Less work, more activity

Parents and schools should prepare children for a fulfilling life in which the aim of having a "good job" does not dominate, says John White

Too much television; too many toys, computer games and other consumer goods on demand; too much fast food... Many parents' misplaced kindness - or shelling out for a peaceful life - are well known. There is much talk these days of parents' responsibilities. Recent years have seen the work of the teacher increasingly regulated by national guidelines and the job of parent seems likely to follow suit.

No doubt more will be done here by exhortation than by legislation. Parental indulgence is an obvious target. Children need ethical stiffening against the temptations that beset them and parents can best provide this. They need to inculcate an extended version of the traditional virtue of temperance - in the Greek, not the Salvation Army, sense which has to do with the proper regulation of one's bodily desires. Their role in this and other forms of character education needs official endorsement and support.

I suspect few would disagree with this. But more has to be said about the wider framework within which such responsibilities should operate. Here a cultural chasm opens up. A crucial question for home as for school education is: will our Work Society continue, or are its days numbered? By "our Work Society" I mean the culture in which the British have lived for 300 years, where work - by and large, work one is constrained to do - is seen as the central feature of a meaningful human life.

Parents with babies today should ask themselves what the Britain of, say, 2050 will be like, when their sons and daughters are in their prime. Will people in work be exceeding the 44 hours mean average today, trying to keep up with Pacific Rim competition? Or will progress in IT and automation combined with disaffection with the traditional work culture have helped to create a society where work has lost its old dominance?

From an ethical point of view there is everything to be said for the end of the Work Society. The idea that one's life should be centrally committed to work made sense to Puritans centuries ago who saw relentless hard work not as an unavoidable evil but very positively, as a duty towards God. It cuts less ice when measured against the liberal ideal that everyone should live a life built round activities of their own choosing as long as they do not harm others. If this "Activity Society" (in Ralf Dahrendorf's phrase) contains hard workers, these will be there by choice, not obligation. Nearly everyone will want to include some work in the varied pattern of their lives. At the same time non-work activities - reading novels for pleasure, conversation, cycling through the countryside - will be for many of them every bit as salient as product-orientated ones. The moral imperative that everyone should devote the best part of their life to - largely heteronomous - work will have melted away.

True, in 2050 as now our community will need to keep economically afloat and the current push towards equipping the population with high-tech skills makes good sense. But this can be detached from the traditional doctrine of work's centrality. Heteronomous work can still be a significant feature in our lives without being the dominant value it is now.

As parents become more conscious of challenges to the Work Society, they will be able to incorporate this heightened reflectiveness into how they see their role. Take the issue of children's temptations and parents' indulgence. As we know them, these things are the product of the work culture. In two ways. One, some parents work too hard, paid or unpaid, to devote the time they should to their children's upbringing and give in too often to their wishes.

Two, the work culture defines childhood by exclusion as a time for play, for freedom and gaiety before the years of disciplined productiveness begin. So it is not surprising that parents have traditionally thought "Let them enjoy themselves while they can!" A twist on this has come about in the last century with universal schooling and its induction of children into a regime of unavoidable work from the age of five - a tendency noticeably accentuated in Thatcherite and post-Thatcher education policy. The more the shades of the prison house have stretched backwards and more deeply into early childhood, the more understandable has been parents' - often misplaced - concern to mark out for their children a protected area of freedom and spontaneity.

Many on the right would like parents to bring their children up less permissively but within the taken-for-granted framework of a Work Society. But liberals who urge sceptical reflection on this framework have good reasons of their own for calling for families to return to traditional virtues. Take temperance again. The self-directing persons which the liberal ideal envisions need to learn as children how sensibly to cope with temptations . It is part of their equipment for a flourishing life.

If, as commentators increasingly believe, the end of the Work Society is within our sights, parents could think of childhood less as a pre-work stage and more as a period of preparation for a life of varied activities, some involving work - autonomous or obligatory - others not. On the work front they could encourage children's self-motivated attempts to build Lego windmills and write stories; and they could insist they tidy their room and help with household chores. Parents do these things now, of course; but in the world we may be moving into they could do them more consciously as induction into different elements of the Activity Society.

Given this greater reflectiveness about their role, parents could also work with teachers as more equal partners in children's initiation into a post-productivist world. For on this scenario schools, too, would have to change. At present they mirror the Work Society. As soon as they begin compulsory schooling pupils are as involved in work as lorry drivers or mothers looking after children.

Schools could be a new kind of mirror. Parents could see them less as pathways to a Good Job and more as door openers to a life of personal fulfilment .Their aims would still include preparation for work of different kinds but greater attention would be paid to how such work aims fitted into a wider picture. The long school day could be cut in two so as to parallel work reduction in the adult world- a constrained part for necessary learning and a part devoted to self chosen activities , not necessarily academic. Finally, teachers , like parents , would be working less. Both could be fresher and more dynamic, bringing their non work interests more to bear on their dealings with children. As a different kind of role model, they could reacquaint them day in, day out with more engaging visions of how to live a worthwhile human life.

John White is Professor of Philosophy of Education at the Institute of Education, University of London. His new book "Education and the End of Work", towards a new philosophy of work and learning, is published by Cassell, price pounds 15.99 paperback. It is obtainable from the Institute of Education Bookshop on 0171-612- 6050.