The pervasive anxiety affecting primary school children referred to in yesterday’s community soundings report from Cambridge University, is proving to be thought-provoking, even contentious.
There are two main thrusts to the findings: children are anxious about the outside world and they are under pressure to perform in the classroom. The danger here is that education is motivated only by grades and results, rather than generating happiness and creating balanced, tolerant human beings.
I’m chaplain to two very different primary schools in central London. Whilst the parents of some pupils may be anxious, sometimes extremely so (and for a whole variety of reasons), I’m not sure that I detect a pervasive anxiety amongst the majority of children about the state of the world.
Or, at least, no more so than in my own day. I certainly remember suddenly, at 7 or 8, realising that war is terrible, and that your parents one day will actually die and that God must be amazingly powerful… These are common thoughts in the head of an eight-year-old.
Do they still have to get under their desks and “duck and cover” to protect themselves against the A-bomb like we had to do? I was always anxious about WWIII and grades. I thought you were supposed to be anxious in school.
[/blockquote]SATELLITE SKY
by Mark Heard.
Why do I lie awake at night and think back just as far as I can
To the sound of my father’s laugh outdoors
To the thought of Sputnik in free-flight?
Before I could fashion my poverty
Before I distrusted the night
I must’ve known something
I must’ve known something
Those were the times I live for tonight
Why, why, why, I say Why, Mama, Why?
Why can’t I sleep in peace tonight underneath the satellite sky?
It can’t be easy for my children
I’m hollow before my time
It looks like a desert here to me
Where is the promise of youth for my child?
Where are the faraway kingdoms of dreams?
We’ve been to the moon and there’s trouble at home
They vanished in the mist with Saint Nicholas
They lie scattered to the ghettos and the war zones
Why, Why, Why, I say Why, Mama, Why?
Why can’t I sleep in peace tonight underneath the satellite sky
I want to stand out in the middle of the street and listen to the stars
I want to hear their sweet voices
I want to feel a big bang rattle my bones
I want to laugh for my children
I want the spark to ignite
before they find out what it means to be born
into these times
Why, Why, Why, I say Why, Mama, Why?
Why can’t I sleep in peace tonight underneath the satellite sky? [/blockquote]
I agree that anxiety is an eons-old problem. However, children today live under constant threat of parental divorce (if their parents are not divorced already) to an extent never before realized in the history of the world. What anxiety is worse than that of fearing your own personal world is going to be or has been torn apart? Add to this the fast-paced nature of our technological society, and I don’t think we should be amazed that children are showing more neurosis.
Heklen is surely close to the ruth. Little children sense instability quickly and react to it in all sorts of uncontrollable ways. To be a happy child requires familial stability and an ordered familial universe, a universe of law and affection. But familial stability is precisely what we do not have, and you all know the reasons and their scope. But this instability invades the elementary school where little boys are now commonly treated as ill if they behave as little boys commonly do. Girls are actively encouraged to compete with boys in those areas where boys once dominated but the boys are actively discouraged from such behavior. How can a lttle boy find an identity in such a world? And I still wonder if little girls desire the competition assigned to them, or whether this assignment is simply the contemporary female teachers’ agenda looking for a exemplar? LM