MEASURING ‘wellbeing’ in schools, incentivising feckless parents and micromanaging the rest – that’s the suggested solution to child unhappiness.
As if schools did not have enough to do, the Children’s Society charity now wants teachers to monitor pupils’ wellbeing.
UK children are among the unhappiest in the world and it is no wonder. Everyone has to work to make ends meet so children routinely spend 40-plus hours a week in often noisy, chaotic institutional childcare, outdoor play time is heavily supervised and constrained or simply nonexistent, and parents are too exhausted even to gather the family for dinner.
Add to that a social life that skips real-life contact for the narcissistic filter of social media, confusing messages about sexuality that blend extreme permissiveness with anxious prurience, doom-laden prognostications about the environment, a shaky economic climate and a dearth of adult role models who wish to behave like adults, and it is no wonder children and young people are confused and unhappy.
But what on earth does anyone imagine will be improved by asking schools to measure this? A child’s wellbeing originates, first and foremost, with his or her family. Certainly a school can contribute to wellbeing but if home life is miserable there is not a great deal teachers can do about it.
The only way this suggestion makes sense is if you accept the premise that the proper place of family life is not with families but within institutions – that in fact families are no longer up to the job and schools should, wherever possible, make up for that shortfall. But loading ever more responsibility on to schools for offsetting the disintegration of family life is to compound the problem. It says to parents: this situation is fine, pray continue doing as you please, and never mind how it affects your children because it is the job of schools to pick up the pieces. Send them to reception class in nappies because you cannot be bothered to potty train them. Don’t bother teaching them to use a knife and fork: they’ll learn it at school. You don’t need to teach them to read an analogue clock – they’re taking them all down from exam halls anyway.
Every additional report suggesting more ways to outsource the duties of family life to state provision encourages adults to abdicate responsibility. It reassures parents that ‘adulting’ is optional, because there are institutions that will make up the shortfall.
Yet more insidiously, with that superficially attractive freedom from adult responsibility comes an ever more profound loss of freedom to conduct family life in the private sphere, or indeed in any way other than that sanctioned by the state. Perhaps that might be to the benefit of a few children with genuinely awful parents. But what of those of us who wish simply for the freedom of conscience to diverge from the official morality of the therapeutic state, and raise children according to our own values?
