Names for the Sea, page 6
4
Back to School
It’s almost the beginning of term. Max is going to the International School. If we decide to stay permanently in Iceland, he can move into their bilingual stream, but for now it seems more important to minimise his immediate sense of alienation than to maximise his chances of eventual integration. The other children, and most of the staff, sound (but are not) American; we still haven’t learnt that International English is not the same as the language we speak at home.
Icelandic children start school aged six, and stay in the same school until they are sixteen, when they move to a college, which takes four years to prepare them for university, or into vocational education. Childhood and adolescence have a different shape here. Fifteen-year-olds are in the same category as seven-year-olds, both children, both part of that tribe old enough to go around without adults but not old enough to drive, the only people who walk and take the bus, while nineteen-year-olds, although able to drive, vote and drink alcohol, share their daily space with sixteen-year-olds. We hear no-one demonising older children here, nothing akin to the English fear and loathing of teenagers. When I tell a group of students about the high-pitched sounds played to stop ‘yobs’ congregating outside English shops, they don’t believe me. What kind of country would allow businesses to control children’s freedom of movement?
The International School is housed in the local state school, and the buildings, so new that the swimming pool is finished as term begins, look more like those of a new art gallery or the headquarters of a particularly avant-garde corporation than a state institution. The classrooms are all open-plan, widening off light-filled spaces too broad and curvy to be corridors. The children skid in socks around pieces of sculpture, trees in pots, fish-tanks and glossy wood-fronted kitchen areas, complete with ovens for baking classes and coffee pots for the teachers. It isn’t just the obvious expensiveness that’s exciting, but the way the architecture suggests an entirely novel idea of childhood. The library and many of the classrooms have glass walls over the sea, as if it matters that the children should be able to see the horizon. There are no doors, no way of shutting people in or out, as if children and adults together could be trusted to move or be still. There are no stalls for the children’s toilets – the part of looking round schools in England that always makes me think about home education again – but single bathrooms used by staff and students and kept clean by all concerned. There is nothing to stop a child wandering off and fiddling with the cookers or pulling boiling coffee off the counter, but they don’t. And most importantly, there is nothing to stop anyone entering or leaving the building at any time. No fences, no gates, no boundaries, and the spinning doors open to all. English schools, Max says after a few weeks, are like prisons. They think they have to lock the children in.
Max sets off uncertainly in clothes of his own choosing and returns with tales of his six classmates, each bearers of at least two passports. Two embassy children, one Norwegian and one American. Two girls with Russian mothers and Icelandic fathers, girls who, Max recounts, take ages after swimming to put their make-up on and rearrange their hair. The daughter of a Filipina mother and a Polish father, and the son of a Finnish academic researching economic collapse. The builders are still finishing off the play equipment in the first week of term. There is nothing delineating ‘school grounds’, nothing to keep anyone in or out. Children play on the log climbing frames, swings and stepping-stones after school and at weekends just as during the school day. Adults use the basketball courts in the evenings. (I remember the CCTV cameras trained on the perimeter fence of Max’s primary school at home.) That land, those facilities, belong to everyone. And because most children make their own way to and from school, there isn’t exactly a moment of departure, nor a ‘school gates’ culture among parents. We learn about Max’s classmates’ families only via the gossip of seven-year-olds, at least until a sequence of birthday parties shows us all quite how foreign we are to each other. Only the British, it seems, do birthday cards. The Americans send out for pizza for the birthday tea. The Norwegian version of ‘Happy Birthday’ has more verses than the British national anthem, and the Icelanders at the International School do children’s birthday presents on a scale I have not previously imagined (although we have an unrepresentative sample here: Garðabær-dwellers are regarded by the rest of the city as vulgar and nouveau riche, the footballers’ Cheshire of Iceland, and within that group the International School hosts those whose families have spent time abroad or who plan to do so very soon – a discordant blend of academics, diplomats and ‘entrepreneurs’ with Russian connections). School-children’s days seem largely disconnected from their parents’ movements. They finish their lessons and move out to the playground, and after a while adjourn to the beach or the pool. No particular need to go home, for parents are still at work. The streets of suburbia belong to the children, who make perfectly sensible citizens.
Nevertheless, we have trouble letting Max go. What are you worried about, asks his new friend’s Icelandic mother, when we want to escort Max and her son to the play-beach down the road. Traffic, we say, watching another driver go by steering with her knees because she needs both hands for texting. Water. Rocks. Abduction. Other children. Everything. That stuff doesn’t happen here, she says. I don’t know why but it just doesn’t. Come on, I say, seven-year-olds fall off things everywhere, things like sea walls built up out of piles of concrete blocks and ending in shallow water and rocks. I don’t believe Icelandic children just somehow have better balance. More practice, she says firmly. They learn to take responsibility for their own safety, which is pretty important with this climate in this landscape. Relax, you’re in Iceland now. Honestly, there’s no recorded case of a child being abducted here. You’ve seen how we leave babies in their prams in the street? Not one has ever been taken. Think about it, where would you go? Everyone knows everyone. They don’t know me, I say, suddenly understanding why foreigners might be treated with suspicion. I could abduct a child. I know you, she says. Pétur knows you. Mads and Mæja know you. And we know lots of other people. We’d notice if you suddenly disappeared, and where would you disappear to? You haven’t even got a car, and if you did, do you think the people at village petrol stations don’t notice strangers coming through? It’s not possible, not in Iceland.
