The modern-day Just Williams we should all be learning from
Harvey is a sweet little boy. On his first day at a new primary school, aged about six, he was anxious about settling in, but when the head teacher asked how he liked it, at the end of the afternoon, Harvey was happy.
‘Good!’ he said politely. ‘I made friends . . .’ and then something on the windowsill seized his eye. With real excitement, he announced: ‘and I found some weird bugs!’
Harvey has an attention span as short as one of his pet insects. He’s a typical Just William, a boy who should be wreaking havoc in the countryside, not cooped up in a classroom. He can’t cope with school . . . and as excluded at Seven ( C4) made plain, most schools can’t cope with him.
But after an explosive tantrum saw him banished from his previous placement, Harvey struck lucky. He was sent to the rosebery near King’s Lynn in Norfolk, where gifted and patient teachers specialise in coaxing unruly pupils to adjust to school.
Both my boys are adults now, but this brilliantly observed documentary from the Cutting edge team brought back a rush of raw memories that are never far from the surface.
Children like Harvey are the most rewarding pupils. They disregard every rule, and never hide their emotions. It’s a joyful way to live, when the world permits it.
But the British aren’t good with Harveys. We love elderly eccentrics, but panic at the sight of junior ones. and our intolerance is getting worse: stage- managed reality contests such as Britain’s Got Talent spread the notion that all seven- year- olds should be miniature celebrities, dancing like Michael Jackson while speaking three languages.
Other nations manage far better. In Denmark and Finland, children don’t even have to start primary school till they are seven.
That neatly solves the problem of all those early exclusions — but instead, our current policy is to encourage every three-year- old into the nursery classroom.
as this moving, frustrating programme proved, for many youngsters that system is not so much counter-productive as soul-destroying.
Thank heaven for rare havens like the rosebery and its inspirational head, Sharon Donaldson. But they can deal with only a handful of cases, while up to 1,000 pupils aged seven and under are branded as classroom rejects every year.
It’s useless to crush small boys like Harvey into conventional education. We should be learning from them instead.
One or two might just grow up to rule the world. Scratch an autocrat, after all, and you’ll find an angry schoolboy, still seething with resentment at adolescent slights.
Dictators And Despots: A Timewatch Guide (BBC4) studied footage of 20th-century tyrants, searching for a common factor, and could only point vaguely to ‘malignant narcissism’ and ‘dark ‘ charisma’. Presenter David Olusoga wasted 20 minutes with hackneyed clips of Hitler and Mussolini, and an irrelevant dramatised life of Julius Caesar.
The real value lay in archive film spanning the careers of more recent madmen — Castro, Gaddafi, Saddam and Mugabe.
What came over most strongly is how often Tv reports got it wrong, with robin Day’s 1961 hero worship of Castro, Panorama hailing monster Mugabe as africa’s saviour in the Seventies, and John Simpson warning of Iraq’s non- existent weapons of mass destruction in 2002.
Never mind Dictators and Despots, this was frequently Disasters and Duds.