Back-to-school daze

Michele A’Court

My granddaughter started school this week. It feels very soon to be writing that sentence. Sure, I can make other sentences that tell me where I am in life (‘‘Where have I put my glasses?’’; ‘‘I’m off to get my roots done’’; ‘‘There’s something wrong with my knee’’) but honestly, if I had to guess how long it’s been since I made that mad dash to be there for her birth, I’d measure it in months.

This is one of those milestones that makes you reflect. I remember her mother’s first day at school: I cried, she didn’t. On the way out of the school grounds, I bumped into a nice lady walking her dog. Looking at my wet face, she smiled and asked gently: ‘‘First day?’’ It was a comfort to know this was a recognisable phenomenon, a parental rite of passage.

It was also a comfort that her grandparents were there with us. They were retired by then, hands-on with childcare, and were to become as welcome and familiar in the classroom as all the mums and dads.

I remember a little of my own first day at school – the smell of the cloakroom, an orange lunchbox, Miss Hooper who looked like a floral teapot and smelled of lemons instructing a big girl I didn’t much like the look of to hold my hand and her grip felt awkwardly tight, and hoping that if I waited long enough all this newness would become familiar. I don’t think I cried, but suspect my mother did on the way home. She certainly seemed entirely unsurprised by my tears when it was my turn. Pretty sure she joined in.

Once you become a parent, you never get to experience one emotion at a time. The joy of watching your child find their place in the world is served with a side dish of grief that they can manage a little bit – and then a little bit more – without you.

Ariana will remember everything about her first day at school – not because she has a prodigious memory (she does, though – she is gifted, and also strong and beautiful) but because there are photos and videos aplenty. She is wearing the dress with cats I gave her for Christmas, and her iridescent rainbow-coloured backpack (she calls that colour ‘‘unicorn’’ because she is brilliant) is almost as big as she is. She looks brave, and happy, and excited. Her mother cried, but she didn’t.

I wasn’t there because I am working at the other end of the country, doing something I love. I cannot count the number of emotions involved in being here and not there. I don’t need to tell you

what my eyes did.

Jeremy Elwood

As I’ve watched parents posting, boasting and rejoicing in sending their kids back to school over the past fortnight, I have felt the stirrings of a darker emotion. A resurgence of a retained memory that I cannot, and may never, shake. The fear, no, the terror of being the one headed back to start a new year.

I hated school.

Not every second of it, sure, but far more of them than not. I’m lucky – I don’t have any real horror stories to tell. Mine were the truly ordinary travails of boredom, repetition, failure to fit in and an overriding sense of ‘‘what’s the point?’’

I had some good teachers, some good friends, and enjoyed the occasional triumph, but during my school years those were vastly outnumbered by days spent with terrible tutors, awful enemies and abject failures. The first day of a new year or even a new term would loom throughout the holidays like a spectre hiding in the shadows, unseen to most, but never invisible.

As the day approached, its shadow would grow ever darker until the idea of an imaginary monster under the bed became far preferable to the real one hiding in your calendar. At least if the bogeyman got you, that would be a pretty good excuse for not donning the uniform come Monday.

And oh, those uniforms. You can lie to yourself all you want about how they promote a sense of order, pride and a way to protect every child from the vagaries of fashion, peer pressure and competition, but you’re wrong. They’re expensive, uncomfortable, and designed to quash individuality in the favour of greying (literally) the lines between education and conformity. The only reason we force South Island kids to wear shorts or skirts in the middle of winter is that our forebears taught us that suffering is character building, and the market for chimney sweeps has dried up significantly since Dickens popped his clogs.

For me, seeing a kid sent off to their first day of school is like watching an oblivious and innocent prisoner leave the dock to begin a 13-year sentence. A sentence which, counterintuitively, will only be shortened or commuted through bad behaviour or a failure to meet the required standards.

Education is important. But like democracy, the way we inflict it is a deeply flawed system only remarkable by being better than any of the alternatives.

If your child seems less than thrilled about starting the new year, ask yourself this: were you?

I have heard people describe school as the ‘‘best years of their lives’’. I pity those people. And

I worry about what has happened, or not happened, to them since.