Once it was taboo. But parents are no longer dismissing corporal punishment out of hand (…)

At lunch recently, a father of four who works in publishing told me he occasionally gives his children ”a clip around the ear”. The threat of minor violence, he said, was the fastest way to get his brood into the people carrier if they were all to get out of the house on time. It wasn’t so much the fact that this otherwise modern thirtysomething father would slap his children that shocked me, but the fact that he spoke about it so openly. A decade ago, he might have been worried that I’d call social services - or at least recommend an anger management course.

In the 21st century, however, discipline is in. Thanks in part to the rise of television programmes about parenting, such as Supernanny and House of Tiny Tearaways, naughty steps, finishing what’s on your plate and strict bedtime routines are back in vogue. And yesterday the Sentencing Guidelines Council, which sets down rules for magistrates and judges, called for leniency in sentencing parents who are brought to court for smacking their children - a sea change in attitudes from just four years ago, when the right to a defence of ”reasonable chastisement” was removed under the Children Act.

As a mother of two, I know how testing small children can be. The closest I came to lashing out was when one of mine almost ran into a busy road. I stopped her just in time, but I was so lost for words, so horrified at what might have happened that a smack felt almost natural - the only language either of us might have understood.

Although I stopped myself before the message transmitted from brain to back of hand, because I feel slapping is a lazy form of discipline, I couldn’t promise I would never lash out. So when friends confess, as many have, that they have hit their children, I find it impossible to be too judgmental.

My generation grew up in a culture in which smacking children was commonplace. Talking to friends, it is clear that they all remember, in vivid detail, when they were smacked. My primary school in the 1970s offered the slipper - in front of the school - or the cane for the very naughty.

Now those days are back - for some families, at least. Smacking is no longer taboo. Yesterday, on mumsnet.com, the popular parenting website, whether or not to smack your child was the hottest of topics. “I don’t, because I don’t like it or find it a necessary way to discipline my children,” said one mother. “But others find it effective and don’t have a problem with it.”

Said another: “I have smacked my son twice and he is four. Both times it was for something quite serious. I have threatened a smack when I have been tired or ill, but not followed through.”

Another exhausted mother explained: “I smacked my seven-year-old disabled child when he was trying to gouge out his father’s eyes, quite deliberately… My husband was strapping him into the car and couldn’t defend himself. Violence with violence. Not great. But I did it.”

Justine Roberts, co-founder of the site, says women are becoming more open about their anger towards their children: “A few people are saying [smacking] is a strategy for managing their children and it’s the only effective one they’ve found. But most admit they’ve done it once or twice in anger but feel awful about it. There’s a huge amount of sympathy for parents who are being pushed to the limit.”

None of my friends needed any persuasion to off-load a little guilt about parental crimes. One, a 37-year-old marketing director, said. “It was three years ago when my daughter was two and I have never, ever forgotten it.

“We were with my husband’s family and we’d had a taxing day on the beach. My daughter was hot and sandy and exhausted and so was I. I was trying to change her nappy and she just would not stop wriggling. Suddenly I lashed out and whacked her on the leg. She was stunned and just froze. She stared at me and all I could see was that she had been humiliated and betrayed. I felt sick and then cuddled her and said sorry. I’m ashamed to admit that I said: ‘Please don’t tell Daddy’.”

Another, a 40-year-old novelist, told me: “One afternoon after school I held on to my 10-year-old and just shook him. I felt very stressed about work and my relationship, and he had broken an expensive toy. I felt terrible afterwards, apologised and promised to myself never to do it again. I think it’s really bad parenting to hit children.”

While some parents may be more relaxed about corporal punishment, Elizabeth Hartley Brewer, an expert in child development and parenting, believes that such attitudes must be resisted. “Children can’t defend themselves verbally or physically,” she says.

Those who have never lost their cool and hit out should not be feeling smug, however. There are, Hartley Brewer admits, worse forms of punishment for children. “Some of those horrible TV programmes have made people proud of disciplining their children, regardless of how they do it,” she says. “I’ve met people who don’t hit but think it’s perfectly OK to make their child wash their mouth out with soap or even eat their lunch naked as a punishment. As for the naughty step, that can be just as damaging as a smack if it is used to humiliate a child.”

