Millennium Lecture on the Marginalised Child, 28 February, 2000
Millennium Lecture on the Marginalised Child, 28 February, 2000.
It was with great pleasure that I accepted the invitation from Fr Ken McCabe and his colleagues to join you here this evening and to deliver the fourth in this series of lectures on the Marginalised Child, for the Lillie Road Centre Group.
The list of previous speakers in this series suggests that I have some fairly hard acts to follow – people such as my good friend, Professor Tony Clare, who is of course Chairman of tonight’s proceedings. It is doubly intimidating to hear that the Lillie Road Centre Group received enough sponsorship and inspiration from its first lecture here in Dublin to help fund the purchase of a new house in Edenderry. I am not quite sure what sort of value Accountants place on Presidential speeches these days, but in case of disappointment, I intend to do the predictable lawyer thing and enter a disclaimer by pleading rising house prices.
A good starting point in any discussion about the marginalised child, is to define, or at least explore, what we mean by ‘marginalised’. Definitions of that word include ‘relegated to the fringes’; ‘out of the mainstream’ and ‘made to seem unimportant’. Those definitions capture something of the lop-sided relationships set up by marginalisation, the remoteness from power, the sense of abandonment, the downstream demoralisation that any human being feels when he or she feels or is made to feel inconsequential or left out, left behind.
There are aspects of marginalisation which are easily measured and visible: low incomes, poor housing, early school leaving, problems with literacy, family dysfunction, and so on down a line of cause and effect manifestations which spin into a complex web. There are aspects of marginalisation which are not so easily measured but which are dire in their consequences because they arise from the insidious psychology of being excluded and feeling excluded.
There is an expression in the Irish language which captures it and which used to be used to describe a national attitude - the ceann faoi. We know how destructive nationally that was, how it insinuated its way into hearts and souls, de-energising them, demotivating them. We also know the radical transformation that comes when a nation looks out to the world with its shoulders back, its head up, when success begins to breed success. It looks at itself differently and others look at it differently. A whole new set of relationships is established, new energies and synergies are released.
The marginalised child still lives with the ceann faoi syndrome, low self-esteem, low self-worth, under-achievement, little lives slowly closed down by the weight of internal and external pressures. And in this world where we are beginning to recognise that failure to properly support, encourage and develop human potential is like throwing away a fortune, the marginalised child has to be for us a particular centre both of economic gravity as well as a natural place for the egalitarian impulse of a republic of equals to challenge itself and chart its future. This is a country now hungry to achieve its full potential. We have seen the remarkable downstream advantages of widened educational access, of greater social mobility and of the release into the national knowledge grid of the energies of constituencies previously held hostage by the dead hand of history and bias. The case of women and their huge contribution to this dynamic Ireland makes the point particularly well. Seamus Heaney makes the same point in his poem From The Canton of Expectation when he contrasts two generations - that of his parents, accepting, almost acquiescing in their second-class citizenship living as he says - "under high-banked clouds of resignation." Then comes the next generation- free education offered to them and
"next thing, suddenly, this change of mood.
Books open in the newly wired kitchens.
Young heads that might have dozed a life away
Against the flanks of milking cows were busy
Paving and pencilling their first causeways
Across the prescribed texts….."
That new generation flooded into schools, colleges, institutes and universities expanding the national knowledge equity while simultaneously expanding the reach of both the individual and community. Knowing what we now know, knowing that we can say emphatically that widening access does not dilute this thing called knowledge, does not divide into smaller parts this thing called opportunity but in fact does the very reverse, we must surely have a sense of urgency and excitement about unlocking the potential of those whose lives are still "dozed" away.
Those whom we identify as the marginalized are a large part of our national unlocked potential. Without the full value of their contribution we will always as a society be operating below par, economically, culturally and socially.
But unlocking that potential is itself problematic. How do we get this marginalised child to the centre? How do we secure a decent future for the children we know will be born tomorrow and the next day and whose place of birth, and circumstances of birth will allow statisticians to predict with some accuracy that this child will probably never see the inside of a college, will probably never hold down a decent job?
