Books are rare in many homes today. Perhaps children are too exhausted to read a book after all the extra activities, and especially after homework; but their parents don’t seem to read any more either. Again, they work all hours and perhaps for most people television both provides stories and news and the computer is an unrivalled source for information. So should we have books in the house? Well one response would be to ask why the government spends enormous sums just so that people should be able to read what’s on the tin or to follow a recipe.

The true response is that reading a book demands an effort in reaching towards the author to recreate the characters, the place and the time, or in the case of non-fiction to wrestle from the text an understanding of its meanings. A book is paced to the readers will so that he can rest, think, re-read a passage, put it down to let it work in his mind. He makes it subject to his imaginative interpretation so that he ‘sees’ it in the light of previous experience. In this regard a book is unique. Film, television and the computer with their explicit image requiring little or no interpretation make it easier for the audience because the effort of imagination in seeing the picture and working out meanings is unnecessary, which perhaps is why slumping in front of the television has become so popular.

The author makes the book, but the reader remakes it. Reading is much more than the decoding of a combination of letters The sympathetic reader takes what the writer has given and imaginatively recreates that, trying to understand what has been given but testing it against what his experience tells him. The more experienced he is the more sophisticated will be the image he is able to bring to mind and so to enjoy a book there is a continuing conversation between the writer’s mind and that of the reader as he reflects upon his own version of what the writer says.

Reading is an experience like any other and as I’ve explained the reader’s part is vital in making sense of the book. His first part is to decode the lettering. This is mostly what primary schools teach as reading. The second, and this is the more difficult but more interesting, is to interpret the language, first as to what the author intended, and second as to whether what has been written has that or another meaning and whether the reader finds it convincing. This process is not as cumbersome as it sounds because it is rapid and largely unconscious but without it the reader will find a passage has been read and it has left no impression. This happens to me from time to time.

I think the limited example of reading illustrates the essential second part of any learning and this is frequently overlooked. It is not enough to enjoy a first hand experience however impressive that might be. Just as in reading it is vital to play the mind over meanings, it is equally important to encourage reflection upon the experience so that it becomes personalized with the differing emphases which the different children will put upon it. So when visiting a zoo for example, one will be enraptured by the monkeys and will want to relive the moment again and again, another will remember the elephants. Both must have opportunities to reflect upon their impressions and re-work them by talk or drawing, modelling, making a book etc. etc.

So the third part of a learning experience is to have time to do this. A timetabled reading schedule is not likely to encourage the expansive sense a reader needs when exploring a good book. Nor is it helpful if there is any limit placed upon the time a child needs to express her ideas in her chosen way, because to do that should be the first priority of the school.

The fourth essential is that the experience should be one chosen as being of interest to the child rather than the teacher or the school. This may seem obvious but it isn’t to schools. In general the children are not asked, the teacher having already decided upon a trip down the Thames. Of course it is always difficult to make a whole class event more than a fun occasion because it doesn’t meet the criteria for learning. A group trip to London may well be enjoyable for most, but it is never going to be as memorable for a particular child who has been seized by the sight of a bee navigating its way into a flower and then extricating itself. And so we have the class of children on a visit to the zoo who when asked said the ‘best’ memory was when Sharon found that her bottle of drink had gone all over the seat at the back of the bus! The intended impression is frequently not the one desired.

I believe in the Christian concept that we are each unique and that every one of us should have the right to a full and equal opportunity to develop our potential whilst remembering the rights of others. Each child is born with a defining personality, the essence of what we as parents cherish. Education is society’s expression of that private passion. It doesn’t presume to know, only to ‘entice and fascinate,’ to enable children to look further and deeper and with growing understanding into things. The result should be a child with an inner life of imagination and confidence, independent but ready to ask for help when it needs it. That child will happily spend a busy time occupied with its own devices because it has built a repertoire of resources to fall back on. It will have taken a large responsibility for its choices in learning. The ‘empty’ child, the one who needs the reassurance of an exam result or the teacher’s report is the saddest spectacle, but that is what we are seeing today with children who are being single-mindedly directed towards the narrow materialistic rewards of the market with its preoccupation with only that which can be measured.

A common, almost universal, mistake is to think that the chief purpose of schools is to ‘educate’ children in the disciplines of the curriculum. I am convinced that schools have become instruments of control and conformity by apparently benevolent means. What they do is extraordinarily expensive, but has proved its value since lawlessness or even restlessness are very rare in this country.

They succeed by various means. The first is the absolute, irresistible insistence upon uniformity of clothing. Only in prisons, the Armed Forces and parts of the public service are uniforms required and for obvious reasons. What reason does a school have other than identifying an escaping child? It now costs over £400 to provide the kit for a first year at secondary school and of course this will be replaced several times over the years. So expensive has it become that some schools see it as a way to exclude the undesirables.

Of course, ‘uniform’ says everything. It is the first step towards individual invisibility. So essential is the need to assert control a recent report described a newly appointed headteacher requiring her staff to examine the children as they came into school and report any found to be wearing an offending garment. Four hundred were excluded. She later was reported as saying that as a newly appointed headteacher she felt it was vital to assert her authority. She chose to do that, not by any reference to the imagined function of the intellect, either hers or the pupils, but by a crude insistence upon uniformity; and the public made no comment!

The second is the curriculum. The origin of this was the circus round which the Roman charioteers drove their horses. That gives a flavour of the events in the life of our children at school. They are entered this race without any consultation with anyone in the family and certainly not by the choice of the child. All must take part, all must be measured and in time all will be placed according to an arbitrary decision. Control requires uniformity of procedure. All children must be processed because otherwise they couldn’t be measured which would leave you with an unknown quantity of an unknown quality of an unknown character: not the material for tight control.

The third is that children can avoid school if its parents request it, so that in the eyes of the child they are to blame. There is no avoiding it and there they must remain until released so they become virtual prisoners sentenced without trial. Furthermore there is no remission for good behaviour as in a prison. This is important because it guarantees that any trouble makers will be off the streets until they can be sent to prison.

The fourth is that not only is the curriculum assembled to apply to any child anywhere, but also to no child anywhere. It is a stand alone utility made to be consistent to a method of logical steps which if followed in sequence would achieve mastery of a discipline. In itself it is a satisfying academic exercise in demonstrating how the concepts of the discipline are inter-related. But to the confident young learner, fresh from the fields of learning by observation of experience, it comes as a crushing statement that school is where you know by being told and by remembering what you are told. From that time the child knows that nothing is accidental, everything is controlled, and its prospects are dependent upon being obedient to the wishes of the school. If it’s not in the curriculum it is not valued. Success is measured by the child demonstrating it is consistently providing the expected answers, not to its questions, but to the body who contrived the curriculum.