Letting them grow

Very soon our children will be returning to school and as always we hope things will have improved. Despite all the ideals raised in the national minimum curriculum, a number of fundamental matters have gone unchanged.

Labelling is still a common practice; in some primary and secondary schools, classes are still very strictly streamed and labelled, especially in years 5 and 6. This practice is unfair, children should not be categorised and judged simply by asking them which class they are in.

This does not happen in the adult world; offices are not graded a, b, c, according to their efficiency because adults protect themselves from these kinds of judgment, so why are we doing this to our children?

A first simple step could simply be the issuing of a circular by the department of education advising all schools to use different class names that do not indicate the academic levels of the classes. One may say that this is all very cosmetic and indeed it is, yet at the end of the day it does make a difference, for calling a class 5 yellow is different from 5E, and yes, the teacher would know the level of the class from the results, yet this would be all more confidential and the clear-cut distinctions between classes would be watered down.

Having experienced this change in the school where I teach, I believe that students are psychologically more equipped to try harder to improve because they are not being labelled as failures. Even groups who score poorly in exams find it inside themselves to keep on trying, as they are not constantly being compared with other much brighter students.

Id-denfil is another indication of how slowly we act when it comes down to helping the young in our schools. How sad, in this day and age, when attractive and exciting books are published all the time, when colours, fantasy and fun are all squeezed into lovely children's books, that the children in our state schools are given a 30-year-old book to read, Id-denfil.

An anachronism, this book contains dull pictures, very unimaginative reading, sexism and some very boring extracts.

I am sorry, but while this stale reader is still used in our schools, I cannot believe that our schools are seriously being helped to overcome illiteracy. And so we get six-year-old Mary, who comes from a book-deprived background, and on her first day in year one, she is given this exciting book called Id-denfil to read.

No wonder Mary loses her innate curiosity very soon, and decides that making an effort to read this book is not really worth the trouble; with cartoons on television, this book is surely no competition.

Of course, schools are now able to provide alternative reading for their pupils, yet the material in Id-denfil continues to be compulsory for pupils.

No wonder teachers in primary schools find it extremely difficult to make their teaching more exciting; with that kind of material what do you expect?

I believe reading has its roots in primary years. It is at this age that children should be falling in love with stories and storytelling. It is this basic fact that will later bear fruit and the young person will be able to express himself clearly in any other language being learnt. Our primary schools should cater to the basics of language, communication and fluency above all, and not bother about being able to write a 250-word composition that is often artificial and very poor.

These kind of stereo-typed, adult-induced compositions are often the end of any natural and exciting individualistic expression.

In later years, in secondary and beyond, this chaining down of expression keeps reoccurring; the same format, same expressions and, of course, the same mistakes, will keep appearing in many of the students' language work.

Pupils who understand the magic of reading in their primary years, will never come across similar problems. It is not the repetition or drilling of grammatical rules that should be practised in primary, but mainly the acquisition of fluency.