by Carl Honore
“At a stroke, the notion of the slow school destroys the idea that schooling is about cramming, testing, and standardizing experience,” Holt writes. “The slow approach to food allows for discovery, for the development of connoisseurship. Slow food festivals feature new dishes and new ingredients. In the same way, slow schools give scope for invention and response to cultural change, while fast schools just turn out the same old burgers.”
Holt and his supporters are not extremists. They do not want children to learn less, or to spend the school day goofing around. Hard work has a place in a Slow classroom. Instead of obsessing over tests, targets and timetables, though, kids would be given the freedom to fall in love with learning. Rather than spend a history lesson listening to a teacher spewing dates and facts about the Cuban missile crisis, a class might hold its own UN-style debate. Each pupil would research the position of a major country on the 1962 standoff, and then make the case to the rest of the class. The children still work hard, but without the drudgery of rote learning. Like every other wing of the Slow movement, “Slow Schooling” is about balance.
Countries that take a Slower approach to education are already reaping the benefits. In Finland, children enter preschool education at the age of six, and formal schooling at seven. They then face fewer of the high-pressure standard exams that are the bane of student life from Japan to Britain. The result? Finland routinely tops the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s prestigious world rankings for educational performance and literacy. And delegates from across the industrial world are flocking to study the “Finnish model.”
Elsewhere, parents who want their children to learn in a Slow environment are turning to the private sector. In interwar Germany, Rudolf Steiner pioneered a brand of education that is the polar opposite of accelerated learning. Steiner believed that children should never be rushed into studying things before they are ready, and he was against teaching them to read before their seventh birthday. Instead, he believed, they should spend their early years playing, drawing, telling stories and learning about nature. Steiner also eschewed rigid timetables that forced pupils to hop from subject to subject at the whim of the clock, preferring to let them study a topic until they felt ready to move on. Today, the number of Steiner-inspired schools around the world is over eight hundred, and rising.
The Institute of Child Study Laboratory School in Toronto also takes a Slow approach. Its two hundred pupils, aged from four to twelve, are taught how to learn, how to understand, how to pursue knowledge for its own sake, free from the mainstream obsession with tests, marks and schedules. When they do sit standard exams, though, their scores are usually very high. Many have won scholarships to top universities around the world, lending credence to Holt’s view that “the supreme irony of the slow school is that precisely because it provides the intellectual nourishment students need … good test results follow. Success, like happiness, is best pursued obliquely.” Although the Laboratory School has been running since 1926, its ethos is more popular now than ever. Despite annual fees of $7,000 Canadian, more than a thousand children are on the waiting list to get in.
In Japan, experimental academies are springing up to meet the demand for a more relaxed approach to learning. One example is Apple Tree, which a group of desperate parents founded in Tokyo’s Saitama prefecture in 1988. The school’s philosophy is a million miles from the martial discipline, breathless competition and hothouse atmosphere of the average Japanese classroom. Pupils come and go as they please, study what they want when they want to and take no exams. Though it sounds like a recipe for anarchy, the laidback regime actually works rather well.
On a recent afternoon, twenty pupils aged from six to nineteen climb the rickety wooden steps to the small, first-floor academy. They do not look particularly rebellious—some have dyed hair, but there are no tattoos or facial piercings to be seen. In the Japanese way, they stack their shoes neatly by the entrance before kneeling down to work at the low tables spread around the L-shaped room. Occasionally, a pupil rises to make green tea in the kitchen, or to take a cellphone call. Otherwise, everyone is hard at work, writing in notebooks or discussing ideas with the teachers or their classmates.
Hiromi Koike, a cherubic seventeen-year-old in jeans and a denim cap, wanders over to tell me why schools like Apple Tree are a godsend. Unable to keep up with the constant pressure and fast pace of traditional state education, she fell behind and became a target for the playground bullies. When she refused point-blank to attend school, her parents enrolled her in Apple Tree, where she is now working towards a high school diploma, taking four years instead of the usual three. “In normal school, you are always under so much pressure to be fast, to do everything within a set time,” she says. “I much prefer being at Apple Tree, because I get to control my own schedule and learn at my own speed. It is not a crime to be slow here.”
Critics warn that Slow Schooling is best suited to children who are academically able, or from families that put a high premium on education. And there is some truth in that. But elements of the Slow doctrine can also work in an average classroom, which is why some of the fastest nations are starting to change their approach to teaching. Across East Asia, governments are moving to lighten the load on students. Japan has embraced what it calls a “sunshine” approach to education. That means more freedom in the classroom, more time for creative thinking and shorter hours. In 2002, the government finally abolished Saturday—yes, Saturday—classes. It has also started throwing its weight behind the growing number of private schools that take a more Slow approach to learning. Apple Tree finally won full government approval in 2001.
School systems in Britain are also looking at ways to ease the pressure on stressed-out pupils. In 2001, Wales scrapped the standard assessment tests for seven-year-olds. In 2003, Scotland began exploring ways to put less emphasis on formal testing. Under a new plan, English primary schools will aim to make learning more enjoyable.
