For the love of ...

I want to live in a world in which people are motivated by love. A world in which the reason we grow food or make money is in order to feed our families or improve the lives of our neighbours. Where we invent things for the greatest possible good, and destroy the ill-conceived fruits of our labour in order to protect others. A world in which the study of happiness is given the level of investment that the study of weaponry has been enjoying lately. It might be pie-in-the-sky, but it is no wonder that I love my job.

Family Learning is all about love.

The reason there is Government funding into a programme which effectively promotes happiness is because of the figures. Studies have been made which show the link between parents’ involvement with their children’s learning and children’s attainment.

If we get the adults back into school and show them what a creative and scientific place it has become – far from the desperate battleground it was in their day – they will be much happier about sending their offspring into the soft melee. If we help to teach them the basic skills they couldn’t learn when they were young and vulnerable, they will be confident and able to help their own children with their homework in the future. And if we gently teach them a few parenting skills along the way, they will be better at coping with the demands of fraught modern life without collapsing and becoming a drain on resources in so many other ways.

So goes the theory. And for once, the theory is very close to the truth.

For the past year, I have had the privilege of spending Government money on love. I have helped to set up courses for parents who don’t speak any English, but who have to negotiate the eccentricities of the English system for themselves and their children. I’ve set up confidence building courses for parents whose children have such demanding needs that they can’t bring themselves to hold a conversation in a playground with parents of ‘normal’ children, for fear of mental collapse under the strain of their misunderstanding and judgement. I’ve helped to develop courses to teach basic ICT skills to parents who have been frankly frightened of their children’s knowledge of the cyberspace they haven’t dared enter.

I’ve been lucky enough to teach parents, too. To take them through the bewildering world of graphemes, phonemes and split-vowel digraphs; to reassure them that if their offspring refused to read their school books in the conventional manner at age 5, it did not mean they were going to fail to read anything for the rest of their lives; and to introduce them to poetry that both made sense and touched their own experience of the world.

This is what I leave my daughter at home for. Someone else would do it if I couldn’t. But – but. Oh, the aching pain of that decision. Is my spreading a little love around for a minor-league salary worth the anxiety? Every day, I’m a little less sure.