London - Although he’s now in his 80s, my father still boasts unusual prowess in mental arithmetic. He puts this down to a primary school teacher who refused to allow him and his classmates to go home until they’d each solved a complicated blackboard sum in their heads. If the answer he whispered in his teacher’s ear was right, he was free to go.
As you can imagine, competition to be the first to leave each day was intense.
When I told this story to a friend who happens to be a primary school teacher, she laughed mirthlessly at the very idea of trying something similar with her own pupils today.
‘I’d have outraged parents storming into the classroom to complain,’ she said.
Why - because pupils weren’t leaving school on time?
No, she replied, because they’d all be worried their child might suffer from coming last.
These are the same parents, she added, who send their children to school unable to perform basic skills for themselves.
As we learned from a chilling survey recently, two-thirds of primary school teachers report that increasing numbers of five-year-olds are not toilet-trained by the time they arrive at school.
In addition, many can’t even put on their own coats or change into their PE kits unaided.
A portion of the blame can be laid at the door of schools: of the 850 primary school staff polled, only 36 percent said their own school demanded that children should be out of nappies and able to get dressed on their own.
Most of the fault, however, surely lies with parents themselves.
It’s tempting to dismiss poor parenting as a problem for an inadequate few.
But there are many middle-class parents who’ve been so infantilised by our twin prevailing cultures of instant gratification and nannying by the state that they no longer see why they should put in the hard graft of child-rearing themselves.
Small children are eager to learn, but instilling in them the idea of self- discipline and independence is an endlessly time-consuming task. It used to be made easier by the extended family, with aunts, uncles and grandparents all helping out.
Today, many parents live far from their families and feel isolated, with no one they can turn to for advice.Nor does it help that the last government invested so much time and political capital in persuading new mothers to go back to work as soon as possible - after all, the last thing either parent wants to do after a tiring day is engage in an exhausting battle over a potty.
Add to that more than a decade of increasing state control over almost every aspect of childhood - from sex education for eight-year-olds to teachers rooting through children’s lunchboxes for ‘unhealthy’ treats - and you can see why parents no longer think it’s their job to teach fundamental life skills.
For centuries, the role of a parent has been clear: to teach children how to be responsible, independent adults. As the Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran so movingly put it nearly 100 years ago in his poem The Prophet: ‘You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.’
Parenting is the most important job many of us ever undertake. Yet our sense of responsibility is continually being eroded by the knowledge that the state now controls - or tries to control - so much of our children’s development. If the state was doing a good job, this might not be such a problem. But only yesterday a group of child experts warned that the relentless focus on formal assessments in nurseries is robbing children of the ability to play. Not only do these formal assessments - the so-called ‘nappy curriculum’ imposed by New Labour - stifle creative teaching, but they also lower standards to a common denominator and allow little space for natural development or aspiration.That’s only just about tolerable if parents can pick up the slack.
Reading a toddler a fairy tale, for instance, helps him learn to speak, teaches him that reading is a wonderful pastime and instils in him an innate understanding of right and wrong. Sitting down not just to family meals but also to pretend tea parties teaches children how to use a knife and fork as well as how to be sociable, while games of dressing up are invaluable not just for developing imagination but for helping a toddler learn how to do up buttons and how to put on clothes. The sad truth is that a great many parents have stopped doing any of these things with their children.
So what can we do about it? Well, we could put childcare on the senior school curriculum for a start. At least then the generation that’s missed out would have some idea what to do with the next. - Daily Mail