in the Westminster vaults, with some serious government engagement at last with Steiner principles and pedagogical practices.

There have of course been many challenges in the press to our arguments about childhood - far more to do with envy-driven 'sour grapes' and competitive spoiling tactics, I venture, than with anything substantive in our case against 'the excesses of modernity'. And with the overwhelmingly positive public response to the issues we have raised, this just could be a defining cultural moment in 'Late Modernity' - and I invite readers to engage with this 'moment' in whatever ways you are able, and to add to the extraordinary momentum that this story has already generated.

Our 100+ signatories to the open letter represent just some of the many voices now being raised across the globe against the worst excesses of modern technocratic culture, and the harm it is doing to the next generation. A systematic and successful challenge to these pernicious forces is urgently needed at every level, from the personal to the political - as there can never be a more prescient issue than the health and well-being of the next and subsequent generations. Above all, individuals and families need to become informed and empowered against the worst excesses of a 'technocratic modernity' that seems to be crucially beyond political control; and our unexpected media coup has certainly helped to advance global public awareness of these issues, and the urgent need for us all to challenge the worst excesses of the 'junk culture' that threatens to engulf our children's precious childhoods.

For updates and news on the debate as it unfolds, please see the News Item "Toxic childhood - Junk Culture" maintained by Richard House on Error! Reference source not found. - a University of Roehampton web site.

Reference:

STEINER EDUCATION WORKSHOP IN LONDON
With his fellow letter signatory and partner, Sylvie Hétu, Richard is co-leading a DAY WORKSHOP on STEINER EDUCATION at Rudolf Steiner House, London on

Sunday 19th November 2006, 10.30 a.m. - 5 p.m., on the theme, 'The Future of Childhood: Journeying towards Steiner Education'. This workshop will address the many challenges faced in modern education, and will then explore the insights and pedagogical indications of educationalist Rudolf Steiner. Further details and bookings: Tel. 020 7723 4400; or email: r.house@roehampton.ac.uk

Dr Richard House is an early-years teacher at Norwich Steiner School, and Senior Lecturer in the Research Centre for Therapeutic Education at Roehampton University, London. Richard is also Series Editor of the acclaimed Hawthorn Press 'Early Years' series, and co-founder of Ur Publications and Programmes Inc., Montreal. You can contact him at: r.house@roehampton.ac.uk

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