Anarchy 43/Stunted to school

From Anarchy
Jump to navigation Jump to search


257

Stunted
to school

LEILA BERG


It seems strange to me that people should fight so hard, and so rightly, over edu­ca­tion for chil­dren from five up­wards—prim­ary, second­ary, uni­ver­sity—and not care at all what has hap­pened to the child before this.

  For their first five years, thou­sands of our chil­dren are un­able to grow. They live in flats—new flats—where their mothers have to keep all win­dows per­man­ently locked be­cause the child might climb and fall to the con­crete ground; where the bal­con­ies, the only nearby play-space, are also kept per­man­ently locked be­cause the walls have been built too low; where the inside walls and floors are so thin, and let so much noise through, that chil­dren cannot run across the floor to greet their father when he comes home from work; where mothers walk round and round the block with the baby in the pram and the small chil­dren hang­ing on to the pram handle be­cause father, who is work­ing nights, is asleep; where the chil­dren who cannot play up­stairs cannot play down­stairs either be­cause the mother—eight or nine stories up—cannot see them, or get to them quickly when they need her, and dan­ger­ous traf­fic runs nearby.

  It is, ironic­ally, the grad­ual real­isa­tion that there must surely be a better, saner, hap­pier, more hu­man way of liv­ing than this, that will fin­ally break the ban on nurs­ery school build­ing. Mothers cannot go on like this much longer. I heard re­cently of one who ar­rived hys­ter­ical at a nurs­ery school that was al­ready filled to capa­city, and said if they would not take her chil­dren she would aban­don them; they took them—and now she has begun to have joy in them.

  So mothers come to the nurs­ery school with chil­dren whose in­fant edu­ca­tion has al­ready been stun­ted by their en­vir­on­ment, and those of them who are lucky enough to get in—how piti­fully in­ad­equate the num­ber is—begin to grow.

  They have space, they have a tran­quil and in­ter­ested love, they have time, the long time of child­hood, that is abund­antly theirs, they have ac­cess to the basic things—sand, water, earth, grass, and clay, with a flow­ing chan­ging un­cramped sky above—and they begin to make rela­tion­ships, to ap­pre­ciate first them­selves and then other people as unique hu­man beings. They begin to make pat­terns of casual co-oper­at­
258
ing that is very beauti­ful to see, like ballet.

  And their parents too begin to grow. In nurs­ery schools, parents are wel­come, parents are part of the whole edu­ca­tional vision. There are no notices in nurs­ery schools that say “Parents may not come beyond this point.” They are not kept out­side the gates while their chil­dren scream for them. They come in with the chil­dren, and they stay, and they talk and watch and dis­cuss and won­der. The real­isa­tion comes to them that it is pos­sible to re­joice in a child’s laugh­ter, a child’s dan­cing, a child’s ex­plor­ing, a child’s de­velop­ing skills, a child’s grow­ing in­de­pend­ence, a child’s glee. All these things, which had been so twist­ing them with anxi­ety and anger, for they saw them only as a threat, be­cause their en­vir­on­ment had be­come more im­port­ant to them than the child, they begin at last to see as the hu­man herit­age. They sud­denly see that to be­have like this—joy­ously, spon­tan­eously, curi­ously—is pos­sible. Nothing dread­ful hap­pens. The sky does not fall. Their chil­dren are happy, not de­praved. And then they see that what is wrong is their en­vir­on­ment, the way they are liv­ing. And this they will then begin to change.

  Then we will have homes where chil­dren can play toge­ther, where they can have cats and rab­bits, where they can dance and sing with­out guilt. We will have as many nurs­ery schools as mothers need, be­cause small chil­dren, even in the best of homes, need a bridge into the out­side world. And then the child­ren will not come al­ready stun­ted to the prim­ary schools.