In Praise of Primary Schools

On the need for and joy of functioning civic institutions

School blackboard (shutterstock)

I didn’t expect to enjoy being a school parent. I mainly had children in order to have adult children, and because I didn’t want to miss any experiences. I’m not especially child orientated, by temperament, though I like mine. The idea of dragging them back and forth every day, sitting through painfully bad plays and ear-splitting recorder concerts and volunteering at school fairs in no way appealed. I thought it would just be a functional, even transactional relationship. Though I understood, for the first time, the appeal of home schooling, neither my husband or I felt sacrificial enough to take it on, and so someone would need to teach them to read and write.

In some ways my expectations were correct - I am still the guilty parent avoiding joining the PTA, taking an hour on the Splat the Rat stall only when I absolutely cannot get out of it. I mainly ignore the febrile parents WhatsApp group and the occasional kerfuffles which break out there. Last night though, I sat cross legged on a rug on the playground, my middle aged back aching, and wept with a sense of joy and belonging.

Our school marks the end of the year every summer with the Playground Proms. Every year group, including the tiny pot-bellied nursery kids with their fingers in their mouths, offers a musical contribution. It’s good quality, as these things go - it’s just a local community school but is lucky enough to have a dedicated and talented music department who pour love and attention into the event - but it is still, mainly a bunch of kids singing in unison, not always in tune. It’s not moving because it’s musically wonderful. Watching my kids sing is cute, but it wasn’t their sections that especially got to me. There is something else going on. Something about what this place is, the role it plays for all of us connected with it.

One of the things I thought I’d hate is the school run. And I do hate the lead up. When it’s my turn to get us all out the door, with correct weather appropriate clothing, bags, PE kit, instruments, brushed teeth, clean clothes and whatever random craft materials or charity outfit is needed (it’s World Wombat Day! Wear your trousers backwards and bring a pound!), I have to breathe through it. No one finds that fun. A soon as we are out the door though, I relax. It’s maybe the comfort of familiarity, the same route, at the same time, every day. We live a twenty minute walk away, and as we traverse the streets we join up with other families, other groups, like tiny tributaries flowing into streams. Eventually on the road outside school we become a rushing river of scooters and back packs, kisses and goodbyes, flowing in and then out again, everyone moving quickly but never crashing, like a dance.

At the gate a smiling teacher stands, clearly end-of-term-knackered, but greeting every child by name, welcoming them into the world beyond. In our school in South East London, they will greet parents who are Ukrainian, Syrian and Iranian refugees, a famous theatre director, nurses and doctors and porters and cleaners who work at the nearby King’s College Hospital, a director of a global tech company, a documentary filmmaker, a dentist, an iman. There are pentecostal christians and burqa clad muslims and progressive atheists and people who have voted both ways on any major issue. The only other place I’m part of such a diverse group is at church. In we all go, chatting and greeting and dashing off again. Some people swearing because they forgot Wombat Day. It is beautiful.

I think primary schools are perhaps the last remaining functional local civic institution. We used to live under a canopy of them, overlapping places of belonging and connection which we interacted with at different life stages. Professional guilds, unions, social clubs, voluntary organisations like Rotary., the W.I. and Mother’s Union, Young Farmers, religious congregations, choirs and sports leagues. No one in a given geographical community was a member of them all, and no one organisation collected up everyone, but together they formed a patchwork of interconnection, weaving disparate groups together. They turned us from a random collection of atomised individuals to a group of people with a stake in each other, a shared story, and so held us together.

Too many have gone now, or limp on in skeleton form, with only retired people keeping them going. Our digital lives connect us outwards, away from our locality, and make it entirely possible to live on a street without knowing a single neighbours name. And this is good for none of us.

Being part of a local institution is scaffolding, or to use a more suitably horticultural metaphor, a trellis, for relationships. It’s hard to have community without it. Much to my surprise as someone who loves travel, spontaneity and adventure, the structure and routine, clear parameters and repeated rituals feel right at some deep level. I like marching in step with others.

Bizarre as it may seem, the Playground Proms felt like what Durkheim called ‘collective effervescence’, moments where societies come together in rituals which allow them to share feelings of joy and even ecstasy. He argued these moments are essential for social cohesion.

The proms also have a subtle initiatory aspect. Every time, the year six children who are about to leave and move up to senior school sing the final song, a sort of farewell. This year it was the Circle of Life from the Lion King. I wouldn’t normally weep at this Disney hit, catchy as it is, nor at a performance from a group of children none of which I know (mine are younger). But I did. As I watched them, the time-lapse size of them compared to the nursery kids they had so recently been, still tender and enthusiastic and open but with bodies about to unfurl unto adolescence, I felt powerfully behind them. I wanted to mark this moment with them, to send them on with a blessing, from us, the adults who are not their parents. I saw them for what they are: members of my community in whom I have a stake. The structure and the habits of institutional community and the ritual of musical collective effervescence had effectively bonded me to them, so much that I will keep an eye out for them as I see them about on the local streets. The civic institution had done its job, it had taught me to care for people close to me who I do not actually know.

I think the local is about to get a lot more important. As we learn to navigate a less safe climate, a less stable world, we are going to need the people around us, and not only the ones just like us and already agree with. Communities which fare best after natural disasters are the ones which already had strong social bonds. And so maybe part of the work worth doing in this time is joining, serving, reviving or committing to local civic bodies which help us know our neighbours, sharing in structures which hold us, where we can share rituals that lead us into collective effervescence. It might even mean I need to join the bloody PTA.