“I can tell you love him,” I say.
Our eyes meet for a moment. We’re both on the verge of tears.
I know he’s only one of thousands, but his is the story I’m hearing from this teacher and all the little details are hitting me hard.
It’s a story of the impact of poverty, and all the deprivation and stress that comes with it, on the development of this boy who has wound his way into this teacher’s heart.
I won’t go into specifics, but suffice it to say that if he were your child, you would be fighting for every piece of support you could get, because he needs it.
His high level of learning needs is not his fault. Nor is it his parents. And it’s not an inevitable genetic outcome. It’s a direct result of the fact that collectively we have chosen to take money away from children and those responsible for loving them and give it to others. And now the road from birth is increasingly treacherous for too many of our kids.
In 2020 the oil and gas industries received $5.9 trillion in subsidies worldwide. That’s a number so big it’s meaningless. We need another number to help us make sense of it.
Here’s one: $4.7 trillion. That’s how much the world spent on education in 2019.
That’s right - oil and gas got more money from your pocket (that’s how we’re supposed to talk about government money, right?), money that encouraged them to continue their environmentally criminal ways, and make themselves richer in the process, than was spent on educating our kids. (So much for user pays and the free market, eh).
So here’s this boy, whose early life of poverty, transience and stress is the same one so many of our precious young grow up experiencing now, who can’t get the support he needs because our underfunded education system doesn’t have the resources to provide it because we give more money to oil and gas companies in subsidies than we spend on education.
He doesn’t deserve this start to life any more than those oil and gas companies deserved being gifted $5.9 trillion in 2020.
We cannot separate learning, and the achievement we seem to be happy to demand from kids at school, from the developmental needs every child has: attachment, a secure sense of self, knowing their emotional landscape, and play. These needs do not go away because we haven’t prioritised them or we’ve ceased valuing their provision. No. Children who do not have them met are traumatised. That impacts every aspect of their development, including their ability to learn. This is not the fault of parents, who are forced to raise their kids in a society that’s hostile to love.
So instead of berating education systems and teachers for falling standards, I wonder if we’ll hear from a politician who has the guts to be honest about the changes we must make if we want all our kids to succeed. It’s nothing to do with curriculum refreshes and better ways of teaching. It means making it socially, culturally and economically easy to love and care for all kids. And that starts with prioritising children over environmental criminals.
Today’s message from Pluto
“I vote for love! Woof!!!”
