There is a current and ongoing discussion in mainstream media around children’s education: reading ages, extended play, European differences, SATS, assessments, pressure, summer children.
Parents fighting for their children’s right to childhood cross checked with the government’s pressure to increase literacy, create constant childcare, push parents back to work.
In our little family, we are currently in the Steiner system for our children’s education. They play with wooden toys, hold strong daily rhythms, spend plenty of time outdoors until they are 6 or 7. Then they begin to learn their academics, slowly, carefully they are taught their letters entwined into magical stories, numbers have context, languages introduced subtly & playfully – learning is gentle, enjoyable, fun. It is not a perfect system but it is working for us.
My daughter (6) is loving her new foray into ‘big school’, she tells me with excitement all the new things she had discovered in her hours there. She cannot wait to read. And I am so glad she is waiting…
I have noticed many subtleties around this principle, the debate is not just about literacy and intellectual potential, there are so many other layers. I notice the loud words on billboards, the confusing messages at bus stops and on shop windows and I’m really glad that she can’t read yet. I’m so pleased that she has another few minutes of innocence before she is assaulted with ideas and concepts too old for her years. And there are even smaller subltleties; how we still get our evening moments when I read to her, where we enjoy our stories unfolding together. She has always loved books and as soon as she can read she will, like I did, disappear into a world of books. She will sit for hours, absorbed, entranced and away from us, that is what I predict. I cannot fault her is she chooses to do this, it is one of my greatest pleasures, to escape into another realm, but I will miss her so much. We will; her brother, her father and I.
And as I think about this, I realise how the subtleties of life are so often missed in amongst the warring, the shouting, the brash and constant conflict out in the big wide world. The subtleties of so many issues, breastfeeding, birth, ISIS, religion, feminism, all of these big topics have a gazillion subtleties that if we stopped and observed them could entirely shift the energy of discussion. For me, it is the idea of looking for the beauty, looking for the understanding, rather than fighting for the principle or the dogma.
The core guts that can mean so much but yet become the quiet, unspoken, unobserved aspects of our issues – the emotional role breastfeeding plays in a child’s development; the empowering rite of passage of a vaginal birth; the deeper ideology of religion that transcends ego; the space for humanity to usurp the need for feminism. These are all subtleties that are lost in the black & white sound bites of discussion, not enough characters in our tweets, not enough vavoom for a headline. Subtlety has been forgotten.