Imperial Leather for supper hardly counts as “reasonable chastisement”. Perhaps if modern mothers knew more about such extreme parenting styles, we’d stop beating ourselves up about the occasional outburst.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk, United Kingdom
http://tinyurl.com/yslwgp

Smacking naughty children could help create schoolyard bullies and wife-beaters and should be outlawed, a former judge said.

“In my view, the only way we are likely to break this cycle is to stress from the earliest possible stage that violence is not a solution to anything.”

Mr Nicholson, who was caned by teachers and prefects at Scotch College in the early 1950s, called on state governments to follow New Zealand’s move last year to abolish the legal defence of “reasonable chastisement” for parents who hit children.

In Australia, this excuse has been used successfully by parents accused of whipping a child with implements including a cattle prod, stock whip, dog lead, belts and sticks, of forcing a child to eat cigars, and of tying up a child with a dog chain.

“I am concerned that we will have to wait for some particularly brutal attack upon a child to occur and be publicised before the current torpor of our politicians . . . can be overcome,” Mr Nicholson said in a recent article in the international journal Family Court Review.

Almost 70 per cent of parents, many of whom were hit as children, believe spanking is acceptable discipline.

But Mr Nicholson believes most would change their minds if they knew the probable effects.

NSW passed Australia’s only anti-smacking law in 2001, banning the application of non-trivial physical force.

But even this was a weak compromise sending the wrong message, he said.

A British think-tank last week called for a ban after releasing a study that concluded hitting children, however lightly, increased the chances of anti-social and criminal behaviour in later life.

“Banning parents from any form of physical punishment of children . . . would not only reduce criminality in the long term, but would also send out a message about the kind of society we want to be — one in which violence and physical abuse are not tolerated,” the report said.

Australian Childhood Foundation chief Joe Tucci echoed the call for law reform, but doubted the occasional smack would damage children.

“It’s persistent physical punishment, not the occasional smack, that increases aggressive behaviour among children,” he said.

“But you don’t have to hit kids to teach them a lesson, and it’s time the Government took this seriously.”

But Australian Family Association spokeswoman Angela Conway said a ban would only create anger and defensiveness among parents, undermining their confidence.

“To make discipline work, parents need to be the boss.

“What we need is parental education and policies that give tired and overstretched parents the time and resources to understand what constructive discipline looks like.

“Try screening positive parenting programs on television at a time when parents can sit and watch.”

Source: NEWS.com.au, Australia
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23249497-2,00.html

(…) Children with dyscalculia have trouble reading numbers and picturing them in their mind. For example, they might mistake a three for an eight because the numbers look similar. They also have trouble counting objects and organizing them by size.

People with dyscalculia might also have a poor sense of direction. They might have difficulty keeping score during games, and limited ability to plan moves during games like chess.

Children suspected of being dyscalculic should be examined by a professional trained to recognize this condition. Experts say the disorder never goes away. But Sheldon Horowitz at the National Center for Learning Disabilities says carefully designed practice can improve math skills.

For example, a teacher might use a number line to help a child understand the difference between larger and smaller numbers. The child could be asked to point to different numbers and to describe their relationship to other numbers on the line.

Or objects could be grouped to represent numbers. Something else that can help children understand number relationships is to have a math problem described in the form of a story.

Experts say students with dyscalculia need extra time to complete their work. Sheldon Horowitz also advises letting them work with a calculator in school. (…)

Source: Voice of America
http://www.voanews.com/specialenglish/2008-02-20-voa6.cfm

As more kids become telly addicts, studies show that being glued to the goggle box is a health hazard — and it’s affecting family life. (…)

Before you become a parent, you have lots of lofty ideas. You’ve read that too much TV is bad for children, and decide that when yours come along, you’ll lay down some rules. You will play with your kids; you will take them for walks. And you will never, ever, allow them to vegetate and watch continuous TV.

Pretty soon, though, you discover that parenting isn’t all child’s play. Babies are demanding, toddlers need your full attention, and there are days that you can’t get anything done. The ironing mounts, the dust settles, and it is just so tempting to turn on that box in the corner in order to get a few moments of peace.

The children grow. They start school, and come home exhausted. You let them ‘rest’ by watching TV; and before you know it, it’s rarely, if ever, off.

