One day, I am pretty sure historians will look back at 2007-2008 as a key turning point, when the world changed in a significant way that we still don’t seem to have grasped.
It should have taught us something we didn’t learn, and consequently the effects are still playing out.
Anyway, a tangent …
We are currently looking at secondary schools for our son. There are two obvious choices within walking distance, and the ethos contrast is quite stark. One is a church school, strict and ambitious from some perspectives, rigid and pushy from others. The other is huge, has had a lot of investment providing amazing facilities, and is kind of hands-off.
Another parent confided in me that they dreaded their child being allocated to the second of those two schools. “The children are in charge! He wouldn’t survive!”
Which I understood.
What puzzled me a bit more was that this led straight into a complaint that the same child had been kept in at lunchtime for being cheeky, at the current school, and words had been had with the teacher. They’re just children, apparently, and shouldn’t be expected to be able to hold to standards adults set for them, because they’re not ready.
This is a human pattern.
We want what strictness gets us. The academic results, the reduction in bullying, the structure.
But we mentally bank the benefits, and hope to ease up on what they come from. Maybe little accommodations, maybe wholesale denial. Once the benefits are clear, it becomes tempting to think that we can have the good on its own, with no cost. The costs are a pain, after all.
Things that emerge from structure and interaction can be very real in their own right, so it can be hard to believe that we can’t somehow create those things directly. Health, for example, is largely an outcome – the result of a sensible lifestyle (leaving aside genetics), but any suggestion of a shortcut, a diet, a drug, a “simple trick” and we’re instinctively ready to give it a try. Order tends to be the result of rules, similarly, not something we decide to have.