Steve Rollett, Deputy CEO, Confederation of School Trusts
"In order to be a source of true fulfilment, a good hobby probably should feel a little embarrassing,” quips Oliver Burkeman in ‘Four Thousand Weeks’. The book is a thesis on the nature of time and how to use it – or rather, how to worry less about how you use it.
His point on hobbies is about the myriad calls on our time - the meetings, the responsibilities, the social and work pressures, and the constant state of digital connectivity, that makes us feel like we must use our time productively. Hobbies are important, he says, because they transport us out of the pressures of our lives, which tend to be geared towards outcomes (the future), and instead enable us to carve out time that keeps us rooted, at least momentarily, in the serenity of the present.
This is not about success, he tells us: "to pursue an activity in which you have no hope of becoming exceptional is to put aside, for a while, the anxious need to ‘use time well’”. Note that word: anxious.
We know that we live in a time of increasing anxiety, and that this is growing particularly acutely in children. This was born out in the DfE’s recent report on children’s mental health: "anxiousness among both primary and secondary-age pupils appears to have increased and is higher than in 2020/21.”
What’s to blame? There are numerous potential culprits singled out. Interestingly, research by John Jerrim suggests that tests and exams may not be the cause.
Rather, there seems to be a gathering body of evidence that the growth of social media correlates with the rise of mental health problems seen internationally in the past decade or so.
To be clear, I’m not a luddite and I’m not making the case for the banishment of social media. But it’s hard to dispel the nagging suspicion that hours of doom-scrolling through Twitter, Instagram, Tik-Tok etc is leaving an imprint on the minds of children and adults alike. And these things are designed to do so.
As Daisy Christodoulou notes in her book ‘Teachers vs Tech’, "human attention has become one of the most sought-after commodities in the world.” These things are designed to suck us in and keep us there.
So, what does this mean for schools? Clearly schools have an important role in educating children about how to use technology, the benefits and risks involved. They also have important responsibilities in relation to safeguarding and online activity. But I think there’s something else too.
In the words of a CEO I was talking to recently, schools help children ‘find their passions.’ I use that term slightly tentatively because some poor curriculum practice has happened in the past in the name of following pupils’ passions - often for some of the most vulnerable pupils in school: ‘they don’t need subject X. Let’s just teach them what they’re interested in.’
But as this CEO powerfully argued, helping pupils to find their passions is exactly what schools must do. And this can be part of, rather than in opposition to, the notion of curriculum entitlement.
Those passions exist across the full range of human endeavour and experience. There will be budding writers, scientists and mathematicians in a class, just as there will be musicians, artists, architects, and chefs. And there will be children for whom none of these labels apply in a vocational sense; they will simply derive pleasure and meaning from a pursuit, be it cooking, drawing, hitting the drums (as my son does – not ‘playing’), and so on.
This is why the breadth of curriculum is so important, from the academic core, to arts, sports, technology, the humanities and so on.
Sometimes the rationale given for curriculum can be instrumental in nature: exams, progression, jobs etc. But it should never be driven solely by these considerations. The joy – and challenge – that’s to be found in encountering the suite of human pursuits is the thing that schools uniquely can gift children. It’s part of schools’ commitment to human flourishing.
This is not about ‘cultural capital’, which also tends to be applied in quite instrumentalist ways, working on the premise that equipping children with particular knowledge will allow them to enter into a discourse shaped by powerful others (as an aside, I spoke recently to an academic who knew and worked with Pierre Bourdieu, the originator of the concept of cultural capital, who reflected this instrumentalist understanding of the term is in many ways at odds with Bourdieu’s argument).
This is simply about creating a space to imagine that for a child to pick up a drum stick, a paintbrush, a pen, or a golf club, it’s not only an attempt to secure social justice, as important as that is. It’s just part of enjoying being human, being alive for those four thousand weeks Burkeman tells us we might expect (on average).
The education system has worked hard, particularly in the past decade or so, to improve the academic performance of pupils. Let’s not lose that – let’s bank it and continue to get better. But it sometimes feels like there has been less discourse from policy makers, and especially government, about other ways of experiencing school, education, life and joy.
It feels like there is more room to blow the trumpet of, well, trumpets. And footballs, spatulas, pencils, ballet pumps, steel drums, scripts and maybe – dare I say it – even stamps.
Which brings us back to Burkeman on hobbies. A rich, broad curricula and extra-curricular experience is the fertile ground from which hobbies and pursuits might grow. If Burkeman is right, the nurturing of such things – children’s passions – may be an important part of how we equip children to thrive and stay healthy in the modern world.
And there’s nothing embarrassing about that.
