Primary school should be a time for learning facts and having fun.
My six-year-old son has taken to checking the origin of food before we buy it. If it's not made in Britain, it stays on the shelf. Or it would if he had his way. It's not patriotism (he still clings to his Australian roots, just); he's just implementing the latest component of his grade 2 syllabus. Last month we couldn't flush the toilet more than once a day.
His youthful enthusiasm for reducing food came unstuck when I broke the news that his new regime would put an end to banana smoothies, Vegemite and avocado on toast.
So what are they teaching kids at British schools these days? Quite a lot, it seems, and it's not just counting and joined-up writing. Forget the controversy over Julia Gillard's My School website, ''theme-based teaching'' is the new buzz phrase here. Traditional subjects such as geography and science are combined into general thematic areas such as ''global warming''. This new approach will be implemented nationally next year. Not everyone is impressed.
As Prince Charles said recently - and I'm paraphrasing - the obsession with teaching children about ''issues'' rather than ''stuff'' means they may never really comprehend how the world works. Or, as one of the Prince's advisers said, youngsters might get excited by global warming but if they haven't learnt the basics of science, they won't understand why it matters.
At six, humans are great sponges for information, but not yet developed enough to understand the subtleties or complexities of the world. Tell them that electricity is bad for the environment, and they will tell you, as my son did, that we should get rid of electricity altogether. That's fine if you're not into Nintendo or television or lighting. But if you do use electricity from time to time it helps to have a broader understanding of our reliance on fossil fuels.
Some have said that the themes-based approach is part of a desire of government to push its own agendas through primary schools, an idea I didn't really buy until I saw the ''snack swapper'' - a cardboard device that is supposed to help schoolchildren decide what to eat. It's a pretty simple concept: you spin a wheel to choose a type of food you like - say ''chocolate'' - and it suggests a healthy alternative that you don't, such as ''fresh or canned fruit in low-sugar jelly''. Or you choose a stock-standard snack such as ''crisps'' and it will suggest an impossible-to-find but healthy alternative - ''breadsticks with low-fat cream cheese''.
Childhood obesity is a serious problem that needs to be tackled, but this does seem a little condescending, particularly for the parents involved. Reading a chapter of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory before bedtime, after spending an evening playing with the snack swapper, seemed more than a little bit naughty.
Isn't childhood supposed to be more fun than this? Call me old fashioned, but when I was six, school was about scraping your knee and learning your times tables. The biggest concern was who to pick for your football team at lunch. Now it's whether the planet will run out of water by the end of the day.
It's all our own fault. We're so embarrassed (and terrified) by our own failure to save the world that we're desperately trying to get the kids up to speed so they can sort the whole mess out for us. Now the poor souls are racked with guilt every time they use a fresh piece of paper to do a drawing.
There needs to be some balance and perspective. Setting good habits early on has merit, but if we're really going to fix our social and environmental ills, we need a generation that can grasp the causes, not just rote-learned, packaged ''solutions''. Otherwise, come the age of 14, they might start chopping down trees and eating strawberries grown in Portugal just to piss us off.
The Age.
James Schloeffel is an Australian living in London. |
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