Every September 1st, the obligatory sentence on social media is: “Oh, what are you celebrating that first day of school for, as if it were I don’t know what; my father walked me to the gate and after that I did everything by myself!” That view is strange; the beginning of schooling is one of the most important events in a child’s life. Try to remember your own first day of school. I am convinced that you remember what you wore, what your teacher said, and that feeling of nervousness and excitement.
“I will do everything so that my children have opportunities we did not have,” is a common parental mantra. We choose schools, ask around about which teacher is the best, who will be in their class. But how much can we actually choose? When my children started school, I realized that the pattern was almost completely the same. Which is, at the very least, strange. I lived in a different era. They were born with the internet, in an advanced information age.
As my interests changed through parenting, I began to pay attention to other, different things abroad. In person and through the media. Here are four small examples.
During a walk in Germany, I noticed preschool-age children on bicycles with helmets on their heads. Neatly lined up, they were following a young woman in a vest. My sister told me that this is a mandatory part of school enrollment. Children take a bicycle-riding exam, learn traffic rules and the route from home to school. The school administration encourages children and parents to make the bicycle their means of transport and to come to school on their own. Suddenly that sentence from the beginning of the text took on a completely different meaning. Yes, children need to be made independent. School is indeed a big first step when they separate from the family. But it is important for the whole society, and it is something quite different when we prepare them with a lot of care and love and real support than when we say, “There’s the school, I went by myself too!”
Sometime in autumn, when the rains start, the organizational problems of parents with schoolchildren start too. That insurmountable atmospheric phenomenon means: raincoat, boots, umbrella, spare socks in the backpack, a ride to school, a branched network of friends and family organizing if rain suddenly falls while the children are at school so that not a single drop accidentally hits them. And meal preparation, because due to that terrible phenomenon of water falling from the sky, the children will not leave the school building. That’s how it was when I was a child, and I passed those habits on to my own parenting. My friend also took that experience to the Netherlands. A country colder than ours with much more rain.
And so it happened to her that sudden rain started while the children were at school and she was at work. You know the procedure: she took a free morning, packed spare clothes, umbrellas, raincoats, and headed to school. There she found an astonished teacher with the children, who were having their regular PE class. In the yard. In the rain. “Ma’am, children know how to play in the rain too. They will dry off. The sky isn’t falling, it’s not a storm. Relax.” The school, of course, has raincoats prepared for every child in the classroom. My embarrassed, caring friend returned to work after this incredible event. And a change happened in her life too. She says the rain no longer disrupts her plans for cycling. At thirty, she learned what her children learned in the lower grades in the Dutch education system: there is no bad weather, only inadequate clothing.
I recently watched a Finnish film. Part of it takes place in a school. The children are in the school kitchen. Boys and girls are making pudding. Imagine that. Well, I could hardly wait to get rid of that despised subject “home economics” at school. Because I wanted to learn serious things. Not nonsense like how to sew on a button, crochet, knit, and embroider. And now children in developed Finland are learning to cook? Wait. Well, I am still learning to knit, crochet, and embroider. From YouTube. Here we go again. Home economics was long ago abolished as a subject in the countries of the former Yugoslavia. Sixth-graders learn important, serious things like the difference between organisms whose genetic material is located in the nucleus and those whose genetic material is located in the cytoplasm. And then I truly felt endlessly sorry that my children do not have a subject where they can learn how to safely turn the stove on and off, how to fry an egg, and how to caramelize sugar.
I recently read a newspaper article about how the parents of some immigrants were astonished that their child received a school tablet and that in the first days her only obligation was to charge it properly and use the battery rationally. The teacher checks the tablet at the beginning and end of the day and writes a + or – for her. Well, that really is something. It’s not enough that at home I have to fight with electronic devices, but now their tablet has to be homework too. Imagine that—I send them to school to learn, not to play and have fun.
Two days later I caught myself lecturing my teenager that he must be responsible about charging his phone, that he must be rational about consumption and keep the mobile on the charger as little as possible, that he should set a time when he charges it, and that the most important thing is to have a full battery when he is outside. I told him that I would not do it for him and that he must be responsible. Heh, some mom in Sweden doesn’t need this speech, because the children have already learned it at school.
The fact that we romanticize the time of our own growing up is completely normal. Every generation thinks it was the best. But there is no going back to the old ways. We have waded deep into the information age, and old systems must adapt. Electronic devices are not going anywhere. But let’s turn the story around and teach children how to use them. How to use maps, how to know where they can find verified information, how to protect themselves on the internet, and how to take care of devices and save energy. Let’s teach them practical skills. The little ones how to tie their shoelaces, the older ones how to fry eggs and make tea, how to ride a bicycle and get to school safely.
And most importantly, school can and should be fun and play. What we believed—that school is not a joke and that real schools are serious and strict, that grades are the measure of knowledge—eh, we will have to leave that in the past. Otherwise, that myth that our children are better educated and more skillful than their peers abroad will be just a beautiful myth from the past.