Then the pestering starts. “Everyone else,” you are told, has a TV in their room. Plus a computer, electronic games and a Wii. You feel mean. And if you work, and carry guilt about it, it makes you feel better to give in to those demands. And it certainly makes your life easier.

In the UK, four out of five children aged five to 16 years now has a TV in their room. They watch it before school, during mealtimes and, for many, it lulls them to sleep.

Research has consistantly shown that too much indiscriminate viewing is bad for children. And it’s worst of all for the younger ones. This makes the results of the recent National Childhood Poll carried out in Ireland by Barnardos seem just a bit scary. Three out of 10 five to nine-year-olds has a TV in their room; as do one in seven one to four-year-olds.

This is very worring for Imelda Graham, Barnardos co-ordinator for their external clinics.

“I’m not anti-TV, but I am anti-bad TV viewing,” Graham says. “And I don’t agree with children having a TV set in their rooms.

“Young children should be supervised. If a young child is watching alone and something scary comes on, it can be alarming for them. If it’s beyond their capability to understand, they really do need someone with them.

“Pre-school children should be watching much less than two hours of TV a day — and it is hard to control that if the TV is in their room.

“It’s not great for their health either. Bone density can be affected if they are not out being active. There’s a connection with obesity too; and it’s about more than being a couch potato. If you eat meals in front of the TV, you associate the TV with eating. And that’s not good.”

At seminars, people often ask Graham about the organisation’s position on televisions in a child’s bedroom.

“I feel that when they ask, they are getting permission to say ‘no’ to the children,” she says. “The children may be putting pressure on them, saying their friends have TV in their rooms, and they want one too. They want someone to say, ‘it is OK to say no to a child‘.”

Graham thinks that, used properly, TV is great for family interaction.

“If parents watch TV with their child it can build up a wonderful link,” she says. “And you can plan your viewing using Sky plus or video. If something interesting comes on you can say, ‘yes, we can do that.’ Or you can read up more about a subject. TV can be a great tool.”

Used badly, though, TV hampers learning. John Carr, General Secretary of INTO, the union representing primary schools, worries that TV watching affects literacy standards.

“It is worrying,” he says. “And many teachers will say a child has their own TV.

“If they are spending time watching TV rather than reading, they are not going to improve their literacy.

“The older generation would have spent time watching TV, but it was a communal activity. If you had to fight for it, and there were just two channels, you’d end up bored, and maybe go and read a book. Now kids have multi-channels in their rooms.

“Some children are coming to school tired. They are up late watching TV. The quality of sleep is affected, and with the addition of Xboxes, Wiis and computers, their brains are getting wired.” (…)

Source: Irish Independent, Ireland
http://tinyurl.com/ythsd3

Climbing trees and larking about on rope swings are the answer to the problem of “high-pressured and competitive 21st- century girlhood”, according to a new book.

The Daring Book for Girls by Andrea Buchanan and Miriam Peskowitz encourages young girls to forget make-up and rediscover the joys of playing tag and climbing trees.

The writers also developed the book out of concerns young girls are spellbound by the internet and computer games and not gaining the skills that would have defined their mothers’ childhoods.

Activities like climbing trees, building and then riding a scooter, karate and playing in a canoe are all encouraged by the book.

The work is the feminine version of Conn Iggulden’s The Dangerous Book for Boys. This encouraged boys to ditch the Nintendo and the XBox for playing conkers and go-cart racing and was a runaway success.

It reached number one in the UK non-fiction charts several times, selling more than 500,000 copies.

Buchanan and Peskowitz wanted their book, published by Harper Collins yesterday, to counteract what they called the “high-pressured and competitive 21st-century girlhood”.

This is where “girls are inducted into grown-up-hood sooner, becoming teenagers and adult women before their time”.

Mother-of-two Mrs Buchanan from Philadelphia said, “With the convenience of modern technology, lots of girls have simply forgotten how to go out and do things, make things and fix things, and we wanted to address that.”

North Wales child psychologist Judy Hutchings suggested the book addresses mounting concerns over obesity and youngsters spending much of their time in isolation on computer games.

Prof Hutchings said, “There is the whole issue of obesity and the fact our kids are not getting enough exercise.

