Grave concerns about childhood, and what educational practices and modern technology and modes of living are doing to children, have recently seized the attention of the mainstream. There has been an overwhelming response to the letter published on 12 September in the Daily Telegraph and signed by more than 100 academics, professionals and educationalists, including myself and Sue Palmer, author of Toxic Childhood (see 'In my view', 21 September).
One of the letter's most prominent signatories, Oxford neuroscientist Baroness Professor Susan Greenfield, had already written some years ago of an increasingly ubiquitous information technology that might entail profound long-term risks for children, including 'the potential loss of imagination, the inability to maintain a long attention span, the tendency to confuse fact with knowledge, and a homogenisation of an entire generation of minds'.
'These risks', she continued, 'could even actually change the physical workings of the brain.' This is alarming fare indeed, and our letter's many signatories share these profound concerns.
As a member of the House of Lords, Baroness Greenfield is so concerned that she is setting up an all-party parliamentary group in the Lords to look into these issues, along with three former education secretaries - Baronesses Shirley Williams, Gillian Shephard and Estelle Morris. This is splendid news for those of us who have long since been 'banging a drum in the desert' about these issues.
Sue Palmer's book, Toxic Childhood (Orion, 2006), argues that modern technological and consumerist lifestyles are severely compromising children's healthy development and ability to learn. I am a trained Steiner Kindergarten and class teacher and know that Sue's conclusions concur in virtually every respect with the Steiner approach to child development and learning. A dramatic front-page report in the Times Educational Supplement (10 March 2006) considered how ten 'toxic' ingredients of modern life are making children harder to teach than 30 years ago, noting how Sue has identified a 'damaging mix of technology, family breakdown and poor diet'
that together explain 'the worsening behaviour and an explosion in numbers of special needs pupils'.
Low scores
A plethora of disturbing research findings is now corroborating these concerns. For example, on tests of conceptual development (that is, common-sense understanding of the world), 11-year-olds in 2004 scored two to three years behind their counterparts in 1990.
Only this summer, the British Medical Association stated that some 20 per cent of children and adolescents could expect to suffer from mental health problems. And perhaps most damning of all, out of 25 countries in the European Community, the UK recently scored 21st in a survey of children's general well-being (see Special Report, 31 August). The four countries that scored lower - Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovakia - were ex-Soviet states suffering from ingrained, long-standing deprivation.
With the UKbeing the second richest country in the EC, there can surely be no excuse for such a malaise. Something is clearly going wrong at the very heart of childhood to produce such alarming findings.
It was as a result of these consistently recurring concerns, cited by the many teachers Sue met in the course of her consulting work, that she spent three years researching the influence of contemporary culture on children's development - particularly their capacity to learn. The following urgent questions were raised:
* What lies behind the current explosion in developmental and behavioural disorders, increases in childhood depression and general dissatisfaction among young people?
* What changes in children's lives over the past 25 years may be affecting cognition and behaviour - and thus making it more difficult to teach children to read and write?
* How can schools, parents and society 'detoxify' contemporary childhood?
The signatories to our letter represent a striking diversity of professional perspectives (academics, writers, educationalists, child development experts, counsellors and psychologists), and more significant still, wide-ranging political viewpoints that span the left-right spectrum.
What the response to our initiative strongly suggests is that the concerns that now exist about the state of childhood in Britain transcend the parochialism of left and right, which in turn makes the call for a cross-party consensus on these questions compelling and, we suggest, irresistible.
Not that this should be interpreted in any way as a green light for yet more over-centralising, 'deprofessionalising' Government intervention into the civil and cultural sphere. Quite the contrary. There is compelling evidence, both anecdotal and research-based, that indicates how overweening Government intervention has substantially contributed to the malaise that our signatories highlight - most especially in the educational sphere.
The early years are a case in point. The Government's Curriculum Guidance for the Foundation Stage, for example, was welcomed by the early years sector not in the positive sense that its recommendations and 'curriculum'
were child-centred and developmentally appropriate, but with a discernible sense of relief that it could have been far worse.
Audit and surveillance
From my Steiner-informed perspective, it seems clear that pre-school-aged children are introduced to intellectual learning at far too young an age for them to cope with it in a healthy, integrated way. In Finland, formal schooling does not begin until age seven, yet by the age of ten or 11, Finnish children far outstrip British children on a whole raft of educational indicators. This is clear proof that in child development terms, a late-starting 'tortoise' does indeed often win the achievement race.
Baroness Professor Susan Greenfield is now suggesting what many in the Steiner movement have been arguing for years - that the introduction of computers to young children may be having quite unknown negative (and certainly unresearched) effects on children's growing brains, not to mention the social and psychological effects.
The 'audit and surveillance' accountability culture that has dominated policy-making in recent years has arguably had disastrous effects on early learning environments. Hapless staff have been swamped by largely useless data-collecting and bureaucracy. They are being distracted from their primary task of being with young children by an intrusive and unnecessary concern with measurement, targets and centrally-imposed rules and regulations. 'Low trust' has indeed become perhaps the most insidiously pernicious influence of our times.
Government role
Rather than yet more intervention in early years education and care, we need a clear and informed dialogue and political consensus about those limited fields in which the Government should legitimately and appropriately intervene, and what is best left to local professionals and empowered parental self-help on the ground.
When we hear that Britain's children are among the unhappiest in Europe (Sunday Times, 6 August 2006), the alarm sirens should surely be going off at the heart of Government that something is going badly wrong. Rather than digging furiously in a hole of its own making, a magnanimous Government needs to step back with humility and with the mature capacity to admit where successive Governments may have got things wrong - and then to do something effective and enduring about it.
Now that mainstream authorities are increasingly 'on-side' with these grave worries about how modern children are suffering in the world we have created for them, there is certainly scope for alliances to be forged across diverse fields in the common cause of protecting children from the worst excesses of a soulless, technocratic culture. This culture is systematically casting children in its own barren image.
We are determined to take this initiative forward until such time as the mounting 'toxicity' of childhood is decisively transformed. We welcome contact from individuals and organisations offering constructive ideas as to how this aspiration might be most effectively achieved. NW
Dr Richard House is a teacher at Norwich Steiner School and senior lecturer in the Research Centre for Therapeutic Education at Roehampton University, London
Contact information
* To join the campaign go to http://ipnosis.postle.net/childhood.htm. For updates and news on the debate go to the University of Roehampton website www.letsengage.co.uk and see the 'Toxic childhood' news item by Richard House