On recent more balmy summer days it has been a great pleasure watching children mucking around on beaches, doing what kids have always done at seasides, build sandcastles, play make-believe games, muse, have fun, go with the flow not knowing what is going to next trigger their imaginations. It has been equally nice to be one of the many adults mulling around footpaths, sitting around on benches, not worrying much about having an agenda. This seems an increasingly rare experience in a world where there are more and more pressures, life is incredibly timetabled, increasingly so for children as well as adults, and there is such a lot of focus on achievement, on doing, on things to aim for like grades, and so little emphasis on just being. As Jon Kabat Zinn, the mindfulness guru suggests, maybe we are becoming human doings and not human beings! I worry that just being is becoming a lost art and that life is becoming much poorer as a result.

 School kids as young as 5 are to be encouraged to become entrepreneurs in a new government initiative announced last week, spearheaded by Lord Young and publicly backed by  David Cameron. Much about this worries me, even if we do need to encourage entrepreneurial spirits and there is a certain logic to the plan. While not a Faustian pact, such initiatives give a very clear message about what we as a society value and maybe more importantly, research shows that encouraging business and money oriented attitudes create a likelihood that children's more prosocial and generous character traits will be toned right down as self-interest and more instrumental motives become stronger.  

A version of this appeared in the Telegraph recently, and can be accessed here 

Are results obsessed, league-table crazed state schools churning out pupils who are less moral than their posh public school counterparts, as headmaster Richard Walden recently claimed.? As so often with misconceived hyperbole, his statement contains a kernel of truth, and indeed raises fundamental questions that need answering.  After all, don’t we all want a more moral society, and to raise our kids to be well-rounded human beings who are not only caring of others, embrace and live by cultural and ethical values and are motivated by more than achievement, status and money?

This article is a response to Zoe Williams’ piece in the guardian which can be accessed here.  This piece, which critiqued the use of neuroscience in child protection policy,  has generated considerable controversy. Many letters were published about it, many  upset and surprised that she took this line. Letters can be accessed here. 

Zoe Williams, a journalist whose politics we have generally agreed with,  lines up witnesses for the prosecution against what she sees as inappropriate use of brain science in social policy. She scores some direct hits. Yes, there have been clumsy attempts to grab attention with extreme images of severely neglected shrivelled brains. Yes, some attempts to explain the neuroscience have been crude. But a few examples of bad practice do not invalidate an entire body of rigorous science.

An interesting new study by Professor Alex Piquero in Dallas found a strong link between the age at which young people imagine they will die and the likelihood that they will commit crimes. Basically youth who expect to not be alive much past their teens were far more likely to be involved in criminal activity. Indeed those with the least hope for the future offended at higher rates and committed more serious crimes. This was a complex study with a sample of over 1400 offenders who were followed for 7 years.

One of the perplexing political questions of the moment is why, instead of more protest about issues such as poverty, unemployment, the lack of job security, as well as maybe climate change and a host of issues that are affecting people’s lives for the worse, we rather see people whose backs are against the wall becoming economically and in other ways  more conservative. hence the increased support for far right parties such as UKIP in the UK. We have often seen extreme political views flourish at times of crisis.