Charity is a real gift of a lesson
ON A PROMINENT shelf in my kitchen sits a yellow duck. It reminds me daily of an 11-year- old girl I met on a visit to a London secondary school this term. Would I buy a £1 duck ‘for the hospice’, she asked me at break. I asked if she had been to the hospice and why she was interested in it. ‘ My father died there two weeks ago,’ she replied.
That girl, both as ‘ victim’ and ‘ activist’, epitomises what schools should be doing — and some are — at this time of year.
Rather than wallowing in sentiment and commercialism, they should be teaching children about the plight and needs of others in their communities and much farther afield. That means doing practical things to help.
We can afford it. In monetary terms in Britain today, every one of us is fabulously wealthy compared with, say, a street child in India or a starving baby in a faminebeset African country.
Britons give £ 7.3 billion a year to charities. But according to a new book, The More You Give, The More You Get by Michael Dickson, they also spend £ 7.4 billion each on fast food and gambling. What an indictment. Schools could do a lot to help change this.
When I was an 11- year- old experiencing her first secondary school Christmas in 1958, I was surprised by the sixth form’s annual sale of charity cards. It had never occurred to me that you could help others by sending Christmas cards.
So I mustered pocket money and bought cards in aid of the NSPCC, a local orphanage and a Newfoundland- based charity whose cards had pictures of lovely polar bears. It was quite a lesson. In the years since, I have never bought or sent a Christmas card which didn’t benefit someone other than a commercial manufacturer.
Every child could learn the same lesson if all schools provided facilities for them to buy charity cards.
Then there’s fund- raising and other giving to good causes. Operation Christmas Child (OCC) asks schools and individuals to pack shoe boxes with toys, toiletries, crayons, gloves and so on. Then, you personalise it by putting in a card or a photograph of yourself. That way, the child doing the giving feels really involved.
Last year, OCC sent more than one million boxes to hospitals, orphanages, refugee camps and homeless shelters in Eastern and Central Europe.
And for every child who opens such a box, there is another who packed it and who learned that the Bible has a point when it says: ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’
The children of Wallington County Grammar School in Surrey know that. They have raised £5,600 for St Raphael’s Hospice in Cheam, which costs £3million a year to run.
Or consider the example of Tunbridge Wells High School in Kent. Encouraged and sponsored by pupils, the staff took to their bikes for Demelza House children’s hospice in Sittingbourne, Kent, which is the Daily Mail’s Christmas charity this year. Head teacher Graham Smith pedalled 100 miles round Kent and East Sussex for the cause.
Charity representatives make good assembly speakers. I remember watching an RSPCA officer who showed us an orphaned fox cub — unforgettable stuff. So was the woman from a disability charity who told our teenagers so much about the everyday difficulties of a 14-year-old with cerebral palsy.
Citizenship and RE are compulsory subjects for all ages. Charity work and giving can play a big part in both.
Then there’s history — some charities go back a long way. When I was a child, for instance, The Children’s Society, founded in 1881, was called Waifs And Strays.
As soon as you start considering the needs and problems of developing countries, you are teaching geography.
There’s English potential, too. How many children are now taught that the word charity actually means love?
I’d like to see every school in the land planning a charityrelated Christmas for 2006. It’s much closer to what Christmas is meant to be about than discos, balloons and a surfeit of unhealthy food.
SUSAN ELKIN is a former teacher.