Children’s rights and being wronged
Following hard on the heels of an article written recently in The Guardian by Susanna Rustin (Votes at 16, yes. But children need more rights than that), I also came across another thoughtful post by Michael Rosen, who seems to write wisely and consistently about children, in his article in the same publication entitled Dear Damian Hinds [Education Secretary], Ofsted forgets our four-year-olds are not GCSE apprentices. I’d been collecting links to write an entirely different post over the past few weeks, but these two offerings above coalesced my thinking into writing on children’s rights: always a worthy subject matter, in my opinion.
Rustin’s article begins with the Welsh government’s plans to reduce the age for voting to sixteen in local elections, as is permitted to those of this age in Scotland. She goes on to discuss the significant lack of concern at governmental level in England for children’s rights — though we should ignore the tired reference that is ‘Reach for a utopian vision of liberated children in charge of their destinies and you bump up against William Golding’s dystopian Lord of the Flies’ (no doubt included for the sake of journalistic balance). Notwithstanding this inadvertent stoking of the anti-rights flames, Rustin is at pains to point out that children get a raw deal in England (the Welsh government have, for a long time now, been so much more advanced in their thinking towards those people in our society who just happen to be of or below the age to still attend school).
Michael Rosen writes of the school years with a cogent regard for children and their overall experience. His article highlights Ofsted’s Bold Beginnings report which, in his words, ‘assumes that the most important thing about four-year-olds is that they need to be pump-primed for what’s going to happen next.’ In other words, more future-focused work, less play. In such a short piece, Rosen packs his writing with a lot of sense. He writes (in the form of an open letter to the Education Secretary, Damian Hinds):
Schooling has been increasingly built around the idea that a proportion of children are ‘falling behind’. There are ‘falling behind’ tables . . . the report holds out, in the midst of setting and streaming, a no-one-falling-behind future. Perhaps you will acquire the special powers to prevent anyone from falling behind anyone else.
Rosen also quotes from Bold Beginnings:
‘[L]istening to stories, poems and rhymes fed children’s imagination’ and ‘[S]ome headteachers did not believe in the notion of ‘free play’. They viewed playing without boundaries as too rosy and unrealistic a view of childhood.’
He concludes this with the following:
It’s not clear why ‘imagination’ is self-evidently good, while ‘free play’ is ‘unrealistic’. Anyone who has spent any time thinking and writing about such things could as easily claim that ‘imagination’ is ‘unrealistic’ and ‘free play’ is self-evidently good.
The child’s right to play continues to be steadily and not so stealthily eroded. Many adults seem to want or need to create subsets of play (‘free play’, as opposed to the seemingly more valuable ‘structured play’ or any derivation thereof that suggests ‘solid’ and ‘useful’ outcomes — learning, citizenship, social responsibility, moral fibre, etc.) and, by extension, ‘free play’ (whatever that transpires to be) is just a frivolous luxury. Regular readers of this blog know that the perspective here is that this ‘frivolous luxury’ is very far from the lived experience of play for children.
How do or could we know this? Considered observation and reflection is always a good starting point, but we can also open our minds and opinions by actively listening to the children around us and to providing real opportunities to canvas opinion. Rustin touches on this area of thinking in her writing on giving the vote to sixteen year olds (though the argument can also be used for younger school-goers too). Regarding real consultation with children, she writes: ‘When did an education secretary, for example, last seek children’s views on the national curriculum?’
It is interesting to note, in a gallows humour kind of way, the stream of anti-rights comments that filters through the public opinion boards of Rustin’s article. There seems to be the dominant idea in the comments to her article that children — using the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) definition of someone under the age of 18 — aren’t ‘fully developed’, have little to no critical thinking and analysis skills, have limited life experience, and so on, and therefore cannot possibly be trusted to make important decisions as suggested by the right to vote. Where to start here? It isn’t the fault of someone of a young age that they’re of a young age, but I have had countless conversations over the years with UNCRC-defined-as children on all sorts of topics of interest and a lot of it has been thought-provoking to say the least.
In theory, the UK subscribes to the UNCRC (ratified in 1991) and there are at least two articles contained therein that are enshrined in the thinking, actions and conversations of any self-respecting playworker, these being: Article 12, paraphrased, children’s right to an opinion about matters that concern them, and Article 31, children’s right to play (although this needed a further General Comment 17 to clarify matters, Article 31 being caught up in leisure and relaxation as it also is). As an aside, and as I understand it, there is only one country currently not to sign up to the UNCRC (and this may take further research but I believe it’s down to the concern for parents’ rights), and that is the USA. In theory, the UK subscribes to the UNCRC but precious little ‘real’ consultation takes place, as per Article 12, and though of course play does and shall always happen, it’s really adult attitudes towards play that need to be addressed so that a better offer can be made as a matter of course, not luxury, and as linked to Article 31.
Children expressing an opinion should not be a tick-box exercise. I have been to many schools or places designated as for play, as Rustin also alludes to in her article, where the UNCRC information is pasted on the walls, and I have observed or been part of plenty of consultations with children, but sometimes the efforts strike me as disingenuous. Children can work out the size and shape of things fairly quickly and they can play the game: they might write or say what the adult wants or needs to hear, but in their own time and on their own terms, they’ll express entirely different opinions. I’ve seen and heard this first hand. I continue to see it happening. Children aren’t stupid.
Where many adults have a need to create subsets of play, children will play in all their in-between time. Some adults find this disagreeable, unfocused, superficial, not towards any given ends. Children will play anywhere and everywhere, if that place is conducive to what they want to play and how they want to play. Children will play at any time, for the same reasons. So in trying to exercise their right to play (whether they know about the UNCRC or not), or in just getting on with what they are, as biological creatures, pre-disposed to do, i.e. play, children will play first thing in the morning and late at night, at meal times, at any given moment in the street going from destination to destination, in classes, waiting for the bus, brushing their teeth, going to the toilet, waiting in line, and all other instances which adults also do in their day-to-days and which, for those adults, are mundane necessities. Yet, this play of the children is not seen as play, often: it’s disruptive, unfocused, impacting on the adult who wants or needs to be somewhere, and so on.
I’m not proposing that all adults (whether they be parents, teachers, or anyone involved with working with or just passing by children) just give up the ghost and do whatever the children want whenever they want to (this is where I usually have people citing Golding’s Lord of the Flies, and ‘oh, but there’ll be anarchy, and we can’t have that’, and I’m frankly bored of that now): conversation, relating, intuition, and understanding are all needed in a properly functioning and diversely populated aggregation of people, which just so happens to include ‘x’ many children, who have their own opinions, feelings, experiences and ideas too.
If our legislation bestows rights on individuals and groups of people in our society, then those rights should be properly served. Children, in England at least — not served by a devolved government — seem to have paper rights that aren’t always properly provided for in the real world: the powers that be in Westminster, for example, have difficulty understanding that such small creatures called children could express valid points of view and that they tend towards something they know, as lived experience, as ‘play’ (four-letter word as that is, to some).
