In Praise of Slow

by Carl Honore

  Nevertheless, Kliemt buzzes with a messianic zeal. Like other Tempo Giusto members, he believes the movement could be the biggest revolution to hit classical music in more than a century. And he takes heart from the progress made by other Slow campaigns. “Forty years ago, people laughed at organic farming, but now it looks like it will become the national standard in Germany,” says Kliemt. “Perhaps forty years from now, everyone will be playing Mozart more slowly.”

  While the Tempo Giusto movement seeks to rewrite the history of classical music, others are using musical slowness to mount a symbolic challenge to the cult of speed.

  An old lighthouse on the banks of the Thames River in east London is now the venue for what may be the longest concert ever staged. The project is called Longplayer and will last a thousand years. The music is based on a twenty-minute recording of notes played on Tibetan singing bowls. Every two minutes, an Apple iMac plays six segments of the recording at different pitches, yielding a soundtrack that will never repeat itself through a full millennium of performance. Jem Finer, the creator of Longplayer, wants to take a stand against the narrow horizons of our speed-crazed world. “With everything getting faster and faster, and attention spans getting shorter, we have forgotten how to slow down,” he tells me. “I wanted to make something that evokes time as a long, slow process, rather than as something to rush through.” Sitting at the top of a lighthouse with views across the Thames, listening to the deep, meditative hum of the singing bowls, is very much a slowing experience. Longplayer reaches a wider audience than those who make the pilgrimage to East London. During 2000, a second iMac piped the soothing tones into the Rest Zone at the Millennium Dome across the river. Dutch national radio gave it four hours of uninterrupted airtime in 2001. Even now, Longplayer is broadcast on the Internet.

  Another marathonic musical event is underway in Halberstadt, a small German town famous for its ancient organs. The local St. Burchardi Church, a twelfth-century pile that was sacked by Napoleon, is the venue for a concert that will end in the year 2640, sponsors permitting. The featured work was written in 1992 by John Cage, the avant-garde American composer. Its title, appropriately enough, is ASLSP, or As Slow As Possible. How long the piece should last has long been a bone of contention among the cognoscenti. Some thought twenty minutes enough; hardliners insisted on nothing short of infinity. After consulting a panel of musicologists, composers, organists, theologians and philosophers, Halberstadt settled on 639 years—the exact time that had passed since the creation of the town’s renowned Blockwerk organ.

  To do justice to Cage’s piece, the organizers built an organ that will last for centuries. Weights attached to the keyboard hold down notes long after the organist has left. The ASLSP recital began in September 2001 with a pause that lasted seventeen months. During that time, the only sound was that of the organ bellows inflating. In February 2003, an organist played the first three notes, which will reverberate through the church until the summer of 2004, when the next two notes will be played.

  The notion of a concert so slow that no one who attends opening night will live to hear the final note clearly strikes a chord with the public. Hundreds of spectators descend on Halberstadt each time an organist comes to play the next set of notes. During the long months in between, visitors flock to soak up the residual sounds echoing round the church.

  I attended the ASLSP concert in the summer of 2002, when the bellows were still filling with air, and before the organ had been installed. Norbert Kleist, a commercial lawyer and member of the John Cage Project, was my guide. We met outside the St. Burchardi Church. Across the yard, old farm buildings had been converted into social housing and a furniture workshop. Near the church stood a modern sculpture, made up of five disjointed iron pillars. “It represents broken time,” explained Kleist, as he dug a set of keys from his pocket.

  We stepped through a heavy wooden door into the church, which was spectacularly empty. No pews, no altar, no icons—just a gravel floor and a high ceiling crisscrossed with wooden beams. The air was cool and smelled of old masonry. Pigeons flapped about on the windowsills overhead. Housed in a large oak box, the organ bellows squatted like a miniature power station in one of the transepts, huffing and puffing in the half-light. The whooshing sound they emitted was gentle, almost musical, like a steam engine pulling into the station at the end of a long journey.

  Kleist described the 639-year rendition of As Slow As Possible as a challenge to the breathless, haste-ridden culture of the modern world. As we walked away from the church, leaving the organ to fill its vast lungs, he said, “Maybe this is the start of a revolution in slowness.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHILDREN: RAISING AN UNHURRIED

  CHILD

  The most effective kind of education is that a child should

  play amongst lovely things.

  —PLATO (427–347 BC)

  HARRY LEWIS IS DEAN of the undergraduate school at Harvard. In early 2001, he attended a meeting at which students were invited to air their grievances about staff at the Ivy League university. One undergraduate kicked up a memorable fuss. He wanted to double major in Biology and English, and cram all the work into three, instead of the usual four, years. He was exasperated with his academic advisor, who was unable, or unwilling, to devise a schedule to accommodate all the courses. As he listened to the student moan about being held back, Lewis felt a light bulb flash above his head.

  “I remember thinking, ‘Wait a minute, you need help, but not in the way you think you do,’” says the dean. “You need to take time to think about what is really important, rather than trying to figure out how to pack as much as you can into the shortest possible schedule.”

