The Story of Childhood (32 page)

There are a lot of play-fights at school, but some of them are serious, and the teachers break them up. Sometimes you
just get an incident report and it goes into your record. Sometimes you get held back after school.

The worst punishment Majid's ever had was a phone call home which was for swinging on his chair and for calling out. His voice rises in indignation. ‘ 'Cos some teachers, I hate them so much 'cos they know you want to answer the question, they know I want to do it right and they don't pick me for the fun of it. They see me getting frustrated and they want me to get in trouble, 'cos I have this urge to call out, and it's their fault if they don't pick me!'

His teachers think he's naughty but they think he's all right. ‘I'm intelligent, but I'm naughty.'

Over the weeks that Majid had been discussing his school – the boy who made the rape threat, the good teachers who are flexible, the bad ones who pick on you for calling out – a minor wave of child-panic about classroom discipline was sweeping the country.

In April 2005, Channel 5 screened a documentary by the film-maker Roger Graef, who had equipped a supply teacher with hidden cameras to expose the extremity of insolence and disruption she encountered. The National Association of Head Teachers condemned irresponsible parents who sent children into school lacking basic social training. New figures revealed that the number of physical assaults on teachers had doubled in the space of a year. At the beginning of May, Education Secretary Ruth Kelly called for ‘zero tolerance' of disruptive behaviour in the classroom, while the Conservatives offered up the dubious panacea of fast-track expulsions.

In the same period, the annual report from the chief inspector of schools, David Bell, received selective coverage, fuelling the impression that the nation's schoolchildren were beyond
control. But, as Fiona Millar pointed out at the time, Bell actually reported that discipline was satisfactory or better in the majority of schools, and poor in 1 per cent of primary schools and 9 per cent of secondary schools. ‘In short,' she concluded, ‘there is a chronic problem in several hundred schools, most of them secondary schools with an above-average number of children on free school meals.'

Since leaving Downing Street, where she worked as an aide to Cherie Blair for many years, Millar has proved herself a passionate but cool-headed advocate for the state education system. She noted that, while many schools with generally good behaviour did suffer the kind of low-level disruption that the education secretary was talking about, blaming parents was not the answer.

‘Most parents of low-level disrupters are doing their best,' she wrote. ‘They can be let down by an unstimulating curriculum, headteachers who don't manage behaviour consistently and teachers who can't hold their pupils' attention.' Which is certainly Majid's experience. ‘A programme of behaviour initiatives won't work without acknowledging that children also have rights: to be well taught in schools where expectations are clear.'

It is hardly surprising that teachers, as well as pupils, struggle with the imperatives of standardisation and centralisation, though many continue to create stimulating learning experiences in spite of the strictures of the National Curriculum. Latest educational theory is moving away from grading, towards a more comment-based approach, and the Department for Education and Skills' own five-year strategy emphasises that the child is ‘a partner in learning, not a passive recipient'. But in socially and ethnically mixed innercity schools, where the aim is to get all children – no matter how unable or unwilling their parents – to a useful level of
literacy and numeracy by the time they leave, perhaps a degree of plodding is inevitable.

While Majid may not be exemplary in class, he has the sense and the family support to work hard when it's important. When he grows up, if Spanish footballing doesn't work out, he says he'd like to get a job with cars, designing them. And he'd like to open a restaurant, or a business of some sort. ‘The thing that I would want is a McDonald's that is hallal, 'cos you'd get much more custom. The Muslim people that go to McDonalds, they only buy the Filet-O-Fish [he pronounces it the French way] which they don't even like. But if you do it the hallal way you'll get much more profits.'

The following weekend, it's the beginning of the spring half-term holiday, and Majid is planning to play football all day every day. His mum says she's going to feed him like a pig! He's too skinny. Sometimes I wonder if his noise and bluster are an attempt to take up the extra space he'd like his body to. But the thing is he's fussy about food. He doesn't like fried onions and he doesn't like aubergines and they're in Arabic food a lot. So he eats junk food, but they say that it makes you obese, and he's
still
skinny. He pats his slim tummy.

He's already had some of his exam results back. In maths he got two down from the very top grade. But he failed his art. ‘I don't care about art! I've got no
passion
for it!'

At school this week there was excitement over crutches. ‘My friend, he broke his leg. He fell on the stairs with his bike. He came in yesterday and everyone started borrowing his crutches and fighting with them! And in my history lesson, I was just playing with his crutches and I got in trouble! For no reason!!' Majid has an unsurpassable talent for this.

He has some homework to do this week too: a thousand-word essay for geography on ecosystems; some maths questions; and for English they have to make a holiday brochure about a city. But mainly he'll be in the park. Sometimes when he's playing football, older people come and play with them. It's like a manhood connection.

‘If I wanted to I could just deceive my parents and say I was going to the park then go to Oxford Street. When my parents let me do something, I don't take advantage of it. I do the thing I told them I would.'

Majid isn't sure whether children deserve more rights. ‘Yeah and no. Yeah is because when I went to a funfair I wanted to go on the bumper cars but you had to be fourteen. Little minor things like that. But no for major things like drinking and smoking.'

He thinks that if children had proper rights they would go over the limit. ‘But sometimes, because they're children, people say they can't do stuff. When we play football in the park, if there's adults they say, “You can't join us 'cos you're too little”, when we're sometimes better. Or in Apollo you can't buy DVDs 'cos you're under sixteen. And you can't pay for petrol in the petrol station for your uncle when he's in a hurry. There's an airline called Ryanair and you can't travel by yourself if you're under sixteen.'

Majid shows little confidence in his peers' capacity for moderation. ‘As things are going now, it's kind of corrupting, with drinking and that. Some people, their parents smoke weed and then they get into it. Or some music has songs about violence, saying you have to do it. They think if you're being bad you get respect. They're all in groups, they all look like they're going to pull something off.'

