The Idler

Do Less in Two Thousand and Ten

18 January 2010

Here is my latest “idle parent” column for the Daily Telegraph. TH

BACK TO SCHOOL, BACK TO WORK, back to the fields. In the old medieval calendar, Plough Monday, which was the first Monday after the Feast of the Epiphany or Twelfth Night, marked the end of the Christmas holidays. Those lucky medievals had enjoyed a two week holiday over Christmas, but now it was time to open the shops and harness the plough, in order to prepare the ground for spring sowing. Another custom was St Distaff’s Day, the first Tuesday after Epiphany, which marked the day when the women would resume their duties at the spinning wheel. As Herrick put it:

Partly work and partly play
Ye must on St Distaff’s Day

So in 2010, the men would have returned to their toils on 11th of January and the women on the 12th. As it is, most us generally resume toil on the 4th, meaning that before the Reformation people we had a much better deal, although this year the snow extended the holiday, giving us a nice insight into what the medieval Christmas would have been like.

The problem with education is not that there is not enough of it, but that there is too much. Modern government puts children in schools from nine till three thirty so their parents can toil in the mills. During that time the small ones are mostly mucking about and being told to “express themselves” rather than actually learning anything. And the government is talking about longer school days.

A far more efficient approach would be to have a shorter school day but harder lessons. This was D. H. Lawrence’s idea in his 1919 essay, “Education of the People”. Contrary to what most of us think about Lawrence, he was not actually in favour of letting children run wild all day long. It appears that ninety years ago, there was, like today, a vogue for encouraging “self-expression” in schools:

Each child was to express himself: why, nobody thought it necessary to explain…. A child was to be given a lump of soft clay and told to express himself… Now it is obvious that every boy’s first act of self-expression would be to throw that lump of soft clay at something: preferably the teacher.

For Lawrence, high ideals should be left out of education, and instead the teachers should concentrate on teaching the basics:

… chuck overboard all your drawing and painting and music and “graphic” history and “graphic” geography and “self-expression”, all the lot. Pitch them overboard, teach the three Rs, and then proceed with a certain amount of technical instruction.

In Lawrence’s scheme, there would both be more education and more play:

Begin at the age of seven—five is too soon—and teach reading, writing, arithmetic as the only necessary mental subjects: reading to include geography, map-practice, history and so on. Three hours a day is enough for these. Another hour a day might be devoted to physical and domestic training. Leave a child alone for the rest: out of sight and out of mind.

So we can imagine a primary school day which teaches children from nine till twelve. Then there is lunch and some football or training in something useful like baking bread. From two till bedtime they play in the fields.

And how are the parents supposed to get all their work done? Well, this neatly brings me to an excellent idea which has been put about by the think tank, the New Economics Foundation, which is the 21 hour week. The thinking here is that we will all work less, spend less and thus free up more time for creative activity and pleasure, while doing less damage to the planet into the bargain. Work will be evenly spread around, so we will abolish the problem of the armies of unemployed. It has something in common with my own “Do Less” campaign, which argues that activity itself eats up resources, whereas lying in a field staring at the sky harms no one, therefore we should cut down on the former and do more of the latter.

I would like to see a world where the government’s pedestrian and unromantic vision of a nation of “hard-working families” is replaced by a country filled with “good living families”, families whose members are enjoying themselves rather than over-working and over-spending as they chase the ever-elusive satisfaction promised by the commercial world.

Shorter working days, shorter school days, shorter terms, longer holidays, more feasts, more days off, more rest, more play. These are the simple answers to the exhaustion that post-Industrial society has created in individuals, in families, in organisations, and in the earth itself.

ENDS