Archbishop Rowan Williams gave the Citizen Organising Committee lecture at Queen Mary College University of London in April this year here summarised by Michael MacLachlan. The full lecture is at (www.archbishopofcanterbury.org). His subject was, “Who is bringing up our children?”
Children, he said, are not bought up by just one or two people but by the whole of the social complex of which they are part. Even if a culture has no idea what it intends, or does not care, it still educates children; and may well not like the end product.
If we cannot define maturity we cannot understand the process of formation and will not be surprised if chaos results. He suggested working definitions for a mature human being would include being aware of emotion but not enslaved by it, believing change is possible for themselves and others, accepting fallibility and death, and sensitive to the cost of choice, not threatened by difference and answerable to more than mere cultural consensus. A sense of the holy was also an important part of being adult.
Definitions give us a way of looking at the way our environment limits the development of healthy adults. It is one where emotions are indulged but never educated, where apathy and cynicism are normal attitudes to public concerns, where we are short on dialogue, learning and self-questioning and live with a fear and denial of human limitations, especially that we shall all die, with a total faith in technology as a universal solvent. We are passive to the culture of the global market, simply receiving a constant stream of messages from producers and suppliers. We are ever bored and perpetually addicted to novelty, obsessively romanticising victim status and lacking all empathy, tone deaf to the sacred and mysterious.
This is not simply a list of problems; they are things that prevent us growing up. If we and our children live in an atmosphere of gossip, inflated rhetoric, non-participation, celebrity obsession and vacuous aspiration, it is not surprising that human formation can be crippled. A significant example of such is the rushing of children through childhood, pushing them into the commercial and sexual habits of supposed adulthood. He told the story of a murdered child who had been schooled from the age of five in that provocative behaviour and dress appropriate to beauty contests in the American South. Walter Davis, an American playwright, had written of this case tracing the connections of abusive imagination that not only entrapped the child in the process but eventually took her life.
The emancipatory agenda of the last 30 years had been advanced by many literary classics but left unanswered the question, “Yes, but what about the child?” Doris Lessing’s “The Golden Notebook” faces the cost of the formation of another generation when children are caught up into the energy of adult dramas that give them no room to be securely children. If we want to give children that opportunity we have to accept the fact that being adult is about taking on the task of forming other human lives.
People can only grow securely if there are stable things in their environment that they can trust, primarily people, including their parents. The trauma of unemployment, (as in the failure of the Rover Car Company), has shown us how even economic instability can impact a whole nurturing environment. Questions raised about instability are not only about domestic issues but public ones as well. Not least we should ask hard challenging questions about advertising aimed at children. What is proper in such advertising if we want an environment where improper pressure is to be rightly seen as a form of injustice towards children? We should also question the rewarding of neglect. People should have choices about their work but have we moved too far in giving incentives that force carers out of the home and contribute to the breakdown of stable domestic environments?
In education, our obsessions with testing, results and productivity threaten the development of emotional, communicative and other forms of literacy. Mildred Masheder (Positive Childhood: Educating Young Citizens) discusses various educational strategies to make people literate about how to communicate, particularly urging the practice of dialogue and listening to be built into primary education. Relentless productivity threatens our ability to produce functioning human beings. We abuse children by default when we ignore their need for stability, the sense of being seen and heard. Intelligent, understood social interaction as part of education recognises that citizens and persons are not born but made, cultivated at a very literal, physical level. Sue Gerhardt (Why Love matters: how affection shapes a baby’s brain) suggests that areas of the brain atrophy without proper social interaction. The argument breaks through conventional polarity between nature and nurture by showing that nature needs to be nurtured. If our potential is to be activated other people are necessary who will listen, engage, trust and offer love. Neurological development demands social input, and she is not afraid to raise questions about home and work, what is needed in a domestic environment to secure stability. Betty Frieden described the oppression of young mothers in the ‘60s imprisoned in one role in the home but our current situation may be equally oppressive to children left to professional ‘minders’ or in front of a Video while parents lead busy lives elsewhere. How do such children learn to regulate their emotions?
To form human adults aware of emotion but not enslaved by it we need more than economic productivity. Stable environments of nurture, certainly avoiding the oppression of young mothers but more than piecemeal childcare, require steady trustworthy backgrounds. We need organisations that will campaign with this is mind if we are to build a nurturing culture capable of responsibility and conversation. Conversation is part of being adult. People are formed at the deepest level by taking one another seriously so one of the critical public and political questions is what nourishes or frustrates conversation. Educated citizens have been taught serious communication. It follows that education of children and citizens are inseparable aspirations. Mildred Masheder urges more commitment to investment in education. Children need to be seen as unique individuals and given consideration as such; this means smaller classes and approaches not tied to the rigidity of formal examinations. Smaller classes would radically improve the quality of children’s education giving them a new interest in learning, and joy in playing. We have the means to make this a reality if we have the will to do so.
Clamour for visible results displaces discernment of quality. If we cannot fully educate we accept a balance-sheet of skills acquired and tests satisfied. Literacy is not only about words; it is about ‘reading’ peoples’ feelings, about speaking and listening, about emotional literacy and social literacy.
The Archbishop concluded with questions about our practice; what messages are we giving our children, where do we find our opportunities to become adult. If the gloomy analysis he had offered is right we need networks of organisations to campaign for the practice of being adults. Religious organisations should be part of this. Despite frequent failure they are capable of ‘growing’ human adults because, at best, they communicate a profound sense of the worth and value of human beings in the eyes of God; an awareness of the need for self-questioning in God’s presence; and a balance between hope and realism which is deeply characteristic of maturity.
When adults stop being infants, children can be children. We want to see a society composed of adults; people who can choose, act, change, hope, who can make a difference, who can be sorry when they fail, who can empathise, who can go on learning. It does not happen by chance. If we go on producing grown up infants we can expect violence and dysfunction to persist in our society. We have choices. He hoped and prayed that we had the courage and the positive delighted appreciation of childhood that will give us the energy to pursue those choices.
© 2005 Flame