What do we think of children? Boarding schools are out of fashion because they represent ‘delegated parenthood’ and we are taught to believe that we should be very ‘hands on’ with our children, and that everyone else’s hands are suspect. We are horribly mistrustful of Michael Jackson where our grandparents loved the equally strange J.M. Barrie. But probably never before in history have so many children seen so little of their parents. This is partly because so many (mainly fathers) are absent through divorce or separation, and partly because parents are now encouraged by public policy, social pressure, house prices and the tax system to work so hard. The phrase ‘hard-working families’, so loved by the main political parties, contains a little-considered challenge: how hard can you work and still be a family? Now we have ‘Kelly’s hours’, by which schools are to be open from eight until six all the year round, so that children can have breakfast there and enjoy clubs and child care as well as education. There is obviously some sense in this — the greater incorporation of community in school, the fuller use of existing buildings, the introduction (sotto voce) of charging for non-scholastic services which are provided in schools — but is it right that the government gives so much money and attention to means of keeping children away from home? Anyone with an unhappy private education will have seen ‘young creatures on whom the sins of their frail parents had descended, weeping even for the mercenary nurses they had known, and lonesome even in their loneliness’ (Nicholas Nickleby). How long before Ruth Kelly goes one further and creates residential Dotheboys and Dothegirls Halls all over the country, which children need never leave? We were brought up to think of the Victorians as hypocrites.
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