Children's space

Over many years I've come across incidents and experiences that have made me think about children and young people's experience of public space. I'm talking about both rural and urban space. In fact I did my undergraduate dissertation on young people in rural spaces. Later I was occupied with young people's behaviour in urban space and prepared an unimplemented research project to explore that in some academic [sic] way. Anyway, such thoughts also drove me to move here to rural France. After my daughter was born while living in a city, I'd wanted to find an alternative space for her to grow up in, and the rural south of England was proving an expensive place to do that. So here we are, and she's having the time of her life, and very comfortable with her immediate experience of public space in the village.


But that obviously isn't a solution for everyone, and urban areas in particular are still facing many of the issues that bothered me as a new parent, and as a worker concerned with young urban experiences at the rougher end of the spectrum. Demos (intern Adam) has just published this video on YouTube to complement some of their work on play spaces. I like the video (besides what it says).

To school or not to school

On the day our li'l lamb goes back to school, my ongoing debate with myself, and occasionally others, about whether she would be better off elsewhere has resurfaced. By elsewhere, I don't mean another school, well, perhaps. Steiner etc. alternatives exist within 3 hours of here, but don't really offer a choice for us. Home-schooling? Maybe. What about starting something locally that could support a home -school choice as a by-product. that's an idea trundling along in the background with a couple of inspiring people in the area. In the meantime, two recent posts have caught my attention. This one from Pat Kane of The Play Ethic about a radical plan for a school in New york. And this one from Ewan McIntosh of edublog which asks some fsacinating questions about higher education (keep reading, it's further down).