“There are the health benefits of the exercise and then obviously these kind of activities involve interacting with other children and young people rather than being isolated in a bedroom on a computer game.”

Prof Hutchings of the University of Wales, Bangor, also believes the activities outlined in the book help divert young girls away from the early sexualisation promoted by the fashion industry.

Professor Hutchings, a 64-year- old grandmother added, “You can’t climb a tree or ride a bicycle in a pair of high heels and you don’t need your make-up for that.

“There’s a whole industry out there that produces things for girls that are modelled on adult body forms and make-up and fashion.”

Lucy Akhtar, development officer for parenting with Children in Wales, said part of the problem is that boys’ role models tend to be active sporty types, while this is almost never the case for girls.

Mrs Akhtar, a mother of two boys aged 13 and 11, said, “The school curriculum promotes very traditional sports, which may not be so attractive to girls – things like hockey and netball.”

Another factor preventing children spending more time outdoors is heightened parental sensitivities about the threats to their safety – particularly from sex offenders.

Prof Hutchings suggested research shows that the threat is actually no greater now than it was in the past. Parents are now far more cautious. (…)

Source: ic Wales, United Kingdom
http://tinyurl.com/2rk6jh

Anthony Seldon and Frank Furedi set out their arguments before the first of a series of live public debates on educational issues

YES

There is only one important question: what is the purpose of education? Is it to cram students with facts to maximise their test performances, so that whole institutions become exam factories, tensing and stretching every sinew to achieve five A*s-Cs at GCSE, and comparable results at A-level and beyond?

Or is there a wider vision? One that involves developing the whole student, so that we help them know who they are and what they want to do in life. On leaving full-time education, not only will they be able to wave certificates with pass marks written on them, they will also be fully prepared to embrace life in all its fullness.

Schooling at present is driven by three forces: the government, universities and employers.

The government wants to show, year on year, a quantifiable improvement in results that will show it is “doing a good job for education”. It has little incentive to concern itself with holistic and non-measurable aspects of learning.

Universities want to have the brightest possible pupils in their departments. Some take into account wider achievement. But, overwhelmingly, universities are concerned with GCSE and A-level results. This does not encourage schools or pupils to want to broaden out.

As for employers, I am not certain I understand what they want.

These three “top-down” drivers all have their place, but they are far too dominant. Children need to achieve results academically, not least to maximise their employment prospects. But this should be balanced with “bottom-up” factors: what makes up each child, and how can they make the most of their linguistic and logical, social and personal, spiritual and moral, creative and physical faculties. Every school should be developing these eight aptitudes. And the less privileged the children, the greater the role of the school. What isn’t developed when young may never be.

Why should we teach children how to live and how to be happy? Three reasons. First, if schools do not, children may never learn elsewhere. Second, depression, self-harming and anxiety among students are reaching epidemic proportions. So are drinking and drug-taking. Teaching schoolchildren how to live autonomous lives increases the chances of avoiding depression, mental illness and dependency when they are older.

And third, since the development of the positive psychology movement under Martin Seligman and developments in neuroscience, we now know how to teach wellbeing, and have empirical evidence of its effectiveness.

But what should one teach? The emphasis is on relationships. In ascending order of importance, the relationship with technology comes first. Young people can spend 30 hours a week in front of television and computers screens. In wellbeing classes, they learn how to use technology rather than to be used by it.

Then, they learn how to relate to the environment around them, including how to organise their rooms and possessions to give them a sense of order.

Relating to others is fundamental because nothing is a greater source of joy, nor of anguish, than human relationships. Students learn how to foster friendships that nourish them and avoid those which are destructive. Good relationships are crucial not only in families but also in the workplace.

Most important of all is the relationships with oneself. Students learn how to manage their minds, their emotions and their bodies. Bit by bit, they learn what makes them distinctive.

They learn to recognise and manage their negative and positive emotions. They learn the value of accepting themselves as they are and appreciating others. They are taught to calm themselves by deep breathing and other techniques, and discover that three 20-minute bouts of exercise a week have the same effect on raising the spirit and avoiding depression as a standard dose of Prozac.

In Britain today, we have exam instruction, rather than the education of the whole person. This is as unnecessary as it is unkind. We need educational environments that develop all the intelligences of every student.

