We preach baby worship but practice baby farming

We have got used to the idea that buzz words are weasel words; they tend to mean just the opposite of what they should.

“Spending more time with the family”- now one of the most weaselly phrases in the language – means anything but. We are supposedly a nation of baby worshippers, obsessed with our “kids” and longing for more time with them.

As usual the opposite is true.

We spend less and less time with our children. We are more and more prepared to hand them over to other people, we have allowed the state to encroach more and more on family life and it emerged that the government is about to nationalize parenthood and family life altogether, so that we have to spend almost no time with them at all.

Charles Clarke, the education secretary, announced a brave new scheme of “wraparound educare’ for all, in his chilling expression. He recognises that working parents need not only education for their children but childcare, too, and he proposes to provide it at school. “Educare”? What kind of talk is that?

“We need,” said Clarke with earnest confidence, “to create a universal one-stop service for parents” and he has committed the government to offering school and social care for children for 10 hours every day round the year, including the school holidays, from infancy.

Given travel to and from school, this could well be an 11-hour day away from home for many children. It has rightly been called boarding without beds. Clarke is proposing to start with pilot schemes, but in fact there are some schools where this kind of thing already exists.

St Bede’s primary school in Bolton is open from 7.30am – 6pm for 51 weeks of the year, providing breakfast, after-school clubs and nursery services for children aged from six weeks to 11 years. From six weeks old means hardly out of the womb. This is baby farming. What else can you call it?

Why not hand babies over at birth and have done with them as our forebears used to do? Why not hang them up by the swaddling bands on a hook in some stranger’s hut? Why not, like wretched wage slaves in the industrial revolution, tie them to the bedstead for a 10-hour day to keep them out of serious harm?

We live in a society where people talk of baby worship and practise baby farming. We talk of community and busily undermine the family. I wish I were surprised that there hasn’t been a public outcry over this, but I’m not.

This might perhaps not be so shocking if all schools were temples of plenty, peace and joy. After all, some children really do enjoy some boarding schools. But state schools are not always such havens. Parents all know that there is a serious shortage of good teachers and there are not nearly enough to give proper individual attention, even during the present short school day.

We know teachers are under-trained, under-paid and demoralized, constantly dropping out or taking stress leave, constantly being replaced by substitutes. We know they often can’t keep order and that bullying is a grave problem in most schools, as is violence in many. We know that too many nursery carers are in every way inadequate in numbers, in training and in continuity of care.

We know that evidence about the quality and the effects of nursery care is disturbing. We know that playing fields are being sold off, that few schools offer much sport and we know that teachers are understandably wary of offering exciting and risky activities for fear of lawsuits.

We know schools have vending machines selling junk food and drink that make children obese. We know that most school meals are rubbish and that children are allowed to choose the unhealthiest food.

If you applied to a pedigree dog society for permission to buy one of its animals and explained that you would be sending it out for care for 10 or 11 hours a day to a kennels down the road it would show you the door as an unfit owner. Wraparound educare is not good enough for a valuable dog or even for a pedigree cat.

Yet we solemnly think it is good enough for our children, or at least our government does.

And it is taxing us more and more heavily so that it can give us our money back in dribs and drabs and allowances and credits here and there to pay for the ferocious cost of this baby farming, so we can then go out to work for the privilege of neglecting our own children and handing them over to the state baby farmers.

“Children,” as Clarke said, “are our most precious asset. How we nurture, care and support them in their early years is a fundamental test of whether a society values individuals and believes in opportunity for all.” How true, for once, how true, whatever he may have meant.

James Whirly

/From The Daily Telegraph, № 11, 2005/

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