The summer holiday is here at last and — no matter the dimming of the dratted memory — most of us never forget what it was to stare into the longest six weeks of the year, fit to burst with possibilities not yet dreamt.
There will be friends and games and trips and films and silly fights and clever texts and, if the parents will only stay out long enough, there will be mischief in dollops as big as the frozen gloop on the cone from the singing ice-cream van. Older kids will doss, blissfully, uselessly, around the shopping malls; younger ones will get up to absolutely no good with all manner of peculiar props — mine, I still recall, had much to do with newts, pet snails and grass snakes.
Best of all, without the callous call of school tomorrow, there will be wicked late bedtimes, while children do what children do best: enjoy themselves.
Sadly, there’s rather less fun in store for teachers from two schools in Manchester and South Tyneside, where new vanities in social meddling have led to the announcement of a pilot scheme in which 2,000 state school pupils are to be taught “happiness”. So while the children are about to spend their holidays happily out playing, their teachers will presumably spend the summer mugging up on how to ensure that the children are, er, happily out playing.
We have yet to hear exactly how the lessons will go, although it is already clear that a rousing chorus of “if you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands” isn’t quite going to cut it any longer. We are told that a Professor Martin Seligman, from the University of Pennsylvania, will be instructing teachers to instruct pupils how to “think positively” and to use role play to “challenge negative thoughts”.
Should the experiment be deemed a success (how will they know — smile-o-meters at the end?), the idea is that these classes in cheer will join reading, writing and sums in the national curriculum.
This is not a project born in isolation. Happiness initiatives for children are coming at us thick and fast. In the past few weeks we have also learnt that Prozac has been approved for the use of children as young as eight — yes, eight — and that unprecedented numbers of prescriptions are being written for Ritalin, specially designed to cosh our sweethearts into at least acting as if they are enjoying themselves.
In the short term, perhaps the kind of slightly hysterical short term of the laughter provoked by a good tickle, it is possible that all such measures make children feel better about their world.
In the long term, those same children will be failed if they are not also taught at least as much about misery as about joy. Indeed, what we really need, if only as a counter-balance to the feelgood fellowship, is lessons in unhappiness.
Happy is what most children can instinctively do. What they need to be taught is how to do the opposite. The first truth they should learn is that no matter how good the drug, the shrink, the teacher, the counselling or the safeguard, there are times in their lives when they are going to be unhappy.
We may preach an inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. It is far from the same as a right to attain it. Terrible things will jump up and smack them when they least expect it, even — especially? — at a very young age, if for no other reason than that life’s not fair. So deal with it.
The second truth, disturbingly denied in the vogue to kill off bleak thoughts, is that it is proper, sane and sensible to respond to bad things by feeling bad. If the dog dies, the one which has slept on the bedcovers and kept wardrobe monsters at bay for an entire nine-year-old life, then a little piece of the childhood and thus of the child dies with it. Nothing can make the bereaved feel better about Rover decomposing under the bush where daddy planted him or stop him constantly thinking about it — I knew one child who repeatedly dug up the dog to check on the “progress” — but all it is, really, is a kid learning about grief. And about ever and always and never again.
Should he move house or school, as many will do over the summer and leave friends, a child may tip into the steepest of miserable declines because, by the same token, he is learning about loss.
Sometimes nothing ever hurts again quite like the moment when the best friend is unfaithful and elopes with another, during the lunch hour, down to the illicit chip shop; lessons, again, in rejection and loneliness.
Wretched? Of course. Wrong to be? No. Normal, rational, healthy. But why should we interfere with it? If it is not a sickness and if there is no pathology, then by definition it needs neither treatment nor cure. Prozac does not bring the dog back. Even what we once called “getting it off your chest” and are now supposed to call “talking therapy” can’t yet raise the dead. And no matter how many “happiness” lessons you introduce it won’t stop sad things happening.
There are, obviously, some children who experience psychological illness — but if we believe estimates such as “clinical depression affects one in 10 children”, then it is us who need our heads examined.
Such calculations are done by drugs companies, costly therapists and, now, professors of “happiness”; those, in short, who stand to gain by persuading us that our children neither deserve nor can bear to feel lousy for more than a few days without our running therapeutic interference.
If we buy off misery, in the same way that we buy off headlice, we will raise a generation without any immunity to it; one that thinks happiness is a right rather than a gift, a need rather than a pleasure and a constant rather than an ephemeral moment in spun gold that will pass but will return — just as soon as someone takes a child by the hand and says, come on: ever seen a grass snake?
- Bill Woods was a friend of mine; a lawyer, a poet and an enthusiastic sportsman. Nobody’s idea of a fool — but, as it would turn out, foolish nonetheless. A few years ago in his native Atlanta, Georgia, he found himself in the rudest of health but tripping over a mountain of bills. The obvious solution, therefore, at least as he saw it, was to suspend his hellishly expensive medical insurance. Just for a while, till things looked up.
While uninsured, however, he became suddenly ill and was diagnosed with heart disease. Because of the severity of the diagnosis, no insurance company would touch him. Without insurance, he could not afford the entirely routine drugs he needed; without the drugs, he could barely work part-time, so he became poorer still as any hope of treatment receded further from his grasp.
On Wednesday this week, alone in his Atlanta apartment, Bill died of a heart attack. Just another educated, white, middle-class man in the wealthiest and most developed country in the western world to die for want of a bottle of pills. Hardly worth mentioning, really. Except for this: on Tuesday I was having a grumble about the National Health Service.
India Knight is away