Majid says he feels unsafe on the streets. ‘Anyone could come and jump you.' He acted it out in drama yesterday,
because it happens all the time. ‘My friend who was on crutches, I was in his group. My and my other friend, we acted as we were brothers, we jumped him and took his phone. My friend on crutches went to his dad, then my other friend who acted as his dad came to get us, and he beat me up. And then my friend who had crutches came and beat me up for real!' He rotates his arm to show the latest bruises. ‘He jumped me for real in front of the teacher, and she thought it was acting.' He chuckles noisily. Once in drama they pretended to be Taliban and beat up the Americans!

Children's confinement has reached troubling levels in recent years, but being outside can have consequences too. It is other children, not adults, who are mainly at risk from young people's antisocial behaviour. Young males in particular are more likely to be victims than perpetrators of street crime. Increased surveillance of childhood has not resulted in increased security. Majid has the right not only to be outdoors, but also to feel safe when he's there.

Many of the policies that most curtail children's rights, like curfew orders or ASBOs, may also be seen as an avoidance of adult participation in socialising children. What used to be the responsibility of a whole community is now left to parents and,
in extremis
, the police. While adults invest hugely in their own offspring, they have neither energy nor inclination to get involved in the upbringing of other people's children.

It follows that children's rights cannot be exercised in isolation. Their rights to provision, protection and participation laid out in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child must be balanced with adults' responsibility to facilitate them, and children's own responsibility to exercise those rights with consideration for others.

But children's rights need not be an affront to adult authority. As Mary John, a developmental psychologist widely recognised for her work on children and power, writes: ‘Children are not out to grab some of the action of invested power. What is involved [is] changing the relationship between adults and children so that, through participation and voicing, each person works towards understanding and respecting each other's realities.'

Betrand Russell issued the challenge that ‘no political theory is adequate unless it is applicable to children as well as to men and women'. But it is a far more paternalistic philosophical tradition that has prevailed in modern times. John Stuart Mill insisted that children should be ‘protected against their own actions as well as against external injury'. Liberty was only an inalienable right in the case of adults. For children, well-being – achieved through altruistic adult interventions – took precedence. And Kant denied that children had the ‘reason' that affords individuals the ability to make rational choices for themselves.

In some ways, this is akin to how women's and ethnic minorities' rights – or lack of them – used to be framed. Indeed, it has been argued that children are now in the position once occupied by the idealised bourgeois wife and mother, as historian Harry Hendrick puts it: ‘pampered and loved, an essential ornament serving as testimony to domestic bliss, but subservient to male power.'

In his introduction to
The Children's Rights Handbook
, Bob Franklin offers a number of sensible grounds for rejecting this paternalism. Firstly, plenty of research evidence exists to show that children can make informed decisions and do reveal a competence for rational thought. Secondly, if children are not allowed to make decisions because they have no experience, then how will they ever get started? ‘It does not follow that
children should not make decisions simply because they might make the wrong ones. It is important not to confuse the right to do something with doing the right thing.'

There is nothing wrong with making mistakes, according to Franklin, nor are adults universally skilled decision-makers. Fifthly, ‘allocating rights according to an age principle is incoherent and arbitrary, with different age requirements for adult rights applying in different spheres of activity.' Sixth, he argues that rights should be allocated according to individual competence rather than limited to the developmental hierarchy of age and stage.

Seventh, the denial of participation rights to children is unfair because they can do nothing to change the structures that exclude them. And finally, writes Franklin, ‘to define everyone under eighteen years of age as a child, or more accurately as a “non-adult”, obscures the inherent diversity of childhood and attempts to impose a homogeneity upon children which the plurality of their intellectual and emotional needs, skills, competences and achievements undermines.'

The crux of the matter is whether adults and children are ontologically different. If children are regarded as ‘naturally' incompetent, do adults have a ‘natural' right to exert power over them? The Norwegian academic Jens Qvortrup, one of the pioneers of children's rights theory, has argued that, to justify this position, the actor-status of the adult must be qualitively more important than that of the child. It must also be beyond doubt that adults will always behave in the best interests of children. ‘It is more likely,' he concludes, ‘that the adult world doesn't recognise children's praxis because competence is defined with reference to adults' praxis.'

Despite their potential, children's rights are poorly served
in the UK. Children can, by law, be assaulted by their parents if it meets the requirement of ‘reasonable chastisement'. A young offender can be tried in an adult court and named and shamed in newspapers. And the widespread use of curfew orders allows police to pick up people under sixteen who are out after 9 p.m. without a supervising adult.

Meanwhile, across the globe, children are proving themselves time and again to be thoroughly competent. Ten-year-olds head households in war-torn African states. Child labourers unionise in India. One study found that three-year-olds could plan, budget for, buy and cook a midday meal at their playgroup. Because children can doesn't always mean children should. But ordinary children in extraordinary circumstances are continually revealing capabilities that remain unexplored in their more fortunate peers. The possibilities offered by a rights-based approach need not deprive children of their childhoods nor dissolve into a
reductio ad absurdam
of votes for toddlers.

Lowering the voting age to sixteen is regularly proposed as a way of increasing young people's participation in civil society. In February 2006, the report of Helena Kennedy's Power Commission suggested as much, and was endorsed by Gordon Brown.

It has been argued that lowering the voting age would simply increase the proportion of those who don't vote. Certainly, there seems to be minimal public support for the move – polling by the Electoral Commission, which in April 2004 recommended that the voting age remain at 18, found that only 25 per cent of the public wanted the age reduced. Nor do young people's voting habits suggest otherwise. In the 2005 election, national turnout was 61 per cent, compared with 37 per cent amongst 18–24 year olds – down 2 per cent from 2001.