Nobody wants a generation of snowflakes, Leo, but it is possible to be too honest...
OVER the weekend, my mum was clearing out the attic and came across a very large, very heavy folder containing every school report I’d ever got, from my first days at Montessori right up to my Leaving Cert year.
They make for amusingly grim reading, particularly the secondary school reports which paint a lurid picture of consistent underachievement in everything from geography to gym class. But what’s especially noteworthy in this treasure trove of poor performance is the uniformly unvarnished honesty with which the teachers of the 1980s approached even the smallest of their charges.
Even at pre-school, where you might imagine a four-year-old would be cut a bit of slack for being ‘prone to melodrama’, ‘often close to tears’, ‘not very good at holding a pen’ or ‘easily distracted’, there was no glossing over my shortcomings. I was taken aback at just how blunt it all seemed, and it struck me that my own pre-schooler has never been described in such forthright terms, though I suspect he’s just as prone to tantrums and as deficient in the penmanship department as his mum once was.
I’ve only ever got positive feedback about him – and that’s because today, we rarely speak about small children in anything less than glowing terms. We are slow to point out their failings or their weirdnesses, in the belief that what they need at all times is patience, understanding, encouragement and kindness.
For my generation, though, encouragement was sometimes hard to come by. Reading back on those school reports, I was reminded of the time I entered the local piano feis, aged around 11 or 12.
There were five contestants and we had to play a very tricky and very off-putting Schumann piece. One of the entrants – a tall, wiry boy with Harry Potter-like spectacles – was clearly the star of the show: his performance was fluent and dexterous where the rest of us were hesitant and ham-fisted. He was no doubt destined for greater things; you got the feeling he’d turned up in our provincial backwater only to warm up before competing against the big guns at the Feis Ceoil later in the year. After we’d all performed, the elderly adjudicator stood up and as expected, awarded first place and a little gold cup to Harry Potter. And then, peering sternly at the handful of parents who had gathered in the cold village hall to endure their offsprings’ performances, he announced he wasn’t going to award any prizes for second and third place, as none of the other contestants had met the required musical standard.
So we shuffled off the stage empty-handed, tails between our collective legs. And the funny thing is that I don’t even remember being especially mortified.
It seemed quite reasonable that we wouldn’t be rewarded for being rubbish. But I doubt such a scene would be repeated today, in an era when they give kids a medal for even turning up.
In this post-‘X Factor’ world, you are amazing so long as you’ve gone out there and given it your best shot, and if you’ve muddled up your allegros with your andantes, well, who cares, so long as you did it with feeling?
This shift to a softer approach has been blamed for producing a generation of snowflakes, but looking back, I feel momentarily sorry for the four-year-old who was ‘given to drama’ and the 11-yearolds who never got a medal.
When it comes to our kids, I’ m inclined to think kindness is all.
Leo hits all the wrong notes
OUR esteemed Taoiseach has always been renowned for being a political straight-talker, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. But some of his latest pronouncements seem to be taking it all a step too far.
First there was the upfront, if rather bizarre, admission that he didn’t know all that much about the Kerry Babies until recently.
I suspect he’s not the only one of his generation who, before last week, was a little hazy on the precise details of this complex case, but owning up to being ignorant at a time when the country’s treatment of women, both past and present, is under a microscope struck me as being politically risky in the extreme.
And then Leo went and hit the self-destruct button altogether and casually pointed out in the Dáil that loads of people got help from their parents to buy houses.
Again, I suspect he’s probably right – they just don’t shout about itinpublic.
But Varadkar should know better: he ended up sounding smug and entitled, not to mention grotesquely out of touch with the horrors of the homeless crisis and the day-to-day difficulties of ordinary young people who’ll never be able to buy their own home.
There’s such a thing as being too honest. I’ll bet he’d do a nice sideline in school reports.