Time children learned a life lesson at school

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/01/time-children-learned-life-lesson-at-school

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The campaign Let Our Kids Be Kids has called on parents to boycott the forthcoming Sats tests, saying that pupils are over-tested and overworked, “in a school system that places more importance on test results and league tables than children”. They suggest that parents keep Year 2 children off primary school on Tuesday and make their own “educational fun”. Significant numbers of parents are sick of children being stressed, while some teachers are tired of “factory-farming” children. A supportive petition on the 38 Degrees website garnered almost 31,000 signatures by the end of last week.

In some ways, I sympathise with this campaign. No one wants young children to be overly stressed by exams or stigmatised by test results. Nor should schools and teachers feel pressured to narrow curriculums to deal with them. Something has gone very wrong if schools are forced to obsess over Sats performance over all other considerations.

However, boycotting tests, bunking off for “educational fun”, “letting kids be kids” – there comes a point when this stops being a meaningful mature protest and starts looking like unworkable uber-worthy hippie nonsense.

What does Let Our Kids Be Kids even mean in real terms? Here in the privileged west, kids are always kids – try to stop them! And part of being a kid is that you go to school and sometimes you prepare for it and take tests. This isn’t some inhumane modern calamity, it’s how the educational system has always worked, one way or another. And while it’s not perfect (what is?), there is also plenty that’s right about it.

For instance, tests can serve as a useful guide for how a pupil is getting on. If you feel that even this is an unreasonable “judgment” on your child, then that’s your right – and could you please give me directions to the wonderful, utopian parallel reality where the real world does not demand, compete and judge? Yes, sometimes these are very young children, but what’s more shocking to them – regular testing or the big, nasty shock at the end, when they find out the hard way that the big bad world doesn’t give a stuff about how “fun and free” their schooling was? It wants to see qualifications.

Of course school should be a holistic, caring, supportive, enriching environment, but, even at primary level, it’s also about education, not some abstract haven of potato-printing, tambourine-banging loveliness. The irony is that this protest is supposed to be in support of teachers and schools – who do people think are going to be the first in line for a public battering if standards slip?

Please be clear, I have enormous respect for teachers and schools and the difficult job they do. However, in my view, some kind of testing of even young children should not be abandoned. If this situation is a pressure cooker, the pressure should be released at government level, but not at the school level. The system could be modified, with the government kept out of it until the later primary stages at Year 6, with the earlier results reserved for the school and parents’ sole use – in order to monitor pupil progress and prepare children for a world that doesn’t care if they’re not “feeling” spelling tests.

In the meantime, if a child of any age is stressed by an exam, then surely it’s the job of the parent to reassure them and basically be the adult. A good start would be not saying: “Darling, you’re right to be stressed, let’s run off to the seaside, and I’ll recite Shakespeare to the waves, and then I’m afraid you won’t be allowed an ice cream – we’d have to rush home because I’d be dying to tell everybody how dynamic, cultured and inspiring I am!” Not only are our teachers the best in the world, British parents are also better than this.

Nothing academic about death row

It is rumoured that the Indonesian government is preparing for another round of prisoner executions. The country put the judicial killings on hold last year after an international outcry following large-scale executions, including the shooting at dawn of eight drug traffickers, two of whom were Australians. Now two Britons, Lindsay Sandiford and Gareth Cashmore, are among the rumoured 165 foreigners on death row, many for drug offences, with Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo, or Jokowi, recently telling Germany’s Angela Merkel that capital punishment was a justified approach to Indonesia’s “drug emergency”.

I understand that British people can’t presume that they’re above the law in other countries. And some people here might feel scant sympathy for drug smugglers who get caught and face the death penalty. Perhaps some of those people would support such a penalty in Britain and have no problem with the Indonesian government using their own.

However, saying that this is solely Indonesian business doesn’t really work when there are lives at stake. Sandiford and Cashmore committed serious crimes and deserve to be punished, but I’d hope that people would still find repugnant the idea of them, or anyone else, being executed. Sometimes it feels as though this idea of people “deserving” such a fate is almost indicative of a repressed desire to bring back the death penalty in Britain, but it must be remembered that this is not academic – these are real people with families and lives.

David Cameron did bring up Sandiford’s case during an official visit to Jakarta last year, but to no avail. It seems inconceivable that the situation would be left there, in such a perilous and uncertain climate. Britain still has the right to a robust ethical and, if necessary, diplomatic response.

How best to bring our library pilferers to book?

Bless the woman in Auckland, New Zealand, who plucked up the courage to return a book to her local library… 68 years late.

The book (Myths and Legends of Maoriland by AW Reed) must have been engrossing, and I, for one, am impressed by the woman’s honesty, delayed though it was.

It could have meant a NZ$26,000 (£11,500) fine, but they let her off because she’d taken the book out as a child. Well done, Auckland.

How many books are languishing in British homes because people are too afraid to return them?

I’m vaguely aware of occasional book amnesties, where you can return tomes without fear of costly reprisals, but I’m not sure that’s enough for the lazier, more distracted book-thieving Brit.

They’re left to suffer in hells of their own making, living perfectly normal lives except when they have a guilty start, spotting a pilfered Julian Barnes or Maeve Binchy on the shelves.

This situation requires a National Book Amnesty Day, with lots of publicity. Libraries have enough to cope with, without people making the decision that, if they stick it out for 68 years, they might be let off the hook.