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This
is the question at the heart of Leonora Langley's impassioned
plea for greater
awareness in nurturing emotional well-being in the
young. In an argument that encompasses the obligations
of parenting
as well as the challenges of teaching, Langley marshals
much of her long years as a teacher, journalist, actress
and arts educator in a persuasive critique of the present
emphasis of intellectual achievement over sensitivity
to the needs of children as whole, integrated beings.
The author argues
that the competitive, rational, sedentary nature of most
modern state schooling - based on a nineteenth-century
model which has only been reinforced by the National
Curriculum - is of limited use to the majority of young
people. |
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Her
solution is both radical and based on wisdom dating
back to Ancient Greece about what children need from
their
education and how that can best be achieved. The
goal of education is self-awareness, and thus awareness
of
others, and the arts - which engage the body, the
emotions and the spirit as well as the mind - are the
most holistic
way of achieving it.
At
a time when the arts education is seen as an increasingly
marginal activity
in mainstream schooling, Langley argues that is is
only by putting children's innate creativity and curiosity
at the heart of our educational mission, that we can
hope to re-engage the vast number of children switched
off from the current system and avoid the poverty of
imagination and the absence of hope which are the root
causes of so many contemporary social ills.
Langley's own views are reinforced
by child welfare services and several eminent educational
practitioners, whose opinions, given to the author in
a series of interviews, make up the book's second part. |