Those of us who are the first generation of our clans to go on to university, those who come from poor or modest circumstances, who went to school along with people and are perhaps related to those who today are described as the marginalised, have some particular experiential insight to offer into this complex web of circumstance and structure, of the personal, the familial, the bad luck, the good luck, the community weaknesses and strengths which made the difference between a successful human outcome and an unsuccessful outcome.
One thing we know is that some stories defy the statisticians logic, that predictions do not always get it right. We all know the success stories that flew in the face of a battery of adversity, we know people who have escaped from the margins - we may even be those people ourselves. The wall between margins and centre is not as impenetrable as it looks, but sometimes you have to get in very, very close to see where the bridges are - into the life of grandma and granda, the relationship between mother and father, the mental and spiritual health of the home, the home-making skills, the involvement with the community, the effectiveness of the school, the maturity of the peer group, the strength of character of the individual - a myriad of accidental, coincidental, plannable and unplannable, foreseeable and unforeseeable facts, changeable and unchangeable events and circumstances which weave themselves into the web in which each of us is held - whether as spider, free to come and go, to shape and reshape; or as fly, trapped, lost in a landscape not entirely of our making.
Life teaches us that some of those webs are more robust than others, some are better places for children to grow and develop. Where they do not develop organically or spontaneously can we manufacture them, replicate them or create an effective equivalent? Where they are weak can we do things to make them stronger? These are the questions which exercise and have exercised politicians, educationalists, social scientists, the care service, and anyone who ever wanted a more humanly decent society. Those who have pursued this Holy Grail professionally know that we have been engaged in a process of revelation through trial and error and we still see only through the mists dimly.
Webs are curious things to mess about with. Pull one bit and the whole fragile edifice can shudder. It isn’t even easy to see an obvious entry point but as good a place as any to begin in the life of a child is the place which dominates the early landscape, the home, the family. In that part of the web and it is only part, lie insights which coherently used can provide us with the kinds of signpost to comprehension we will need if we are ever to draw the margins to the centre.
The twentieth century seems to have been one long debate about the family, often shedding more heat than light on the topic. Discussion always seems vulnerable to ideological jousting. What is beyond doubt however, is that the family, however defined, plays a significant role in a child’s development. As Robbie Gilligan has remarked:
‘what happens to children within their families, both in the home and in the web of wider relationships, is of major influence, if not decisive, in shaping a child’s experience and destiny'
The power to shape destinies is an awesome power indeed. Families matter. They come in all shapes and sizes from ‘The Little House on the Prairie’ to ‘Angela’s Ashes’, from those with virtually no internal or external support structure to those with a robustness which sees them relatively unscathed or at least coping remarkably well through a lot of life’s perils.
Few animals in the world of nature take as long as human beings to grow to a level of maturity sufficient for independent living. The level of reliance of child on parent, the privacy of that relationship, its intensity, the ignorance of the child of other models of relationship, these mount up the vulnerability of a child who is unfortunate enough to be born into a family with poor parenting skills, compounded by an adverse social context in which there are no adequate compensating mechanisms or safeguards.
No single model of family is a sure guarantee of a child’s safe transportation from the womb to a fulfilled adulthood. We know that the traditional model of a mother and father in a lifelong marriage, successful as it is in incalculable ways, did not always protect a child from the damaging consequences of physical or sexual abuse, from the family turbulence caused by alcoholism or other drug abuse or the life-skewing consequences of the kind of grinding poverty which provokes low-expectation and poor motivation. We also know that shifting those damaged children out of that model into institutional care was also no guarantee of safety or a passport from the margins.
The traditional family model based on marriage certainly has its fair share of fallout and failure and we have seen increasing numbers of people turn their back on it, dismissing it as old-fashioned and out of step with the demands of modern individualism and freedom of choice. But then there is the fallout too from the increasing number of alternative models characterised by single-parenthood, large numbers of births outside marriage and many couples setting up home together outside of marriage.
It is remarkably easy to convince ourselves that these alternative lifestyles are part of some quintessentially modern, futuristic and unstoppable dynamic. Unstoppable it may be but many a student of modern history could point out the similarity to 18th century England where half of all births were outside marriage and a complete absence of divorce law, allied to liberal social attitudes facilitated a plethora of irregular partnerships. Victorian England did not emerge out of nowhere! Tonight’s chairman has himself raised serious questions about the growing number of children in whose lives fathers play a negligible or marginal role.
