Like many atheists (and unlike Roman Catholics of whom it is seemingly expected) I am not into confessions much - in my case I do not need to confess to anything much apart from the hidden urge to eat chocolate, particularly when my good lady is not home. It is my nature to come out with the facts, so where is the need to confess?
Anyway a number of confessions for you:
1. I have never read the children's book "Heidi". I think that I saw a TV dramatisation when I was a child, but they are never to be trusted to be faithful to the text.
2. I am an out-and-out urban dweller. My take on living in rural areas runs pretty much on the lines of "if you have seen one cow eating grass, you have seen them all". And that is about as exciting as living in the countryside gets as far as I can see. And yes, I did spend five (terrible) years of my life teaching in a mainly rural area.
3. I am not prone to look upon either life in the countryside or the behaviour of children (rural or urban raised) with rose-tinted spectacles.
Now that was difficult, but my breast seems clearer as a result.
So what is the point of this, you may ask? Well apart from the fact that you want to push for a pro-urban agenda and all the associated politics usw?
Stop yawning!
My latest adventure onto the Internet revolves around Johanna Spyri, the author of the children's book "Heidi". Almost without question the most significant children's book to come out of Switzerland. Written about children for "those who love children" apparently.
With a bit of an agenda under the surface. Heidi, the orphan girl, lived high in Alps eventually with her crusty old grandfather, who had fallen out with the local villagers. Her closest friend, Peter, was a goatherd (rural kids didn't go to school in Switzerland at the time, it seems, so he could not read or write).
All well and good until when she was 8 or 9, when her actual guardian, her Aunt Dete, picked her up and carted her off to be the companion to an invalid girl in (shock, horror) an urban area. And not just any old urban area. Where this really hits home - Frankfurt! (am Main, not an der Oder).
Shock, horror. Poor child, removed from an idyllic life in the mountains surrounded by goats and thrust into .... Well I am not sure that the place was inhabited by half the German banking community in those days or whether the gruesome Bahnhofsviertel existed in owt like its current form, and the upmarket shopping area may still have been in its infancy.
But anyway Heidi started to see her health suffer (urban smog, rather than clean Alpine air? Well not these days, but then maybe?), she started having nightmares, sleepwalking (as one does when one is unhappy), and eventually Clara's doctor had her sent back to the Alps and grandfather and Peter and the goats, and ....
"Happily ever after" of course followed. Her grandfather left his seclusion and made peace with the villagers with whom he had been at odds for years. Heidi taught the illiterate Peter to read and write. And she kept in touch with Clara. The latter was recommended by her doctor to spend the summer in Switzerland where she could grow stronger on goat's milk and fresh mountain air.
And finally the coup de grâce. Peter (in a fit of rural pique - tut, tut, this spoils the image) kicked Clara's wheelchair down the mountain. Which meant that the poor invalid girl had nowt to do but learn to walk. And guess what .... A miracle straight out of the sort of stuff you get from American evangelists, eh?
Wonderful. Urban life - Sch*ße, rural life - miraculous, yea, yea, yea! Or as they used to say in MAD magazine: "YECCCCCCH!".
The only difference I personally saw between teaching kids in the city and those in the countryside, was that urban kids, on balance (avoiding stereotypes), tended to be more alert to the world in general. One kid I knew in my teaching days in the rural area was already truanting half the time as he was working on his father's pig farm, and constantly informed people that he didn't need to know much else. Try that in Sheffield or Manchester.
As for the exam results achieved, it usually came down to the school, its intake, and the internal organisation. If inner-city schools had their problems, so did the ones in rural areas, or some of them at least. The final school in which I taught had principally an intake from the affluent suburbs and parental expectations were high, and the results, surprise, surprise, were outstanding.
Not Heidi's sort of school (or the UK equivalent).
Intriguing about Spyri's book was the discovery in 2010 that she may not actually have been responsible for the original ideas and many of them may have come from another novel written by (don't say it too loudly - the Swiss will not thank you for this) a German (!) called Adam von Kamp some 50 years earlier. Spyri's biographer even agreed that there may have unintentional copying (should we avoid the word "plagiarism" here - after all we are not talking about German politicians and their dubious doctorates).
To quote from the (UK) Daily Telegraph in 2010:
“The Swiss have rallied to the defence of their literary icon, saying that many 19th century writers in central Europe were preoccupied by the drift to the cities and the possible harmful effects on children”.
So the mythical values of living in the countryside prevailed. They may have been illiterate and poor, and stuck with inadequate transportation, a simple diet and not much by way of advanced facilities, but they were cheerful and happy and everything always turned out for the best.
Fine, now give me modern urban areas and facilities and transportation, and some decent or half-decent schools (ever the problem with cash-strapped education authorities) and try to persuade me that kids cannot grow up in urban areas and be happy and successful.
The Alps are amazing to visit - as a tourist.
For somewhere to live, then please give me Hamburg or Berlin or Köln/Cologne - or even Frankfurt. Everything you will ever need is there and is easily reached thanks to the excellent local transportation facilities. So much so that even people from the local rural areas are only too glad and come take advantage of what is there!
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