Let the Souls of Our Children Sing

By Leonora Langley

As the stigma and taboos around mental health issues soften, unparalleled numbers of people are seeking counselling, psychotherapy and life coaching. Millions of viewers are transfixed to the emotional traumas played out in reality TV shows, soaps and dramas such as Homecoming, The Bodyguard and Wanderlust. As part of this awakening to the importance of emotional well-being, many parents, educators and carers of the young are bravely attending to their own wounds and are now more determined than ever to mitigate the wounding of the children in their care.
Langley believes that the greatest impediment to young people's development as free-thinking, spiritually-enlightened and emotionally-responsive, integrated human beings is that mainstream education is still based on a nineteenth-century model emphasising cognition and logic, which can be counted and measured, over the enrichment of children's souls which is beyond measure. The existing anachronistic structure desperately needs a new paradigm. At a time when arts education is seen as an increasingly marginal activity in state schooling, she argues that it is only by putting children's innate creativity and curiosity at the heart of our educational mission that we can hope to re-engage the vast number of young people switched off from the current system and avoid the poverty of imagination and the absence of hope which are the root causes of so many contemporary ills.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jun 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781528997256

Leonora Langley

Leonora Langley has divided her professional life between education and journalism, beginning as a teacher in the 1970s. In the 1980s she became increasingly active as a journalist and in 1984 she moved to the USA, where she created and for four years edited a lifestyle magazine for The Hollywood Reporter. From 1988, she was the first west-coast editor of the US edition of Elle magazine and became a regular contributor to Bon Appetit magazine. Returning to the UK in the 1990s, she resumed teaching, specialising in music, English and drama, in the process liaising with world-class organisations such as Glyndebourne Opera. More recently, she has qualified as a counsellor and, through the aegis of music in her role as a piano tutor, she has facilitated an outlet for her students’ emotions. Leonora Langley is a Licentiate of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, an Associate of the New Era Academy of Drama and Music and her M.A. explored aesthetics in relation to drama in education.

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About the Author

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Photo by Alberto Tolot

Leonora Langley has divided her professional life between education and journalism, beginning as a teacher in the 1970s. In the 1980s she became increasingly active as a journalist and in 1984 she moved to the USA, where she created and for four years edited a lifestyle magazine for The Hollywood Reporter. From 1988, she was the first west-coast editor of the US edition of Elle magazine and became a regular contributor to Bon Appetit magazine. Returning to the UK in the 1990s, she resumed teaching, specialising in music, English and drama, in the process liaising with world-class organisations such as Glyndebourne Opera. More recently, she has qualified as a counsellor and, through the aegis of music in her role as a piano tutor, she has facilitated an outlet for her students’ emotions.

Leonora Langley is a Licentiate of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, an Associate of the New Era Academy of Drama and Music and her M.A. explored aesthetics in relation to drama in education.

Dedication

This is the book I would like to have been given to accompany the birth of my son. Determined to make what I needed available to parents, educators and carers of the young, I wrote it myself.

It is dedicated to my mother, my father, Charlie, Robert, Felicity and David – all amazingly inspirational.

Copyright Information ©

Leonora Langley (2021)

The right of Leonora Langley to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The story, experiences, and words are the author’s alone.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781528997249 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781528997256 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published (2021)

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd

25 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5LQ

Acknowledgement

A huge thank you to all the contributors who gave me interviews to support my argument about the importance of nurturing emotional well-being in the young.

Special thanks to my sister, Felicity, a gifted singer-songwriter and counsellor who, with her passion for the subject matter, worked tirelessly to make an invaluable contribution as editor and sounding board and to my twin brother, Robert, for his insightful input as a practising psychotherapist.

Deep gratitude to my beautiful mother who was not only a talented singer and artist but also a lover of nature and poetry and my father, an inspiring musician, both of whom instilled in me a passion for the arts.

Finally, heartfelt thanks to my son, Charlie, who has taught me an enormous amount about giving and receiving love, a theme that permeates this book, and for which I am eternally grateful.

Synopsis

Are we failing our children by not being receptive and responsive enough to their feelings and emotions? This is the question at the heart of Leonora Langley’s impassioned plea for greater awareness in nurturing emotional well-being in the young. In an argument that encompasses the obligations of parents as well as the challenges of teaching, Langley marshals much of her long years’ experience as a teacher, journalist, actress, arts educator and counsellor in a persuasive critique of the present emphasis of intellectual achievement over sensitivity to the needs of children as whole, integrated beings.

The author argues that the competitive, mechanical and sedentary nature of most mainstream schooling – based on a nineteenth century model – is of limited use to the majority of young people. As our society moves towards a heightened consciousness of mental health issues, such as anxiety, depression and stress, what is needed is a new paradigm to replace the emphasis of cognition and logic which can be counted and measured over the enrichment of children’s souls which is beyond measure.

Her solution is both radical and based on wisdom dating back to Ancient Greece about what children need from their education and how that can best be achieved. The goal of education is self-awareness and thus awareness of others, and the arts – which engage the body, the emotions and the spirit as well as the mind – are the most holistic way of achieving it.

At a time when arts education is seen as an increasingly marginal activity in mainstream schooling, Langley argues that it is only by putting children’s innate creativity and curiosity at the heart of our educational mission, that we can hope to re-engage the vast number of children switched off from the current system and avoid the poverty of imagination and the absence of hope which are the root causes of so many contemporary ills.

‘The School Boy’

Songs of Innocence and Experience

By William Blake

I love to rise in a summer morn,

When the birds sing on every tree;

The distant huntsman winds his horn,

And the sky-lark sings with me.

Oh, what sweet company.

But to go to school in a summer morn

Oh, it drives all joy away:

Under a cruel eye outworn,

The little ones spend their day,

In sighing and dismay.

