I went to a fantastic talk about Shakespeare by Lisa Jardine, and on the bus on the way home wrote my reflections on culture, the Southbank Centre and children's rights. I hate editing my own writing, the sign of a bad writer, but I hope it might cause some discussion. It helped me express some of my regular frustration at our culture and its events and people... and their lack of engagement with children's rights:

I want it said! The unasked Question.

Jude Kelly has a problem. She is Director of the largest cultural centre in the UK, the Southbank Centre.

I am on the 15 bus travelling to East London, to Tower Hamlets, my mind full of excited and angry and confused thoughts. I have come from the Southbank, the Purcell Room, from the first Frank Kermode Lecture, given by Professor Lisa Jardine.

I so much wanted to ask her a question at the end of her lecture on Shakespeare and Kermode’s sense of the ‘patience’ of his plays: The waiting openness of them to be re-interpreted by each generation - the actor, reader, critic or audience seeing the world of Shakespeare’s stage according to how they themselves see the world. 

Jardine loved to quote A.N.Whitehead the philosopher and mathematician, and Heisenberg the physicist, fields of science and philosophy engaging with the world of literature.  She seemed to come so close to quoting her father, Jacob Bronoski, on the nature of scientific search for ‘truth’. And so close was I in putting my hand up to quote him, “We must close the gap between the push button order and the human act. We must touch people.” But! And there was space, as no one offered to ask the last question. But!

Going back to Jude Kelly’s dilemma, she is organising brainstorming sessions of people who work with children. I work with children at the famous school based on children’s rights, Summerhill. She wants to organise, in November this year, a week of events at the Southbank, on the culture of children’s rights.

The discussion over what this means needs to be problematic, it should be exploring the nature of culture and its relationship to and with childhood. Is culture disengaged from schools as it is transformed into subjects to be examined? Are those who contribute to our culture separated from the issues of what schools are doing to the cultural aspects of our children because they have disconnected themselves from the space that defines culture as only an educational experience. 

Maybe the wrong people, people who work with children, are there. I want Lisa Jardine to be there, Ben Goldacre, Salman Rushdie, Brian Cox. I want Mark Padmore, Nick Deare, Danny Boyle, Michael Morpurgo, Dizzy Rascal, Plan B, Andy Mulligan, Lilly Allen, Joelle Taylor, Michael Rosen, J.K.Rowling, Mary Riddell, Helena Kennedy, Martha Kearney, Kirsty Wark, Christine Gilbert, Jenni Murray, Carlo Ginzberg,  …

I want the cultural contributors to the Southbank to be at the brainstorming.

My dilemma with the question to Lisa Jardine, is the same question facing Jude Kelly and this group. It is a question I used to have the confidence to ask, even when slow handclapped by the audience of Salman Rushdie promoting his book ‘The Ground Beneath Her Feet’, and urged by his agent, sitting next to me, to actually the bloody question.

Lisa Jardine’s talk, where she referred to the joy of living and the joy of being human, reminded me of my humanity. I smiled, laughed, felt, cross referenced my experiences, my learning. But as a science teacher, as a human rights campaigner, what relevance does her talk have for the culture of our children, for the culture of their schools, for the culture of their learning, their humanity.

The question is always forced when I ask it. It needs wording to the context of the presentation. But should it be so? To me it is the elephant in the room. A speaker who feels joy at their own humanity, at sharing their creativity, their understanding, their learning with an appreciative audience. 

The elephant is that we were all children, we are all products of our childhood learning and culture. Why is there no engagement with this? Why is not each cultural event a comment, a celebration, an explicit protest on behalf of our children, that their culture, their institutions should be about the joy of this creativity, of this learning, of this discourse?

At the first brainstorming Jude Kelly expressed the frustration of talking about a children’s cultural event, as she appeared not to want to marginalise children into an audience group. Culture is for all. 

My answer to her is to brief her cultural performers to ask them my question before they perform. To urge them to do what Janus Korczak, the children’s rights campaigner and director of the democratic orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto, did, to let people see him as the child he was.

And at least have one question from the audience that challenges the performer to reflect on the relevance of their present cultural contribution to the children’s culture of today, and to the speakers own personal childhood culture.

Why is this important? Because the space for creativity; to interpret, invent, and express; the desire to imagine and the joy to play, come from a strong, confident sense of our humanity. This is founded on human rights and its bedrock of children’s rights.

Each cultural event is an unrecognised, unacknowledged plea for children’s rights.

Lisa Jardine, in reflecting on Frank Kermode’s writing on Shakespeare told the story of Desdemona. She is called a ‘whore’, within the audience of another, who goes on to repeat the accusation. Because she does not refute the accusations, she can hardly use the word at one point in the play, her husband kills her thinking she is guilty. The public labelling of our children as miscreants, yobs, feral, or simply in need of control, of punishment, of reward, of measurement, without their voices, or the voices of us as adults speaking as ex-children, contradicting these labels, we will continue to allow our children to be smothered by pillows: The pillow that silences their voices, their creativity, their engagement in culture.

Next time, the next event I am at on the Southbank, I will not be silent.

By the way the 15 bus, that I am sitting on, is portrayed in the film ‘To Sir, With Love.’ Sidney Poitier, the black teacher rides it, as the opening titles roll, and Lulu sings, to the new school he will work at. A school based on children’s rights and co-operation. A school that Government Inspectors in 1948 said was the school of the future.

The bus also passes Whitechapel, where a 13 year old girl in the early 1900s, founded and ran, as equals with other children and teachers, a children’s rights based school. Just before I get home the bus passes Upper North Street, and the white monument of an angel in Poplar Recreation Ground opposite, dedicated to the children, aged four, who died at Upper North Street School during World War I, the first in the world to be bombed by aeroplane.

The bus travels along the road that children marched from our schools protesting against the Iraq war. It passes a plaque, over my local newsagents, for the community, including children who marched to protest for the freedom of the Tower Hamlets councillors imprisoned for trying to create an equal wage for women, helping the unemployed, and fighting for the poor.

Our roads, our landscapes echo with voices of our children’s culture. Let’s hope someday that these voices will engage and be engaged in the culture of the Southbank, and in the culture of our society. I look forward to November.

Michael Newman, Summerhill School February 2014