I love the fact that Currambena is democratic. I love the fact that this means the children the teachers and the parents get together to tussle over the nitty gritty of school life. From what to learn, where to learn it and whether to learn it while eating lunch on top of the monkey bars with balloons up their jumpers – all issues get a good airing.
But there is an elephant in the schoolyard. A big issue that remains untackled, barely mentioned, but that reveals itself in the tired and haunted eyes of parents and teachers at preschool and primary alike when it comes to home time.
Shoes.
Like many Currambena children, my girls wear shoes to school everyday. They wear one on each foot. Often matching. They sometimes wear socks, not necessarily a pair, but I make sure the holes aren’t showing and that they occasionally get to see the inside of a washing machine.
But when it comes to home time, their feet are bare, and their shoes are nowhere to be seen. Somehow as they travel the winding road that is their educational journey they toss aside their footwear. No problem, whatever it takes to get them where they need to be, I say. But that is without the afternoon ritual searching sandpits and school rooms for disguarded sandals.
Sometimes we leave without. Sometimes we improvise with bits of string and craft room cast offs, often we find shoes so long lost that the children who wore them have long since moved on. Occasionally we find the shoes we are looking for – or come across a pair we had given up ever seeing again.
So if you see my children leaving school in the afternoon, with grins on their faces but nothing on their feet – its not the late seventies free-love and no-footwear philosophy of democratic education, nor is it because we have sacrificed shoes to pay school fees, it is simply that they have taken so much on board during the day about life, about friends about all that they get in school, that they have had to put down their shoes to carry it all.
I desperately hope.
If you want to blog about anything that is going on at school – let me know – Kirsten
