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Reviews Children Don’t Start Wars

David Gribble

Peace News: ISBN 978 0 946409 14 3: Price £9

As many LibEd readers will know, David Gribble taught at the Dartington Hall schools until they closed in 1987. He then with others set up a school on the same lines called Sands. Among its many features is the school council, which handles anti-social behaviour more effectively than professional adults ever could. His theme in this book is that children have moral perceptions which atrophy with age, under pressure from the rigidities of institutions and from peer pressure within the adult world – ‘what will people think?’ Children do not judge, they care. Conventional thinking carried over from the past suppresses any spontaneity children may have. Obedience is a handicap and not a virtue.

The book is not sentimental. It starts with a Puerto Rican High School in Chicago facing up to gang culture. It deconstructs Lord of the Flies. David takes apart the manipulations, ridiculous when you look at them, that direct the plot; he attacks the universal conclusions too readily drawn from it, whilst not rubbishing William Golding as a writer of fiction. He explores what was missed when child development pundits like Piaget studied only the reactions of boys, not girls.

David’s response to Richard Dawkins is to suggest that children are genetically programmed to see that no one is unhappy. What is certainly consistent with Dawkins is the idea that institutions are selfish, and keener on self-preservation than on the function for which they were created. Power is not evidence of being right.

Perhaps the most important set piece in the book is a full account of the Children’s Hearing at the Rio Earth Summit of 1992. The Conference itself set the scene for the Kyoto Agreement and the Convention on Biological Diversity, but the children, treated with little respect by the organising powers, came out with a compelling and comprehensive ‘Appeal to World Leaders’. It is still available (after diligent search) on the UN website. It begins, ‘We want to inherit a clean earth.’ Its last sentence reads, ‘We are afraid that soon the world will belong only to the rich’.

I want to add one personal perception which I think is in the spirit of David’s book. In The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett demonstrate that nations with greater income inequality among their citizens suffer the more from almost all measurable social ills. I contend that such countries are also those with a higher proportion of children emerging from the educational system without functional literacy, and above all without functional spoken articulacy. David’s perceptions may be able to right this more directly than any foreseeable financial engineering.

Richard Seebohm

(Richard Seebohm was a governor of a Quaker school, and handled educational finance when working in the Treasury. He was subsequently representative in Brussels of the Quaker Council for European Affairs.)

Turning Points: 35 Visionaries in Education Tell Their Own Stories: Edited by Jerry Mintz and Carlo Ricci:

Alternative Education Resource Organisation, hardback $29.95 Obtainable from

http://www.educationrevolution.org/turningpoints.html

The clever idea for this book was to choose thirty-five people who stand for various alternative forms of education and ask these chosen ‘visionaries’ to answer four questions:

What was your schooling like? When did you realise that there is a need for an alternative approach? What have you done since to help realize that vision? What are you doing now?

The editors did not ask for theories or definitions, they asked for facts. The result is thirty-five highly individual articles, all of them narratives rather than pronouncements. Almost all of them are interesting and some of them are inspiring.

The contributors include founders of alternative schools, teachers in traditional schools for all different ages, activists, authors, magazine editors and a photographer. Almost half of them are women. The book includes both support and criticism of Montessori education, calls for more opportunities for people of colour, memories of both successful and unsuccessful schooling and enthusiasm for home education, but the majority of the articles advocate giving children trust, responsibility and freedom in one way or another.

Whether the book will become important as well as stimulating will depend on its reception. It is a well-presented hardback, but its impact may be diminished by the fact that the only message common to all thirty-five different stories is that there is something wrong with traditional education. There may be too many answers to this problem for the book as a whole to carry much weight, but on the other hand perhaps the variety of answers will mean that everyone can find something to agree with. The fact that the authors reveal themselves as real personalities rather than merely mouthpieces for particular theories adds flavour to the theories when they are expressed.

The only disappointment is that, since it is an American book, nearly all the authors come from the USA. The article included in the present posting on the Lib Ed website is by a Mexican, one of the few exceptions. Canada, South Africa, Israel and the UK also have one entry each, but mainland Europe, Asia and Australasia are not represented. Perhaps people like Rebeca Wild from Ecuador, Keiko Okuchi, Shinichiro Hori and Kageki Asakura from Japan, Rajani Dhongchai from Thailand, Falko Peschel from Germany, Jürg Jegge from Switzerland and Amukta Mahapatra and Rita Panicker from India will provide the basis for another book.

(A sample contribution, Escaping Education by Gustavo Esteva, is included in the current posting on this site.)

 

 

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