Stop Treating Children Like Adults

Apparently, a commons selcet committee has ruled that each school should have a school council. Here I agree - the school management does not always understand the consequences of their decisions and it is important that pupils can get their views across. Also, it is important for the self-esteem of children to feel enfranchised in the decision-making process.

However, in my experience of leading school councils, the people elected to them, whilst representative of the school body ( the 'cool kids'), were very rarely articulate enough to get their point across effectively, or introspective enough to know what it was about a proposition that instinctively made them dislike it.

I certainly don't agree with the idea that pupils should have a say on the appointment of staff and the running of the school, as was suggested by the committee.

Our school was one of those awful 'progressive' ones, and a few pupils were allowed to interview prospective headmasters. I vehemently disagreed with the rest of the student panel, whose only criterion for a good head was that they would promise them the world. Many of these things, if they are honest, they have no right to promise and have never been implemented, because they were highly impractical.

I agree that children need to be given some responsability for them to get used to the idea of making decisions for themselves and other people. However, they are not yet mature enough to make decisions of that magnitude, and are often unaware of the vital context of the adult world.

Treating children as equals means that we should respect their opinions as fellow human beings, but accept that they are made within the context of someone who has never had to care for themselves in the real world. This isn't patronising, it's just sensible.