Parents are also starting to question the academic hothousing that prevails in so many English private schools. Some are lobbying headmasters for less homework and more Slow time for art, music or just thinking. Others are simply yanking their kids out and moving them into schools that take a less Fast approach.
That is what Julian Griffin, an office broker in London, did. Like so many successful parents, he wanted to give his son what he thought was the best education possible. The family even moved, to be within walking distance of a top private primary school in south London. Before long, though, James, an artistic, dreamy child, began to flounder. Though good at drawing and making things with his hands, he struggled to keep up with the academic pace—the long hours in the classroom, the take-home assignments, the exams. Most parents at the school found it difficult to make their children plow through the mountain of homework, but the battles were particularly virulent in the Griffin household. James began to suffer panic attacks, and wept when his parents dropped him off at school. After two years of misery, and a fortune spent on psychologists, the Griffins decided to look for another school. All the private schools turned them down. One headmistress even suggested James might be brain-damaged. Eventually, it was the family doctor who came up with the solution. “There is nothing wrong with James,” she said. “All he needs is to chill out. Send him to a state school.”
British state schools do not hothouse. So in September 2002, the Griffins enrolled James in a public primary school that is popular with ambitious middle-class parents in south London. The school has been the making of James. Though he still has a tendency to daydream, he has discovered a taste for learning and now ranks in the middle of his class. He looks forward to going to school, and does his homework—about one hour a week—without a fuss. He also attends a weekly pottery class. Above all, he is happy, and his confidence is returning. “I feel like I have my son back,” says Julian. Disillusioned with the hothouse culture in the private sector, the Griffins plan to send their younger child, Robert, to the
same school as his brother. “He’s a different character to James, and I’m sure he could take the pace in the private sector, but why should he have to?” says Julian. “What’s the point of driving kids so hard that they burn out?”
Even when their children are coping fine, other parents are pulling their kids out of private schools to give them more space to flex their creative muscles. When he was four, Sam Lamiri passed the entrance exams for a top London private school. His mother, Jo, was proud and delighted. But though Sam did well enough in his coursework, she felt the school was pushing the children too hard. A particular disappointment was the low priority given to art. The children did one hour a week on Friday afternoon—and only then if the teacher felt like it. Lamiri thought Sam was missing out. “His head was so full of facts and learning, and he was under so much pressure to get ahead academically, that he didn’t have any space left to use his imagination,” she says. “It wasn’t at all what I wanted for my children—I wanted them to be well-rounded, interested and imaginative.”
When a shift in financial circumstances meant the family had less money for school fees, Lamiri suddenly had an excuse to change things. In the middle of the 2002 school year, she moved Sam to a popular public school, and is pleased with the gentler pace and the emphasis on exploring the world through art. Sam is now happier and has more energy. He has developed a keen interest in nature, particularly in snakes and cheetahs. Lamiri also feels his creative faculties are sharper. The other day he wondered aloud what would happen if we could build a really huge staircase up into space. “Sam would never have asked something like that before,” says his mother. “He talks in a much more imaginative way now.”
Bucking the hothouse trend can be nerve-wracking, though. Parents who allow their children to slow down invariably suffer from the nagging fear that they may be shortchanging them. Even so, more and more are taking the plunge. “When so many other people around you are hothousing, you sometimes wonder if you’ve done the right thing,” says Lamiri. “In the end, you just have to follow your instincts.”
Other parents find that instinct tells them to pull their children out of school altogether. Home education is on the rise, with the United States leading the charge. Statistics everywhere are fuzzy, but the National Home Education Research Institute estimates that more than a million American youngsters are now being schooled at home. Other estimates include a hundred thousand children in Canada, ninety thousand in Britain, thirty thousand in Australia and eight thousand in New Zealand.
Parents choose to educate their offspring at home for a range of reasons—to shield them from bullying, drugs and other antisocial behaviour; to raise them in a particular religious or moral tradition; to give them a better education. But many see home-schooling as a way to free children from the tyranny of the timetable, to let them learn and live at their own pace. To let them be Slow. Even families that start off home-educating with a rigidly structured day usually end up taking a more fluid, freewheeling tack. On the spur of the moment, if the sun is shining, they might head off on a nature walk or to visit a museum. Earlier, we saw how having control over their own time makes people feel less rushed in the workplace. The same applies in education. Both parents and children report that the power to fix their own schedule, or choose their own tempo, helps to curb the hurry reflex. “Once you control your own hours, the pressure to rush is much less,” says a home educator in Vancouver. “You just automatically slow down.”
Home education is often bound up with the whole family embracing a more Slow approach to life. Many parents find that their priorities shift, as they spend less time working and more time overseeing their child’s learning. “Once people start asking questions about education, you find that they start asking questions about everything—politics, the environment, work,” says Roland Meighan, a British expert on home-schooling. “The genie is out of the bottle.”