Anthony Seldon
(Anthony Seldon is master of Wellington college)

NO

In recent years, officials and educational experts have sought to solve the problems afflicting learning environments through behaviour management. Increasingly, the focus is on students’ “wellbeing”, “emotional literacy” and “self-esteem”. Since this reorientation, the ambitions of therapeutic education have gone from strength to strength. Yet there is no evidence that it works.

The teaching of emotional literacy and happiness should be viewed as a displacement activity by professionals who find it difficult to confront the many challenges they face. At a time when many schools find it difficult to engage children’s interest in core subjects, and to inspire a culture of high aspiration, it is tempting to look for non-academic solutions. Many pedagogues find it easier to hold forth about making children feel good about themselves than to teach them how to read and count. This therapeutic orientation serves to distract pupils and teachers alike from getting on with the job of gaining a real education.

Educators have always hoped that their work would inspire their students, and make them feel good about learning and life. But, until recently, happiness was not seen as an end in itself or something to be promoted on its own terms.

Everyday experience suggests that not everything that has to be learned can be taught. How to feel well is not a suitable subject for teaching. Why? Because genuine happiness is experienced through the interaction of the individual with the challenges thrown up by life. One reason why well-meaning educators cannot teach their pupils to be happy is because feelings are contingent on encounters and relationships.

As Franklin D Roosevelt said, happiness “lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort“. Students can learn about their emotions, develop a sense of self and, occasionally, experience happiness through engaging with literature, art and other intellectual challenges, but not by being instructed on how to feel, or how to manage emotions.

Once it becomes part of the curriculum, happiness ceases to be an emotional response to our experiences. It is turned into a formula that can be taught by teachers, learned by students and managed by policy-makers. Being happy becomes associated with a skill whose acquisition can be measured and turned into a government target. This approach to emotional life will distract educators from dealing intelligently with the existential problems confronting their learners. Students need to understand the moral meaning of good before they can feel “good” about themselves.

Experience suggests that the very idea that we should all aspire to happiness is insipid. People experience a range of emotions - including sadness - when confronted with poignant tales from history, and tragic stories from literature. In our vapid emotional era, it is worth recalling that a good life is not always a happy one. People are often justified in being unhappy about their circumstances and surroundings. Discontent and ambition have driven humanity to confront and overcome the challenges they face. That is why characters such as the Controller in Brave New World want us to live on a diet of “feelies” and “scent organs”. That is also why we should be suspicious of experts who seek to colonise our internal life.

Frank Furedi
(Frank Furedi is a professor of sociology at the University of Kent)

(…)

Source: Guardian Unlimited, UK
http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,,2257747,00.html

Just what do housewives with nannies and cleaners do to fill time? Go shopping – and slowly mad, says our correspondent

(…) Married to a film producer and with slews of domestic help, she is part of a burgeoning class of women who neither work nor raise children. It is a group unrepresented in the “war of the mothers” (working v stay-at-home mothers), or any other war for that matter. They can’t beat their chest for the sacrifices made in the name of raising a family (because they haven’t), nor can they claim to have suffered for feminism (because they ditched the day job as soon as they got hitched). They simply fall into a big societal crack.

“Women who delegate everything enter a really nasty place, where they are not working and they are not with their kids,” says Harriet James, a writer and mother of three. “They fall into a kind of vegetative state where life is all about which shade of eau de nil to paint the walls, or what canapé to have for a dinner party. They’ve subcontracted everything else, so the day’s decision becomes where to go for lunch. I see all these rich women who drop their children off at nursery so everyone can see them, but it’s the nannies who do the pickup because the mothers are all out shopping.”

Thus the phenomenon of our time is not women with too much to do, but women with too little. They have degrees and CVs, but are now chained to Agas that they don’t even know how to use. These ladies meet their future husband at university or the office, but, at some point, decide to give up on their career, usually because they will, sooner or later, slow down to reproduce, while their husband continues working and gets the top job. So the women enter a world of designer domesticity. (…)

What fuels the madness is the fact that the less the Merc Mother does, the more endangered her relationships feel. These women believe they maintain a toned body and full diary to keep their husband interested, but ultimately, they become unfulfilled, lifeless and at risk of being removed (or replaced with a younger and cheaper model), without any practical impact on the running of the household. I know several men who dumped their idle wife, but kept the nanny and nothing much changed.