The whimsical nostalgia which would defend the traditional model of family even to the extent of denying its vulnerable side, and the uncritical assertion that modern flexible domestic arrangements are intrinsically better because they are new and modern, don’t take any of us far in our attempts to understand what it is that makes a childhood, safe, secure and developmentally effective in terms of intellect and emotion. Children need families, however constituted, that work well for them and families need to know the truth or truths about themselves. The harder those truths the more they need to be known, discussed intelligently and owned.
Part of that debate inevitably involves reflecting on these old and new, conventional and unconventional models of family, identifying what works well and what works badly, what works for and what works against the child. As it happens the one I know best, the traditional extended family is now being being revisited by policy makers, academics and practitioners involved in the field of family support, ransacking it for those things which are its strength working out if they are model specific or if and how they can be transplanted into other models of family or childhood support experience to bolster and strengthen them in turn.
We didn’t use terms like ‘social capital’, ‘secure bases’, ‘arenas of comfort’ and the jargon of social science to describe the safety nets and safety valves which our traditional, extended family and close knit community provided. But they existed all the same; yes, they could be patchy from family to family even on the same street, even within the same clan, and they could be patchy from community to community and sometimes, tragically, familiarity gave an obscene cloak of invisibility to the abuse of children. But when the structures worked well, and for many thousands of people they did, they produced a tolerably steady handrail to adulthood. Its apparent random, rough and tumble nature often masked its subtleties, its successes, its foundation on generations of lived life, of distilled, even bitter wisdom, its capacity to absorb change, to mutate and to adapt.
Every child is entitled to a safe passage to adulthood and too many adults have looked back with regret and anger at lives in which the steady handrail was missing or damaged. They need the world of the expert to be unafraid in charting a course for the future in which the lessons of the past and the emerging present have been well studied and well applied. That is why the work of family support experts and in particular the work of those contributing to the debate here in Ireland, will be so critical as we attempt to chart a future that is margin-free. It is particularly encouraging to see so much of this work being done on a North South axis, maximising the available knowledge and experience.
But although family is a crucial determinant of destiny it is not the sole determinant nor does it exist outside a context of some sort or another - a context which can conduce to its health or conduce to its dysfunction. The role of education and of community also impact deeply on destiny. Effective partnerships between parents, teachers and communities can be a crucial factor in discouraging children from the early school leaving/poor literacy/inadequate skills syndrome widely recognised as the most significant indicator of later disadvantage and marginalisation.
We pride ourselves that we now have a good system or education, and we have. It is a system many other countries would envy. It is a system our parents envy, growing up as they did in an era when they knew the powerlessness that came from poor educational opportunities. This system which we are growing all the time, is their legacy to the kind of empowered future they wanted for their children and through them for their country. The evidence is in - that their faith in education as a liberator is paying off well.
And yet for so many Irish people, that same system, has been anything but a source of liberation. It has failed to equip them with the basic building blocks of a fulfilled and successful adult life. I am thinking in particular of the thousands of individuals who have gone to primary and secondary schools and are unable to read and write either at all or only very poorly. I have met quite a few of them. The shy man who was too terrified to ask his bad-tempered teacher anything in class; whose working life on the building sites was a misery because, as he said himself in the first thing he wrote after adult literacy classes gave him power over his life:
"I loved the buildings but I had terrible problems with reading and writing. Sometimes the men would have a newspaper, so I would always get out of the hut quickly in case I was asked to read. When you can’t read you live in fear always. Many times I could be out for a day and go hungry because I wouldn’t go into a restaurant. I was always afraid people would look down on me. When you can’t read and write you feel you can’t talk to people who are more educated than you."
Or the woman who told me lately that she dropped out of school at thirteen because as a slow learner, made to feel she was irredeemably stupid, she felt she could never catch up. She described how, rather than write a letter of explanation about her child’s absence, she would walk down to the school to tell the teacher verbally, in order to cover up the fact she could not spell properly and was ashamed to admit it. A woman with a bright, lively intelligence and marvelous original wit, her life has been lived under a shadow of self-doubt, in low paid jobs where a high level of literacy is not needed.
