The news this week has been packed with topical stories that have grabbed my interest and make great subjects for blog posts. So much so that a story from Wednesday had to wait until Saturday to be covered. Let me begin by saying there is plenty to support the idea that summer babies do sometimes suffer, particularly at a young age. The brain, like every other part of the body, grows, and younger children generally have smaller brains than much older ones.
Of course the gap within one year at school (a maximum spread from September to August) is not particularly large, but you would think that on average the summer babies would have less developed brains than the winter ones. I wouldn’t argue with that.
However why I object to staggering exams is that it is yet another example of taking a “one size fits all” approach. Many summer babies I know were actually more intelligent than the winter babies in their class. The most striking example of this was when I was 11 and there was a girl who was 10 and did better than the oldest kid in the class who was actually 12. Different children develop at different rates.
Age is not the only factor that determines the brain’s development, if it were we would not have child prodigies. Age should not be any sort of factor in marking exams because it could unfairly benefit summer children who happen to be more advanced than their peers, or unfairly hurt winter children whose brains are less developed.
What should happen is what occurs right now anyway. Children who are advanced are often moved up or given advanced classes whilst children who are not as advanced are held back. Reading between the lines, the reference to the fact that summer children are often “mistakenly” thought to have special educational needs suggests that this is a case of an overly liberal attitude. It’s a case of political correctness gone mad, heaven forbid we “hurt their feelings” by holding them back a year.
Being less advanced than your classmates on account of age is a “special educational need”, and I don’t see why that term should be derogatory to begin with. Dyslexia is not derogatory (although many use it that way). So what if it’s because you’re “unlucky” to be born at the “wrong” time of the year? Life is full of situations where you’ll be less lucky than your peers, it’s how you deal with such adversity that matters.
The more I read about our attitudes towards kids in school these days the more I fear we’re nannying them too much. One teacher even went so far as to say that summer babies suffer due to “emotional” issues. I guess if it were winter babies falling behind we’d be blaming SAD. We seem to be trying to find excuses for why some children do badly, instead of simply admitting that maybe these children simply are as intellectually gifted as others. Not everyone was born to be a rocket scientist, nor should they be. We all have different roles in society, we all have different abilities. The irony is these excuses come at a time when exams are being routinely criticised for being too easy!
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