This morning I woke up to two things: the claim that Tory minister Elizabeth Truss thinks today’s toddlers are “running around with no sense of purpose”, and my own three-year old, hellbent on making me read Baker’s Cat for the millionth time running and refusing to take a mumbled “can’t you look at the nice pictures?” for an answer.
Much as I would have liked to ponder the former, the latter meant I didn’t have time. I had a book to read, several times over, with actions and exaggerated sing-song voices, otherwise – “Mummy, you’ve not done it properly!” Toddlers don’t need teaching anything about purpose. On the contrary, they could show the rest of us a thing or two about identifying a goal and sticking to it, crushing the will of all who stand in their way.
To be fair, it now turns out that Truss didn’t actually say that it’s toddlers who are “running around with no sense of purpose”. The Mail just made it sound like she did. In her interview with the newspaper Truss was actually describing her encounters with free-flow play in nurseries:
I have seen too many chaotic settings, where children are running around. There’s no sense of purpose.
So it’s not the children but the overall setting. Even so, I’m confused. Isn’t it only a few weeks since the PM’s advisor on childhood Claire Perry was claiming that children’s lives were over-regimented and that the little blighters needed to be bored? But now it turns out that a lack of structure is the problem. And besides, if it’s nurseries in particular we’re talking about, should children be in them at all? It’s not long since Swedish childcare expert Jonas Himmelstrand was briefing MPs on the evils of “separating children from their mothers”, much to the approval of yet another Tory, David Davies. Only it turns out Himmelstrand’s not that much of an expert after all.
Ho hum. I guess if there’s one thing we can learn from this, it’s that Tories don’t agree on childcare. Or perhaps they do but they’re just making it up as they go along, with frequent about-turns, in much the same way as most parents make things up, although minus the usual guilt and self-doubt.
In a nice, Gove-esque touch, Truss refers to one specific detail within the vast cultural context of another country in order to back up her current argument. In this case the country is France. This is because, as we all know, French children don’t throw food. They don’t talk back, either. I mean, they might grow up to be more prone than most to take to the streets in mass industrial protests (look, I know these are crass national stereotypes, but hey, I didn’t start it). According to Truss, French nurseries are where it’s at:
What you notice in French nurseries is just how calm they are. All of their classes are structured and led by teachers. It’s a requirement. They learn to socialise with each other, pay attention to the teacher and develop good manners, which is not the case in too many nurseries in Britain.’
Oh, and another thing I’ve just remembered: the French mums of all these well-behaved children don’t get fat, which is an added bonus. So yeah, French nurseries! Vive la difference! Or rather not la difference, the opposite (is there a French translation for “out of context detail that we should all copy”?).
I don’t doubt that French childrearing methods – looked at in their entirety – differ somewhat from English ones. I’m less sure how much it matters. In the interests of fairness, I’ve even conducted my own experiment. When some French friends of mine decided to have a baby, I decided to have one, too (I was quite keen on the idea anyhow, but the main reason was so that I could write this one paragraph right now).
Three years on, both of our children are at nursery, or rather French Child is à l‘école, where he learns to sit still and recite, while English Child is at Monkey Puzzle, where he runs around with Early Learning Centre pans on his head. And when they meet up the two of them appear remarkably similar and get along just fine (apart from that one time English Child sent French Child to A&E with an “overenthusiastic” hug, but we don’t like to talk about that now). What’s more, I don’t think you gain much by tinkering with early years education to ensure youngsters are “disciplined” if there aren’t opportunities to offer them later. Might as well let them be creative. That way they can at least pretend to have jobs once they’re older and/or paint more imaginative placards once they take to the streets.
That said, I suppose in the meantime there is a degree to which we’re not harnessing the sheer bloody-mindedness of toddlers while we can. If we put our minds to it, we could probably out-do the French on that score. I think back to when my eldest was two and totally obsessed with taking everything out of the kitchen cupboards and loading it into the washing machine. If you asked him why he’d just look at you and say, like some wild-eyed prophet, “–’chine! ‘chine! ‘CHINE!” The almost mythical determination to complete such a futile, repetitive task carries within it a message for us all.
I’m just not sure I, nor any “expert” MP, is capable of knowing what to do with it yet.
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