For her, and thousands like her, the education system has led not to a release of potential as it should, but to a frustration of it. Out of that frustrated, destroyed potential have comes lives lived unhappily at the margins.
We know the best time to intervene if we are to break that cycle of misery, is when children are very young, when their inherent capacity and need to learn has not yet been damaged, when their minds are still like sponges, capable of absorbing a world of knowledge. But to have the best chance of success, such interventions must extend beyond child to his or her parents and wider community. It needs to recognise that a parent may have been scarred by a bad school experience, that education may not be valued in the home, indeed that it may be positively denigrated because of the parent’s own bad memories. It needs to recognise that such parents may lack the knowledge and literacy skills to help a child with homework or reading; that conditions in the home for studying may be less than ideal. It needs to recognise that the system works best when parents are involved in the circle of education, and feel that they are listened to and valued.
One of the most interesting and encouraging aspects of recent initiatives such as the Department of Education’s Breaking the Cycle Programme, is the way that parents are so centrally involved in the process. It may take a long time to win the trust of parents, even to get some of them inside the school gates, if their own memories of school and of teachers are filled with fear, humiliation and inadequacy. But each small step can help to build up a causeway of trust. It may start with something as simple as encouraging them to come along to their children’s art classes, not just to watch, but to participate. Small steps which bring them into contact with teachers, which help to demonstrate that learning need not be based on fear, that school can be enjoyable, a place where their children’s self-confidence is built up, not torn down. A place where they are made to feel welcome, and which may encourage them to consider their own options, perhaps to re-open a window of hope in their own lives through adult education, or becoming involved in community groups based in or around the school.
In building fluent working partnerships between parents and teachers, we are making much better use of the available energy sources which help empower a child. There are others out there still waiting to be tapped. We talk a lot about our ageing population, sometimes forgetting that in preparing ourselves for the problems associated with ageing, there are also new resources emerging. There are, in particular, so many older and retired people who have huge reservoirs of experience, knowledge and skills that they are only too happy to pass on to younger people, if only opportunity presented itself. And they possess that most important of all commodities in today’s world: time. Sometimes, just spending time with a child, listening to their problems, showing them some new activity, showing them that someone cares, can be the most valuable gift that child can receive. But older people can also help in practical ways, perhaps with a child’s reading or homework. Those who are already involved in voluntary adult literacy work or in pilot projects with schools or libraries, testify to the huge benefits for both the helper and the helped. Such fresh new ways of looking at and using our national knowledge equity, seeing the ending of marginalisation as a team and a national team effort at that, could be an important key to unlocking the potential of the marginalized child in the future.
The building of that team approach is already evident in the success of integrated local partnership initiatives in community development. Time and again I have seen examples where a local volunteer committee, starting from a blank sheet of paper, has drawn in the help of local and central government, voluntary social services, business and industry, local schools, Fás, and of the churches. It has tapped into the sources of available grant funding, has leveraged additional funds from the community and other sources, and out of this amazing patchwork of little successes and achievements, has built up to a radical and benign reversal of the destiny of that community. Communities acting together have found a sufficient strength in joint endeavour to tackle tough issues from drug abuse to unemployment, from care for the elderly to self-development and training for young mothers, from combating racism to healthcare for Travellers, to mention only a few. They have shown that seed-bedding a culture which supports local initiative and acknowledges its integrity, its entitlement to equal partnership with the world of the expert, is a winning combination. The days of marginalized communities having things done to them or for them are over. Today things are done with them and through them, by their leave, so that each step, each little bit of movement towards the centre is theirs to take pride in and to take heart from.
Graham Greene once wrote:
‘there is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in’.
There may also be a moment in a nation’s history when a door opens and the future enters. This moment has that feel about it. In one generation the national ceann faoi has been consigned to history and with it new destinies have been scripted for many of our people. Now we are called to write the next chapter, probably the best chapter of all, where a confident and successful generation, accelerating into the sophisticated world of high-tech and high achievement, decided it would not be comfortable, could not be content, until this country was all centre and no margins. If that is what we want and the ethos which founded this state says that it is, then the destiny of the marginalised child is our problem, our responsibility. We are his family. He depends on us.