Men, it seems, are becoming less sympathetic with wives who appear to do nothing, or have nothing to talk about. Simply being an appendage is socially unacceptable. I hear more and more men apologising rather than boasting about their nonworking wives. One male friend even threatened to move back to Denmark so his wife would have to return to work. “Here, it’s okay to do nothing, but there, it’s just not,” he says.

My friends who stopped working to raise their children without the help of a nanny were the first to start their own companies, return to school or do charity work when they got older. They never lost their confidence or experienced any sort of meaning gap (if anything, mothering teaches you great life skills, such as patience). Maybe these women would find inner joy tomorrow if they gave the shops a miss and fired the nanny.

Source: Times Online, UK
http://tinyurl.com/yuyf2a

Preschool-aged children from low-income families showed notable improvement in cognitive ability and other brain function after their parents received an eight-week training course in communication and child-rearing techniques, a new report has found.

Scientists at the University of Oregon plan to do more work in this area but presented their preliminary findings yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a nonprofit group that publishes the journal Science.

They conducted the research as part of a larger ongoing study of brain development in high-risk youngsters who are part of a federal Head Start program.

In this part of their study, 28 children between the ages of 3 and 5, underwent brain scans and various standardized language and IQ tests before and after the research period. Then, during an eight-week period, parents of 14 of those children attended weekly small group meetings where they learned evidence-based strategies to improve communication with their children, promote children’s critical thinking skills and decrease family stress, according to the researchers. Parents of the remaining 14 children — the control group — received no training.

At the end of the eight weeks, researchers compared test results of the children in both groups. Testers didn’t know to which group each child belonged.

They found that children whose parents received the training showed larger increases in standardized measures of language, IQ, memory, and attention compared with children in the control group.

“We were actually fairly astonished at the magnitude of the changes,” said Helen Neville, an Oregon neuroscience professor who leads the school’s Brain Development Lab. The professor, who holds a doctoral degree in neuropsychology, has spent 30 years studying the brain and its ability to change, and her work has been supported primarily by the National Institutes of Health, according to Oregon University information.

Among the findings, the average IQ score of children whose parents received training improved by six IQ points, while the score of the control group children showed no statistically significant change, she said.

The former group of children also showed improvements in receptive language skills, which is basically the ability to understand and follow direction. Their average score in the beginning was 100 standardized points, but increased to 110 points after their parents received training, she said, while the average standardized score of control group children in this test area didn’t change.

The parent training program was developed by Oregon University doctoral student Jessica Fanning, who recently competed her dissertation.

The professor said her team tried to determine whether this type of parental training program affects a child’s cognitive development and brain development.

“It does,” she said, adding it’s important to note that the youngsters themselves didn’t receive any special tutoring or help during this time.

Parents who received the training also benefited, reporting lower stress levels than the control parents and displaying changes in interactions with their children — like allowing more opportunities for their child to talk and guide the interaction, the researchers found.

“Our findings are important because they suggest that kids who are at high risk for school failure can be helped through these interventions,” said Courtney Stevens, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Brain Development Lab who presented the preliminary findings. “Even with these small numbers of children, the parent training appears very promising.”

The researchers will do another study with another group of children to see whether they can repeat their findings. They also will track the children over the long term.

The goal, they said, is to eventually be able to show policy-makers the best ways to design educational programs.

Parental training is just one intervention being tested: Researchers are also testing the use of music and attention training with high-risk children. According to University of Oregon materials, this research is being funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, which is part of the Department of Education.

Source: Washington Times, DC
http://washingtontimes.com/article/20080216/NATION/484801576/1002

New government proposals call for five hours of high quality culture to be included in the school timetable. James Reed asks if it’s really worth it.

The elasticity of the school timetable is to be tested once again, this time by the Government’s declaration that every child should have access to five hours of culture every week.

It is only a matter of months since Gordon Brown, in one of his first acts as Prime Minister, declared his ambition to see every pupil take part in five hours of sport every week.

