Should schoolchildren observe a minute’s silence after a national tragedy? Is it too upsetting for them? Or perhaps it’s not upsetting enough, occurring with such regularity that they become inured to the cruelty of the world and assume it’s a regular thing to lose a loved one at a pop concert, or 80 neighbours in a fire? Teachers and experts – one from a grammar school in south-east England – have made the case against these memorials.
Everyone wants to insulate children from horror to a degree, and there would be the distasteful tang of the tragedy vulture around a head who held a minute’s silence for every untimely death that came to their attention. It would be bizarre for a school that was in the sightline of Grenfell Tower to not commemorate it formally. Three counties away, the kids might be unaware of the tragedy, and it might feel crass to draw them into it. Although you could argue that is what national solidarity is, marking events that aren’t necessarily on your doorstep.
Certain ideas around schooling have accompanied the evolution of a neurotic risk culture in parenting. One is that children can be held in a bell jar of innocence, untouched by the dishevelled culture that surrounds them, and this is what responsible parents do (irresponsible ones let their offspring roam across the news, like urchins playing on a bomb site). Another is that school represents and can control a child’s experience of the world, and that whatever is going wrong, teachers should be able to fix. A third is that talking about world events is politicising childhood, and politics pollutes. But not talking about events is political, too. A lot of this stuff is control masquerading as protectiveness, a timeless debate between authoritarianism and openness.
I went to Paris with my daughter shortly after a terrorist attack there, and a woman from Conservative Home said to me in a green room before we were both due to appear on a TV progranme that she would never subject a child of hers to such a mini-break because she wouldn’t want them confronted by the police presence. I replied that my daughter was quite intelligent, and I could probably explain that to her. Openness has opinions of its own, it’s not just the thing we do because we can’t be bothered to protect.