Ah, then at times I drooping sit,

And spend many an anxious hour.

Nor in my book can I take delight,

Nor sit in learning’s bower,

Worn thro’ with the dreary shower.

How can the bird that is born for joy,

Sit in a cage and sing.

How can a child when fears annoy,

But droop his tender wing,

And forget his youthful spring.

Oh! father and mother, if buds are nip’d,

And blossoms blown away,

And if the tender plants are strip’d

Of their joy in the springing day,

By sorrow and care’s dismay

How shall the summer arise in joy

Or the summer fruits appear,

Or how shall we gather what griefs destroy

Or bless the mellowing year,

When the blasts of winter appear.

Introduction

A New Vision

Giving Voice to Children’s Feelings and Emotions

It was Harvest Festival, and my six-year-old son’s angelic singing voice rang through the school hall. I tried to make eye contact to let him know his efforts weren’t in vain, but he was completely masked by a group of children at least a head taller than him. As the children sat down and my eyes finally met his, tears were rolling down his face. I swallowed hard as I recalled another six-year-old with a lovely voice, masked by another group of children on another special occasion, on another school stage forty years ago. It was hard to believe that my child could be experiencing exactly the same frustration and despair as I had as an infant, but he, too, was part of an institution where the individual spirit is crushed and moulded into a collective consciousness of conformity.

Throughout the history of education, there has been a debate as to whether education is an individual or societal process. Most people believe that it cannot be one without the other. Whatever its practical aims, ideally, education should inspire and enhance not only the lives of individuals but also society as a whole. In reality, it is often uninspiring and disengaging. I am convinced that the fundamental problem with mainstream education in many countries is its emphasis on the functional and mechanical rather than the creative and inspirational. This can leave young people ‘cut off’ from parts of their beings, fragmented, and unable to cope with the real and diverse challenges of life.

The schools of today may be better funded, better staffed and better equipped, but it is only by de-emphasising the quantifying notion of teaching, which is based on the acquisition and memorisation of facts and figures, that we are ever going to help young people to become better-balanced and more fulfilled human beings. We teach children to divide things and examine separate parts instead of encouraging them to look at the whole picture. We offer them a narrow, mechanical and material view of life and provide limited access to the magic and fantasy of childhood. We focus on cognitive skills and logical reasoning and offer few opportunities for emotional response.

However, it is not enough for children to be imbued with outer and visible things. They also need inner and invisible nourishment for their souls. We need to place more emphasis on children’s immaterial needs and bring creativity, which deals with the emotive and imaginative aspects of their psyches, into the main frame of the curriculum. As it stands, mainstream education not only limits children’s emotional development, it seems to encourage young people to be at odds with each other rather that at one. A rich emotional language can help children process decisions as well as nurture self-awareness, motivation, empathy and hope, while a restricted emotional language renders them handicapped and isolated.

To help nurture children’s emotions and feelings, which are neither synonymous nor interchangeable, it is important to make a distinction between them. Dr Sarah McKay, neuroscientist and author, says, Emotions play out in the theatre of the body. Feelings play out in the theatre of the mind. Emotions, which have ‘emote’ (meaning ‘to move’ as their root – energy in motion), are biological physical actions and reactions involving the neurotransmitters and hormones released by the brain. Event-driven, powerful and transient, emotions such as anger and fear respond to external stimuli involving little cognitive awareness. While emotions need to be honoured and their message heeded, they must not be allowed to take over or run the show. In contrast, feelings such as pain and love are conscious inner-felt mental associations and reactions to emotions giving them meaning. As learned behaviours, more a form of perception or sixth sense that goes beyond the five senses, such as an intuitive, gut-feeling or deja-vu experience, feelings often represent a state of consciousness which persists and grows over a lifetime.

The salient question we need to ask is, what are we educating for? Is it simply for basic survival and a vocational means-to-an-end, or is it for enriching existence and enhancing the quality of our personal lives and the joy of living? It is predicted that many of us will be working a three-day week within the next decade, and possibly from home. This will lead to increased leisure time and the opportunity to explore life in a more holistic way. For this to happen, children’s education needs to be structured not only to fulfil the nature of society’s needs in terms of production skills for its workforce, but also to reflect the nature of the children themselves.

We need to pay greater heed to the naturalists’ interpretation of the word ‘education’, derived from the Latin educere, meaning to lead out, rather than the formalists’ interpretation of educare which means to form or train. Today, more than ever, we seem to be forcing in, cramming overburdened young minds with ever more knowledge so as to become competent, if miserable, computer-like databases. However, the more we model ourselves after machines and computers, which rely on quantities and measures, the more we depersonalise and devalue our lives and environment. If we take heed of Dostoevsky’s belief that his own intellectual capacity represented only one-twentieth of his whole capacity, then schools are certainly on a lopsided mission by failing to develop and nurture all aspects of children’s complex natures. By concentrating on a small part of a child’s potential and making it the whole, we are ignoring the possibility of fostering integrated individuals – thinking, feeling and dreaming beings.

One of the main purposes of our existence on this planet is to create. Human beings are not only homo sapiens but also homo aestheticus. Our creative capacity makes us innately human and anything that stifles that basic impulse within us is destructive. We have complex natures but it is becoming increasingly apparent that the left and right hemispheres of the brain need to work in harmony. Wisdom doesn’t emanate exclusively from either left or right brain but from the integration of the two. Even the sciences need to be felt and have their origins in creative experience. While we need the left-brain facility of logical and scientific reasoning, it is the nurturing of our artistic right side of the brain, our inward state of being, that is closer to our intrinsic structure and individual essence with the potential to offer us joy and fulfilment. This is particularly evident in my work as a piano tutor where I find