The letter that should set alarm bells ringing in Whitehall

In September a chilling event occurred in Canada that made global news headlines, with a young man indiscriminately shooting large number of students in a Montreal college. The young man was quoted thus: ‘Work sucks, school sucks, life sucks. What else can I say? Life is a video game, you’ve got to die sometime.’

This tragic event seemed presciently symptomatic of precisely the concerns we raised in our open letter, in which we argue that ‘the escalating incidence of childhood depression and children’s behavioural and developmental conditions… is largely due to a lack of understanding… of the realities and subtleties of child development…. [Children] need time. In a fast-moving hyper-competitive culture, today’s children are expected to cope with an ever-earlier start to formal schoolwork and an overly academic test-driven primary curriculum, [and] they are pushed by market forces to act and dress like mini-adults...’ We conclude that, while there exist no easy solutions to these challenges, we need, as a matter of urgency: a public debate to be initiated on child-rearing in the 21st century; and that this issue should now be central to public policy-making.

There was an overwhelmingly positive response to our letter from its many prominent signatories; the media frenzy that it precipitated, with TV and radio studios up and down the country being swamped with emails, texts and phone-calls, confirmed that the vast majority of people hold views similar to our own.

The people, then, spoke with a resounding voice — and policy-makers will surely ignore these concerns at their, and our, peril. No politicians were asked to sign the letter — though we’re sure that many would have done so if asked — for we wanted to keep this initiative strictly non-political, so that no underlying political agendas could be argued to be driving it. It also meant that we attracted a wide range of people spanning the left-right political divide, all prepared to stand behind the letter no matter what their political persuasion, because of the rightness of its message, and for no other reason.

A whole raft of objective health indicators have, for some years, been telling us that something is gravely amiss with modern technological life and the environments in which we are raising our children.

For some years, for example, I have been drawing attention to what I see as the parlous state of our education system

— the creature of both main political parties — with its one-sidedly ‘utilitarian’ and aridly ‘managerialist’ approach to modern education, and its erroneous pedagogical assumption that ‘earlier is necessarily better’.

I could refer at length to issues like the effect on young children of premature intellectual learning shorn of authentic creative play; I could point to the effects on teachers and children alike of a competitive schooling system based on a narrow utilitarian set of performance targets, not least the way in which such a system betrays the love of learning that should be every child’s birthright… However, this is not the place to rehearse those arguments, which have been eloquently made by others at length elsewhere.

Certainly, there are ample examples up and down the land of educational approaches that find a far better balance between all-round child development and academic achievement — the Steiner schools being a notable example — and the mainstream surely has much to learn from these models, as the DfES-sponsored Woods Report of 2004 powerfully concluded.

Rather than dwelling upon these criticisms further, what I wish to do here is appeal directly to the honesty, integrity and humility of every adult — parent, professional or politician — involved in the future development of our children. Let me imagine myself for a moment into the role of a policy-maker or politician. Were I in such a position, I would see it as my solemn duty:

1 assiduously to canvass opinion on these issues from far and wide — and including from those with views which are very different from the prevailing political consensus, and from my own;

2 as openly as possible to examine my own belief system about these issues — how I came to hold those beliefs, what assumptions underlie them, what effects they entail, and what interests they might be serving (which is a solemn responsibility to the truth which we all surely share);

3 to enter into a mutually respectful dialogue with politicians of other parties and persuasions in order to seek out points of agreement and consensus which can transcend political parochialism and intrigue; and

4 to undertake to implement whatever political changes were indicated no matter what the short-or medium-term consequences might be for my own political popularity of electability.

My concern is that unless and until policy-makers earnestly engage in such a process, then the malaise of childhood will continue to escalate — with quite incalculable long-term consequences for the mental and physical well-being of our society. Certainly, with the appearance of our open letter, and the avalanche of public support it has generated, alarm bells should be sounding at the heart of government and in Westminster corridors more generally.

There are at least some hopeful straws in the wind, however. For example, we find the admirable Baroness Susan Greenfield (one of our most prominent signatories) rallying an all-party committee in the House of Lords to investigate the effects of modern technologies on children’s brain development — a group including three former education secretaries; and the Archbishop of Canterbury, through the medium of the Children’s Society, setting up a Good Childhood Panel chaired by the eminent economist Lord Richard Layard. Their most important function must surely be to draw national and political attention to the importance of children’s social and emotional welfare, and the factors currently compromising it.

In sum, then, I am arguing that concerns about the state of childhood by far transcend the parochialism of Left and Right — which in turn makes the call for a cross-party consensus on this question compelling and, I suggest, quite irresistible.

Indeed, to ignore these disturbing realities risks being indicted by future generations for a gross dereliction of what is perhaps every policy-maker’s greatest responsibility —the securing of the nation’s future through the healthy rearing and education of its children.

Not that this should be interpreted in any way as a ‘green light’ for yet more overcentralising, deprofessionalising government intervention into the civil and cultural sphere — quite the contrary, in fact.

For overweening government intervention has arguably contributed substantially to the malaise that our signatories highlight -and most especially in the educational sphere. We need an informed dialogue and consensus about those (limited) fields in which the polity should legitimately and appropriately intervene, and what is best left to (local) professionals and empowered parental self-help on the ground.

With Britain’s children amongst the unhappiest in Europe (Sunday Times, 6 August), something is surely going very badly wrong indeed. Rather than carrying on digging furiously in a hole of its own making, we urgently need a magnanimous government and the upper echelons of the civil service to step back with humility and with the mature capacity to admit where successive governments may well have got things badly wrong — and then to do something effective and enduring about it.

And in this task, they should expect the honest help and support of the other political parties in a spirit of cooperation and compassion for the ‘impossible profession’ that is governing our country in what are unprecedentedly difficult and challenging times for all of us.

Richard House is Senior Lecturer in Psychotherapy and Counselling at Roehampton University (London), and has been instrumental in the development of Norwich Steiner School. You can contact him at: r.house@roehampton.ac.uk. For updates and news on the debate as it unfolds, please see the News Item ‘Toxic childhood — Junk Culture’ by Richard House on www. letsengage.co.uk — a University of Roehampton website.