Cooking lessons are also back on the agenda after Jamie Oliver so successfully exposed the dubious diets of Britain’s young people and there have even been calls for children to receive advice on how to manage their finances because of the number of families now racking up huge debts.

With pupils spending so much time kicking balls, boiling eggs and watching Shakespeare during the school day there soon may not be much time to do anything else. The reaction of teachers, who have repeatedly been promised more freedom to exercise their judgment within the curriculum, was to shake their heads in disbelief.

The call for schools to embrace high culture is another example in the growing trend of schools being asked to take on responsibilities that were once considered the role of parents. While excursions and performances from travelling theatre groups have always been part of school life, it has generally been accepted that anything beyond that is down to families.

In some cases, as in those schools where pupils arrive with inadequate social skills, teachers do have to take on the role of surrogate parent just to get children to the point where they can learn in the same way as their classmates.

It is also generally agreed that to become a rounded adult, any child must enjoy a wide variety of experiences, including those sporting and cultural.

Announcing the plans yesterday, Schools Secretary Ed Balls, the MP for Normanton, said: “Many of us remember the first ever live music we heard or the first ever performance we saw. I want all young people to have the chance to experience and take part in creative activities to help them learn and develop.”

Few headteachers would disagree and already want to provide exactly that, where time and money allow. But the decision of Ministers to lay down specific guidelines as to how much time should be spent on cultural activities, rather than rely on teachers’ own judgment, suggests there is a fundamental problem that can only be solved by the Government using the school system to establish good habits at a young age.

That argument is easier to make in the case of sport and cooking. Levels of obesity among young people have reached the point where they not only pose a risk to the individual’s health but, in years to come, could also be a massive strain on the health service. The evidence of a similar growing crisis in cultural awareness among the younger is harder to identify.

True, teenagers are not queuing round the block to get into many art galleries, but they never did. Every generation has its own interests and, thanks to the internet, young people have access to more cultural influences than their parents ever did.

In that case, questions will be raised as to whether it is worth devoting more time to cultural activities when scores of pupils are still leaving school every year with substandard basic skills? Last year, fewer than half the country’s 16-year-olds managed five grade Cs at GCSE in subjects including English and maths. In Hull, the figure was less than a third. Many will believe pupils need to spend more time in the classroom rather than the drama studio.

And even if there is a crisis among the young when it comes to accessing the arts, is the Government dictating what culture is and how it should be enjoyed the way to generate new interest?

Certainly not, according to Mark Littlewood from the Progressive Vision think tank. “Just about the last way to get children interested in high-quality culture is to have two government Ministers promising them five hours a week of the stuff.

“Young people appreciate theatre and art when introduced to it through their families, friends and peer group. This wrong-headed proposal is more likely to alienate pupils than to enthuse them.” (…)

Sadly, although the Government’s proposals are no doubt made with the best of intentions, there is every chance they will trigger a renewed debate about what schools should be spending their time on, rather than heralding a new era of interest in high culture among the young.

Source: Yorkshire Post, UK
http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/features/A-cultural-revolution-in-the.3777266.jp

Ministers should support mothers who bring up their children at home instead of forcing women back into work, researchers have said.

Many mothers feel they have to choose between being a good parent and a good worker, the study by academics at London University’s Institute of Education found.

Fathers should be encouraged to play a bigger role in childcare and it should be easier for women to take on part time jobs, according to lead author Dr Carol Vincent.

She warned that Government policies failed to recognise that many families struggle to balance full-time employment with the demands of parenting.

The conflicts were particularly severe for working class parents and single mothers who face “coercion” to get back into work.

“The mothers in our research were often caught between two conflicting positions - being a ‘good’ mother, or being a ‘good’ worker,” Dr Vincent said.

“If they were in work, they had to balance having reduced time at home, with being an ideal mum. There have been a number of policies under the Labour Government to encourage mothers back into the workplace. But working class mothers don’t have the flexibility,” she said.

“One of the difficulties about Government policy is that it simply erases the differential conditions under which parents parent.

“A lot of policies around parents either assume that families are totally falling apart, which isn’t the case for most, or that everybody has cars to get around and can take time off work with the resources that most middle class families have.”

Source: The Press Association
http://ukpress.google.com/article/ALeqM5hf-gkjbqC-2D6E0mZlvSEi7Gqqkg