Blots on the White Paper
Sir: It would seem that your education correspondent, Rhodes Boyson (January 20), has had no experience at all of two-to-fiveyear-old children and their mothers. Possibly he is also unaware of the difference between nursery schools and day care centres.
Nursery schools here begin with perhaps a two-hour 'day.' Some programmes for older children may last for up to four or five hours — hardly "removing the child at birth from its parents," Many schools are co-operative projects with parents taking turns to work for one session a week with their child's class. This is officially regarded as exactly the "weekly education classes to show how mothers can advance their own and their children's oracy and literacy" suggested in the article — except that here we recognise that children under five have fathers as well as mothers.
Dr Bowlby has stressed the vital importance of the permanent bond between mother and small child, but the misinterpretation of his findings as an insistance that mother and child should never be out of each other's sight before the fifth birthday is a nonsense that he and his colleagues have found very embarrassing.
Children need social experience with their peers, and with adults beside their mother, just as young monkeys do. Perhaps this might once have been provided within the extended family group, but the claustrophobic atmosphere of the present-day isolated nuclear family can be unbearably stressful to both mother and child. " Experienced teachers in reception classess " can pick out nursery school children from the others here too — the others tend to be bewildered, frightened, or hysterical at the abrupt change into large, mass-organised classes.
Children between two and five can profit from experience with a range of materials and ideas that even the most dedicated mother would find it hard to provide. I remember finger painting and tame pythons at our nursery school, for example.
In short, we don't send our children to nursery school because we are feckless and unmotherly. We do it because our children love it (try explaining to a two-year-old about the awful hiatus of the weekend) and because we and they know that nursery school offers • something the most saintly parent can't provide single handed, and helps mothers to be nicer to children, and vice versa, the rest of the time.
T. E. Rowell
. 2301 Rose Street, Berkeley, Cali. fornia 94708 •
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