Somehow or other a culture has been allowed to develop in which people are not shocked by the fact that children are being made to attend institutions where they are not happy, and where they are not made to feel special.

Nature designed things in such a way that, in a normal state of affairs, every child receives a large amount of attention, from the moment that they are born, from at least one adult, at all times of the day and night: this adult might be a parent, a grandparent, an aunt or uncle, an older brother and sister, or, in times of difficulty, a friend or neighbour – but whoever it is, it is someone who cares for the child and who has the child’s well-being at heart.

If we try to think back to our own childhood, we ought to be able to remember how important it was for us to have someone who loved us looking after us, and how lost we felt when we were being looked after by someone who was not really interested in who we were or what we felt.

If we had a rational education system, its top, inviolable priority would therefore be to ensure that every child was able to spend every minute of every day in the care of people who loved them.

Parents of young children are generally very concerned about the effects that modern child care facilities have upon the emotional well-being of their children, but they convince themselves that it is in the child’s interest that they should be made to endure a certain amount of unhappiness at school, so that they can learn things that will be useful to them later in life.

They fail to question whether there is any reasonable foundation for this belief, and whether there is really any reason to suppose that children are able to gain any benefit from anything that they are being made to do while they are not happy.

The truth is that children do not learn when they are in a situation in which they do not feel safe: in the natural world the love provided by parents and family creates a shelter within which a child can explore the world in which they are living and discover things about themselves. When they are taken out of this shelter, learning stops, and the child’s energy is redirected towards just surviving until they can get home.

This is the simple, and obvious, explanation of why educational standards are locked into a cycle of continuous decline, and why spending more money on the problem has no effect. People have made the false assumption that educational excellence is linked to financial investment, while in truth it is the amount of love, not the amount of money, invested in a child which determines how well prepared they are for later life. Obviously there are important issues relating to the need for a fair distribution of resources, but because there is such a basic misunderstanding about children’s real needs, these issues are not being addressed. A hundred years ago it was only in the poorest families that both parents were obliged to go out to work and to be away from their children for large parts of every day; now this situation has become the norm for large sections of the population. Despite all the talk about the need to improve educational standards, little or nothing has been done to make it easier for parents to provide their children with the full time attention that they need. Similarly, little has been done to make schools into institutions that are child-friendly, and which children would genuinely want to attend.

If anything, every successive reform made to the school system has helped to make it less responsive to children’s needs; more and more responsibility has been taken away from teachers and put in the hands of officials and committees who will probably never even meet the children whose lives are affected by the decisions that they make. The ideal school would be one in which each child felt as cared for and as special, as they would if they were at home, being looked after by their mother or father. This is not just something that applies to the under fives or to children of primary school age, it is equally important for teenagers and even for students of university age: simply because one gets older, it does not mean that one becomes less sensitive, less vulnerable, or more deserving of harsh and impersonal treatment.

For many years now, people have treated education as though it were a matter of philosophical debate, and have imagined that a particular approach to education is appropriate, simply because they have decided that it should be so. What we are discovering now is that this is not the case. There is a right way to approach education, which works, and there are many wrong ways to approach it, and they don’t work. One of the most fundamentally wrong ways to educate children is to isolate them from the people who love them for large parts of every day, and pouring more money into a system that does this, simply perpetuates the problem and does nothing to solve it.

Parents in the past may have been worried that their children would be disadvantaged if they could not get into the ‘best’ schools. By the same token, parents today have reason to be worried if they are not able to provide an environment for their children in which they feel loved and cherished for every moment of every day of their young lives.

Gareth Lewis