  After the meeting, Lewis began to reflect on how the twenty-first-century student has become a disciple of hurry. From there it was a short step to speaking out against the scourge of overstuffed schedules and accelerated degree programs. In the summer of 2001, the dean wrote an open letter to every first-year undergraduate at Harvard. It was an impassioned plea for a new approach to life on campus and beyond. It was also a neat précis of the ideas that lie at the heart of the Slow philosophy. The letter, which now goes out to Harvard freshmen every year, is entitled: Slow Down.

  Over seven pages, Lewis makes the case for getting more out of university—and life—by doing less. He urges students to think twice before racing through their degrees. It takes time to master a subject, he says, pointing out that top medical, law and business schools increasingly favour mature candidates with more to offer than an “abbreviated and intense undergraduate education.” Lewis warns against piling on too many extracurricular activities. What is the point, he asks, of playing lacrosse, chairing debates, organizing conferences, acting in plays and editing a section of the campus newspaper if you end up spending your whole Harvard career in overdrive, striving not to fall behind schedule? Much better to do fewer things and have time to make the most of them.

  When it comes to academic life, Lewis favours the same less-is-more approach. Get plenty of rest and relaxation, he says, and be sure to cultivate the art of doing nothing. “Empty time is not a vacuum to be filled,” writes the dean. “It is the thing that enables the other things on your mind to be creatively rearranged, like the empty square in the 4 × 4 puzzle that makes it possible to move the other fifteen pieces around.” In other words, doing nothing, being Slow, is an essential part of good thinking.

  Slow Down is not a charter for slackers and born-again beatniks. Lewis is as keen on hard work and academic success as the next Harvard heavyweight. His point is simply that a little selective slowness can help students to live and work better. “In advising you to think about slowing down and limiting your structured activities, I do not mean to discourage you from high achievement, indeed from the pursuit of extraordinary excellence,” he concludes. “But you are more likely to sustain the intense effort needed to accomplish first-rate work in one area if you allow yourself some leisure time, some recreation,
some time for solitude.”

  His cri de coeur comes not a moment too soon. In our turbocharged world, the hurry virus has spread from adulthood into the younger years. These days, children of all ages are growing up faster. Six-year-olds organize their social lives with cellphones, and teenagers launch businesses from their bedrooms. Anxiety about body shape, sex, consumer brands and careers starts earlier and earlier. Childhood itself seems to be getting shorter, with more girls now hitting puberty before their teens. Young people today are certainly busier, more scheduled, more rushed than my generation ever was. Recently, a teacher I know approached the parents of a child in her care. She felt the boy was spending too long at school and was enrolled in too many extracurricular activities. Give him a break, she suggested. The father was furious. “He has to learn to do a ten-hour day, just like me,” he snapped. The child was four.

  In 1989, David Elkind, an American psychologist, published a book called The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon. As the title suggests, Elkind warned against the vogue for rushing kids into adulthood. How many people took notice? Apparently very few. A decade later, the average kid is more hurried than ever.

  Children are not born obsessed with speed and productivity—we make them that way. Single-parent homes put extra pressure on kids to shoulder adult responsibilities. Advertisers encourage them to become consumers earlier. Schools teach them to live by the clock and use time as efficiently as possible. Parents reinforce that lesson by packing their schedules with extracurricular activities. Everything gives children the message that less is not more, and that faster is always better. One of the first phrases my son learned to say was: “Come on! Hurry up!”

  Competition spurs many parents to rush their children. We all want our offspring to succeed in life. In a busy world, that means putting them on the fast track in everything—school, sports, art, music. It is no longer enough to keep up with the Joneses’ children; now, our own little darlings have to outpace them in every discipline.

  The fear that one’s kids may fall behind is not new. Back in the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson warned parents not to dither: “Whilst you stand deliberating which book your son shall read first, another boy has read both.” In the 24/7 global economy, however, the pressure to stay ahead of the pack is more ferocious than ever, leading to what experts call “hyper-parenting,” the compulsive drive to perfect one’s children. To give their offspring a head start, ambitious parents play Mozart to them in the womb, teach them sign language before they are six months old and use Baby Webster flash cards to teach them vocabulary from their first birthday. Computer camps and motivational seminars now accept kids as young as four. Golf lessons start at two. With everyone else fast-tracking their offspring, the pressure to join the race is immense. The other day I came across an ad for a BBC foreign language course for children. “Speak French at 3! Spanish at 7!” screamed the headline. “If you wait, it will be too late!” My first instinct was to rush to the phone to place an order. My second instinct was to feel guilty for not having acted on the first.

  In a cut-throat world, school is a battleground where the only thing that matters is coming top of the class. Nowhere is that more true than in East Asia, where education systems are built on the principle of “exam hell.” Just to keep pace, millions of kids across the region spend evenings and weekends at institutions called “cram schools.” Devoting eighty hours a week to academic work is not uncommon.

  In the headlong dash for higher international test scores, schools in the English-speaking world have been especially keen to emulate the East Asian model. Over the last two decades, governments have embraced the doctrine of “intensification,” which means piling on the pressure with more homework, more exams and a rigid curriculum. Often the toil starts before formal school. At his nursery school in London, my son started learning—not very successfully—how to hold a pen and write at the age of three. Private tutoring is also booming in the West, at younger and younger ages. American parents hoping to win a place in the right kindergarten send their four-year-olds to be coached on interview techniques. London tutors take children as young as three.

