What are we doing to our children?

A disturbing report from Childline recently described a huge increase in the calls it is receiving from suicidal teenagers. In 2013, 17 year olds were the ones most likely to receive suicide counselling. In 2014, it is 15 year olds. One of three of these young people also talked about self harm, which has increased by 29% in the last two years.

The reasons for this are, of course, very complex, but let me offer a perspective as a teacher, who has seen a huge rise in child and teen mental health issues in recent years.

I would suggest that our current education system may be part of the cause. Our children are the most tested in the world, and children are now categorised during their first term at school when many of them are still only four years old. The political agenda here is one of social mobility, and yet in spite of all the testing, all the measuring, all the categorisation and all the drives to raise standards, social mobility is not improving. The explanation for this is simple: social mobility involves a great deal more than just getting the right exam results. Education is important, but it’s only one factor. Yet the effect on our children is cataclysmic – there are junior schools in this country where the curriculum in SATs year contains nothing but maths, science, English and the statutory two hours of PE. Results are everything, and what we are saying to our young people is that they only matter as economic units for future productivity. A culture of measurement says ‘We value you for what you are’, rather than, ‘We value you for who you are.’

This hits children of all abilities. Our most able children are suffering because they can’t meet ever-increasing demands on them to come up with the goods they need to compete for the best universities. Even when they graduate, it might get them nothing more than an unpaid internship with no prospects. Our least academically able teenagers (when academic success is all that matters) are seeing skilled jobs being given to graduates, leaving them with little prospect of meaningful employment.

Then there are children struggling to cope with fractured lives, domestic violence and disruption, and parents who can’t cope with their own lives, leave alone nurture their children’s.  The loss of extended families leaves many children as principal carers of a parent, robbing them of their childhood and leaving them anxious, tired and very, very lonely.

Add to this the huge explosion in cyberbullying, and you have a toxic mix. Cyberbullying is no respecter of socio-economic grouping and for teenagers on the receiving end of it, even home isn’t a place of safety. If you’re online, they can get you. If you go offline, you become a social outcast. Either way, you lose.

The question we need to be asking ourselves is what we are doing to our children. Do we want them to be cogs in an economic unit, with an education system that only values what they can produce? Or do we want to value our children as unique, made in the image of God, special human people? While the debate rages on around faith education, you can be sure that every parent, teacher and youth worker of faith has a perspective to their work with young people that our society, to its cost, has abandoned. For that alone, faith education is beyond measurement.