Last September the Daily Telegraph published an Open Letter titled ‘Modern life leads to more depression among children’, signed by over 100 prominent public and professional figures. Orchestrated by author Sue Palmer and myself, the letter* expressed grave concerns about the loss of childhood – and the urgent need for an informed public debate about what we might do about it. In a host of ways, we argued, modern technological and consumerist lifestyles are severely compromising children’s healthy development and ability to learn. As a long-standing Green Party member, I believe that the Greens’ policies on education and family life-style are entirely consistent with the huge concerns that the public has expressed on these issues, affording us a great opportunity to showcase our progressive policies in these areas.
The dramatically evocative term ‘toxic childhood’ is beginning to enter modern culture - most notably via Sue Palmer’s new book Toxic Childhood (Orion, London, May 2006), which systematically presents the wealth of research evidence from around the world about how modern technological culture is harming children. When the press story broke surrounding our Open Letter, it preoccupied TV, radio and newspapers for days afterwards - and the story was soon cascading around the globe. Media communication channels went into meltdown as radio and TV studios were swamped with correspondence and communications about the story. We will never know the full impact the story has had - and continues to have - around the world.
This seems to have been a ‘powder-keg’ of a story just waiting to go off - and it just happens that Sue Palmer and I lit the blue touch-paper with our initiative. It also shows that there is overwhelming concern amongst ordinary people about these issues - and that has to be very positive news indeed for those of us who are passionately committed to enabling future generations to live with a more mature ecological sensibility on our planet than we have succeeded in doing.
My own field is that of education - and it’s perhaps in education that the greatest single impact could be made on the ‘toxicity’ of childhood, and its impact on the awareness and sensibilities of the next generation. In mainstream educational thinking, the great danger is that environmental concerns become a kind of tacked-on optional extra – bolted on to a mechanistic, centrally imposed school curriculum as just one more isolated, self-contained ‘subject’ amidst all the other artificially isolated subjects of the modern schooling system (‘Environmental Studies’, ‘Nature Studies’, etc.). In a ‘post-toxic’ educational world, by contrast, we would hope and expect to see environmental awareness seamlessly woven through the very fabric of everything we do within a living school community.
In Steiner (Waldorf) education, for example, there’s no need to draw explicit attention to ‘ecological issues’ in a mechanistic, utilitarian way, because an ecological awareness is routinely intrinsic to everything we do, and to our deepest attitudes to the world and nature. Thus, for example, our communally shared songs and rhymes celebrate a deep reverence and respect for the natural world; and strongly ethical adult role models encourage children to learn that love and caring for our natural world is just something we routinely do, without question or fuss or self-satisfied affectation.
Steiner education, then, along with other progressive educational and human-scale schooling approaches (like the new Green school in Liverpool - the St Francis of Assisi Academy; see the Independent, 2 February 2006), actively models what an intrinsically ecological education will need to be like if environmental sustainability is to become a norm of our way of living and being, and not some short-term novelty which we can either embrace or discard as fashionable fancy takes us.
Richard House is a Senior Lecturer in the Research Centre for Therapeutic Education, Roehampton University (London), and an early-years teacher at Britain’s newest Steiner school in Norwich, which he helped to establish.
*The letter can be read in full at www.suepalmer.co.uk/articles/Letter.pdf