True to the Slow philosophy, home education does not mean dropping out or lagging behind. On the contrary, learning at home actually turns out to be highly efficient. As everyone knows, schools waste a lot of time: pupils have to travel there and back; take breaks when someone else tells them to; sit through instruction in material they have already mastered; wade through irrelevant homework. When you study alone at home, time can be put to more productive use. Research shows that home-educated children learn faster and better than their rivals in conventional classrooms. Universities love them because they combine curiosity, creativity and imagination with the maturity and gumption to tackle a subject on their own.
The fear that children will suffer socially when they abandon the classroom is also unfounded. Parents who educate at home usually set up local networks to share teaching and field trips, and to arrange social gatherings. And because home-educated children get through their coursework more quickly, they have more free time for recreation, which can include joining clubs or sports teams full of their peers from formal school.
Beth Wood, who switched to home education at the beginning of 2003, when she was thirteen, would never dream of returning to the classroom. In her early years, she attended a Steiner school near the family home in Whitstable, a small fishing port fifty miles east of London. A precociously bright child, Beth thrived in the less rigid environment. But when the size of her class expanded, and several disruptive pupils enrolled, she grew so frustrated that her mother, Claire, decided to move her. Since the local state primaries were below par, they began touring private schools in the area. Several offered Beth a scholarship, promising to throw her straight into the “accelerated learning” stream. Unwilling to put her daughter on the fast track, Claire decided to make the leap into home education. Manoeuvring Beth onto the slower road mirrored a shift in her own life: in 2000, she had quit her stressful, long-hours job as a marine insurance adjuster to set up a soap-making workshop at home.
Home education has done wonders for Beth. She is more relaxed and confident, and relishes the freedom to learn at her own pace. If she doesn’t feel like studying geography on Monday, she’ll tackle it later in the week. And when a subject takes her fancy, she reads up on it voraciously. Her fluid schedule, and the fact that she gets through her work twice as fast as she did at school, also leaves plenty of time for extracurricular activities: she has lots of friends, plays violin in a youth orchestra, attends a weekly art class and is the only girl on the water polo team at her local swimming pool. Perhaps the most important thing for Beth, who is tall and already looks older than her age, is that she never feels rushed or beholden to the clock. Having control over her own time gives her an immunity to time-sickness. “My friends in school are always hurried or stressed or fed up, but I never feel like that,” she says. “I really enjoy studying.”
Under light supervision from her mother, Beth is following the national curriculum, and even exceeding it in some subjects. History is her passion, and she has set her sights on studying archaeology at Oxford or Cambridge. Soon she will start preparing for her GCSEs, the exams that all British pupils sit at the age of sixteen. Claire thinks her daughter could whiz through them in a year, instead of the usual two, but plans to rein her in. “She could run like hell with them, but I can’t see the point in rushing,” she says. “If she takes it at a slower pace, and keeps a healthy balance between work and play, she’ll learn a lot more.”
Whenever people talk of the need for children to slow down, play is always high on the agenda. Many studies show that unstructured time for play helps younger children develop their social and language skills, their creative powers and their ability to learn. Unstructured play is the opposite of “quality time,” which implies industry, planning, scheduling and purpose. It is not a ballet lesson or a soccer practice. Unstructured play is digging for worms in the garden, messing about with toys in the bedroom, building castles with Lego, horsing around with other kids in the playground or just gazing out the window. It is about exploring the world, and your own reaction to it, at your own speed. To an a
dult used to making every second count, unstructured play looks like wasted time. And our reflex is to fill up those “empty” slots in the diary with entertaining and enriching activities.
Angelika Drabert, an occupational therapist, visits kindergartens in Munich to talk to parents about the importance of unstructured play time. She teaches them not to hurry or over-schedule their kids. Drabert has a bag full of letters from grateful mothers. “Once you show parents that they do not need to provide entertainment and activities for every moment of the day, everyone can relax, which is good,” she says. “Sometimes life has to be slow or boring for children.”
Many parents are arriving at that conclusion without help from a therapist. In the United States, thousands are joining groups, such as Putting Family First, that campaign against the epidemic of over-scheduling. In 2002, Ridgewood, a town of twenty-five thousand in New Jersey, began holding an annual Ready, Set, Relax! event. On a chosen day in March, local teachers agree not to assign any homework and all sports practices, tutoring sessions and club meetings are cancelled. Parents arrange to come home from work early enough to have dinner with their children and spend time with them in the evening. The event is now a fixture on the Ridgewood calendar, and some families have started applying the Slow creed the rest of the year.
The cue to slow down often comes from children themselves. Take the Barnes family, who live in west London. Nicola, the mother, works part-time for a market research firm. Her husband, Alex, is the financial director for a publishing company. They are busy people with bulging diaries. Until recently, their eight-year-old son, Jack, was the same. He played organized soccer and cricket, took swimming and tennis lessons, and acted in a drama group. On weekends, the family trawled through art galleries and museums, attended musical events for children and visited nature study centres around London. “We ran our lives, including Jack’s, like a military campaign,” says Nicola. “Every second was accounted for.”