We try letting Max go to the beach a few times and she is right, nothing bad happens, or at least, nothing bad happens outside our heads, where things are pretty terrifying. The pavements outside the cafés and designer boutiques of the city centre, we remind each other, are indeed lined with prams, each containing a sleeping infant inside layers of quilts and waterproof covers. Then there are a few stormy days when Max doesn’t want to go out anyway, and by the time the wind dies down we are back in our right minds. No, we say. Because however often we might decide that our better judgements are based on foreign foolishness in relation to parking or fruit-eating or assessment methods for postgraduate work, your safety is more important than cultural relativism. No. And I hear in my voice an echo I haven’t heard before, the echo of thousands of immigrant parents raising kids in a society they don’t fully understand or inhabit. I don’t care how things work here; I know what’s right and you’ll do what I say because I love you. Max goes along with it, for now, for the cold months when he doesn’t much want to be out there anyway, but he has tasted freedom, understood that it is cultural preference rather than a fact of life that says he can’t go out alone. His parents are fallible, their law a matter of cultural relativity.
Finding a nursery for Tobias is harder. At first we thought we wouldn’t need one, since Anthony intends to stay at home with the children until Tobias starts school. In Canterbury, Anthony and Tobias had a weekly round of Drama Tots, Monkey Music, playgroup and swimming. Once we’d worked out where these sorts of activities took place in Reykjavík, we thought, Anthony and Tobias would start to make friends. We ask around, try the Intercultural House, which is there to support recent immigrants, and the local council, check the leisure centres for adverts. There is nothing. You need to sign him up for playschool, the nice woman in the council office explains. It’s important. All children go. Look, he has priority because he comes from a non-Icelandic speaking home. She looks over her shiny wooden desk at the mud-spattered pushchair and our wet coats. It’s highly subsidised. You don’t pay much.
We go home and think about it, but there isn’t much to think about. Tobias can’t spend all day, every day, alone with Anthony in the flat, playing with his shoebox of toys and reading a couple of dozen books. We go down the road to see the nursery by the play-beach, warmly recommended by Matthew’s friend’s cousin, Hulda Kristín’s neighbour and Pétur’s daughter’s colleague. It is newly built, clean, with exposed brick walls and pale lino floors. The rooms radiate around a central atrium, which has a low wooden stage and big crash-mats for bouncing. The head, a fluent English speaker, shows us round. Small blonde children gather around low tables, concentrating on the movements of water and sand. Some are outside, where hills to run up and roll down have been built in a small field. There is a vegetable patch, and a cook who uses only fresh ingredients. We ask the usual questions, feeling competent in nursery selection after Max’s pre-school years, and are told about low staff turnover, simple rules calmly enforced, naps and toilet training to individual requirements. We ask why there are no books, and why the walls are bare. Because we are a Hjallastefnan establishment, she says. Did you not know? It is very popular here in Iceland. It is why the children have this uniform. We notice, now, that the children are all in navy tracksuits with a logo on the front. And it’s hard to be sure among two-year-olds in navy tracksuits, but all of the ones in the room we can see look like boys.
Yes, says the head. We have separate rooms for girls and boys, because that way they have a place where they are not always defined by gender. We have simple toys to give them space to be creative, a space away from all the Disney and advertising and pink for girls and guns for boys. They wear uniform so they don’t think about clothing, so the differences are only in character. It is very popular here. You should read about it.
We wander around a bit more and then go home. Well, we say, he has books at home, after all. He doesn’t know he’s a boy, so maybe he won’t notice the separation from girls. It’s 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 price. We were stupid. We assumed that because this is Iceland, the gender politics would be intelligent, and we didn’t see that what’s posing as feminism is just another way of saying that girls can’t cope and boys are violent. I am sure that these are errors we wouldn’t have made at home. We are so careful to be good foreigners, to suspend judgement, to believe that our views are culturally specific and therefore irrelevant, that we betray ourselves. And our children.
I phone the nice woman at the council and explain that things aren’t working with us and Hjallastefnan. Can she suggest an alternative? Oh, she says, but this method is very popular in Iceland, very popular indeed. Especially with writers and teachers like yourself. I know, I say, I’m sorry, it must be a cultural difference. Is there anything else, anything a little more – well, mainstream? Well, she says doubtfully, there is the state nursery at Lundaból, but it’s a long way for you to take him every day when you have no car.
It is about a mile, a pleasant enough walk through sleeping suburbia. There are gardens consisting of grass, rocks and rowan trees behind white picket fences. You can peer in through 1970s windows to see shiny wooden floors and tidy kitchens, and sometimes a dog barks. The nursery is on a slope from which you can see across the houses and over the top of IKEA to the mountains. There is a metal gate with a latch out of reach of toddlers, and then a tarmac playground with a spider’s-web climbing frame, surely the same model as in my local park in the early 1980s, and certainly of a kind long uprooted in England on health and safety grounds. There are swings, not baby swings with holes for the legs and a frame to hang onto but big swings of the sort that at home are considered unsuitable for the under-fives. The yard is busy with children pedalling tricycles up a concrete slope and freewheeling down, and the tricycles have platforms on the back so that one child can stand and hang onto the shoulders of the one peddling. No helmets. No knee-pads. There is a flight of concrete stairs off to the side of the slope. Anthony and I exchange glances and go round to the porch, where we knock a few times, wait, peer through a window, knock again.
