Names for the Sea by Sarah Moss (the unexpected everything .txt) 📕

just down the road. It’s only part-time. The anti-capitalist bit sounds good. And what really matters is that the staff are lovely and the children seem happy. I check with colleagues in the coffee room at work, who assure me that the absence of books is in no way sinister, that it’s not the Nordic way to offer books to the very young. That comes later, the professor of French tells me. We almost think children should be protected from reading until they are six. It’s the time to be outside and to play together and to learn these hard things about friends and enemies and sharing and fighting. Pens and paper come later. I remember Max’s nursery encouraging the children to ‘learn their letters’ at three, ready for the Foundation Stage, even though none of the staff thought it was particularly useful. Would England be a better place if we insisted that people learn the hard things about sharing and fighting before teaching them to read? All the Nordic countries have more literate and better-educated populations than the UK, and most of them appear to be better at distributing resources and not fighting. Maybe it is a better way, we think. Maybe Tobias will learn to be Nordic and calm and good at sharing.

I can think of little to say in our defence. Tobias lasts three weeks. Anthony goes with him; parents are encouraged to stay until children are happy to be left, which in our case doesn’t happen. The children don’t actually do very much, Anthony reports. They spend half an hour watching their teacher cutting up fruit. The teacher sings but the boys don’t join in. The boys have to move around in crocodiles, each toddler with a hand on the shoulder of the child in front, to teach them conformity and group identity. The staff are nice, but it feels weird.

I find the English section of the Hjalli website, which I should have done weeks earlier. Hjallastefnan is a movement established by Margrét Pála Ólafsdóttir, an Icelandic nursery teacher who began to develop what she describes as ‘rather unusual pedagogical methods’ when she became director of a pre-school in Hafnarfjörður in 1989, and is now the director of a private company running eleven nursery schools and three primary schools in and around Reykjavík. Ólafsdóttir writes that,

In Iceland, as in other parts of the world, little girls are brought up ‘nicely’. They are dressed in pink and cuddled lovingly in the first months of their lives. Their future is clearly laid out; they start their public life in a mixed sex nursery school or kindergarten where they learn that girls are entitled to no more than a quarter of the teacher’s attention and guidance. They learn to take a minimum amount of space and stay mainly in the corners of their classrooms and playground. They learn to be modest, ‘nice and gentle,’ waiting patiently and quietly for their turn. They are trained to develop a victim’s attitude toward themselves, in which they are passive in dealing with their surroundings. This training is necessary for what is awaiting them; minimal participation in a male dominated society in which women go on waiting patiently for the recognition that they exist. (http://www.hjalli.is/information)

Little boys, by contrast, are made of slugs and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails, and can’t wait to get their jackboots on and start kicking people:

Little boys have another fate. They are bounced around energetically from the first moment of their lives. They are strongly encouraged to get up on their feet and to grab at whatever comes to them. They do not spend long in the arms of any adult because that is suitable only for those who must become victims. Just like the girls, the future of the boys is carefully planned from the very beginning. They walk into their public life when the school door opens and where the action awaits them. They do not have to wait for attention and guidance because they get it without having to ask. They are not afraid to occupy space and take the playgrounds over (with their fists if they have to). They are the future directors and governors of the society.

The solution to this problem is to separate boys and girls from infancy so that ‘we can give our full energy and attention to encouraging the girls to become active and assertive and to teaching the boys to become sensitive and non-aggressive.’ The children have no toys or books because,

we make a point of being able to take care of our own things; the teachers and the children make the clay and chalk we need, we write and draw our own books and write our own plays to show to the other children in the next department. We take care of the garden and repair broken things. We are self-supporting people.

We do not use normal toys. For the sake of the children’s imagination and creativity we refuse junk just as we abolish all things and methods that cannot help us to reach the goals. We do not have one jigsaw or one pearl. [I think she means ‘bead’.] Instead, we have unstructured material, such as everlasting wooden blocks, sand, water and the tables and chairs. This choice of resources also helps to create more calmness because the temptation of the garish toy ‘fix,’ or the fighting and competition to get the best piece is nowhere to be found.

Three weeks, I’m sure, did no harm beyond delaying the beginning of Tobias’s integration into his Icelandic world. Anthony didn’t leave him there alone for more than an hour or so, surely not long enough for a two-year-old to learn that because he has a penis he is violent and aggressive, or that people with vaginas are victims who need to be trained to get angry. Not long enough for him to think that books are the tools of the enemy or that conflict must be avoided at any