  Intensification is not confined to schooling, either. In between lessons, many children dash from one extracurricular activity to the next, leaving them no time to relax, play on their own or let their imaginations wander. No time to be Slow.

  Children increasingly pay a price for leading rushed lives. Kids as young as five now suffer from upset stomachs, headaches, insomnia, depression and eating disorders brought on by stress. Like everyone else in our “always-on” society, many children get too little sleep nowadays. This can make them cranky, jumpy and impatient. Sleep-deprived kids have more trouble making friends. And they stand a greater chance of being underweight, since deep sleep triggers the release of human growth hormone.

  When it comes to learning, putting children on the fast track often does more harm than good. The American Academy of Pediatrics warns that specializing in a sport at too young an age can cause physical and psychological damage. The same goes for education. A growing body of evidence suggests that children learn better when they learn at a slower pace. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, professor of child psychology at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, recently tested 120 American preschool kids. Half went to nursery schools that stressed social interaction and a playful approach to learning; the rest attended nursery schools that rushed them towards academic achievement, using what experts call the “drill and kill” style of teaching. Hirsh-Pasek found that children from the more relaxed, Slower environment turned out less anxious, more eager to learn and better able to think independently.

  In 2003, Hirsh-Pasek co-authored Einstein Never Used Flash Cards: How Our Children REALLY Learn—and Why They Need to Play More and Memorize Less. The book is packed with research debunking the myth that “early learning” and “academic acceleration” can build better brains. “When it comes to raising and teaching children, the modern belief that ‘faster is better’ and that we must ‘make every moment count’ is simply wrong,” says Hirsh-Pasek. “When you look at the scientific evidence, it is clear that children learn better and develop more rounded personalities when they learn in a more relaxed, less regimented, less hurried way.”

  In East Asia, the punishing work ethic that once made the region’s schools the envy of the world is clearly backfiring. Pupils are losing their edge in international test scores, and failing to develop the creative skills needed in the information economy. Increasingly, East Asian students are rebelling against the study-till-you-drop ethos. Crime and suicide rates are rising, and truancy, once regarded as a Western problem, has reached epidemic proportions. Over a hundred thousand Japanese primary and junior high students play hooky for more than a month each year. Many others refuse to go to school at all.

  Right across the industrial world, though, there is a growing backlash against the hurry-up approach to childhood. Lewis’s Slow Down letter is a hit with everyone from newspaper columnists to students and staff. Parents with kids at Harvard show it to their younger children. “Apparently, it’s like a bible in some families,” says Lewis. Many of the ideas in Slow Down are gaining ground in the media. Parenting magazines run regular features on the perils of pushing youngsters too hard. Every year brings a fresh crop of books by psychologists and educators making the scientific case against the “roadrunner” approach to raising children.

  Not long ago, the New Yorker published a cartoon that summed up the growing fear that modern youngsters are being denied a real childhood. Two primary-school boys are walking down a street, books under their arms, baseball caps on their heads. With a world-weariness beyond his years, one mutters to the other: “So many toys—so little unstructured time.”

  We have been here before. Like much of the Slow movement, the battle to give children back their childhood has roots in the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, the modern notion of childhood as a time of innocence and imagination grew ou
t of the Romantic movement, which first swept across Europe in the late eighteenth century. Until then, children were seen as mini-adults who needed to be made employable as soon as possible. In education, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French philosopher, rang in the changes by attacking the tradition of teaching the young as though they were grown-ups. In Emile, his landmark treatise on schooling children in accordance with nature, he wrote: “Childhood has its own way of seeing, thinking, and feeling, and nothing is more foolish than to try to substitute ours for theirs.” In the nineteenth century, reformers turned their sights on the evils of child labour in the factories and mines that powered the new industrial economy. In 1819, Coleridge coined the term “white slaves” to describe the children toiling in English cotton factories. By the late 1800s, Britain was starting to move children out of the workplace and into the classroom, to give them a proper childhood.

  Today, educators and parents around the world are once again taking steps to allow young people the freedom to slow down, to be children. In my search for interviewees, I post messages on a few parenting websites. Within days, my inbox is crammed with emails from three continents. Some are from teenagers lamenting their haste-ridden lives. An Australian girl named Jess describes herself as a “rushed teen” and tells me “I have no time for anything!” But most of the emails come from parents enthusing about the various ways their kids are decelerating.

  Let’s start in the classroom, where pressure is mounting for a Slower approach to learning. At the end of 2002, Maurice Holt, professor emeritus of education at the University of Colorado, Denver, published a manifesto calling for a worldwide movement for “Slow Schooling.” Like others, he draws his inspiration from Slow Food. In Holt’s view, stuffing information into children as fast as possible is as nourishing as wolfing down a Big Mac. Much better to study at a gentle pace, taking time to explore subjects deeply, to make connections, to learn how to think rather than how to pass exams. If eating Slow excites the palate, learning Slow can broaden and invigorate the mind.