Posted 2:42 PM by Paul
Way to Go Emily

Emily bounced up to me at after school club when I came to pick her up.

" Daddy I have got a certiificate!"

Clutching the prize in her hand we left for home where I sat down and read it. Headed up WELL DONE, the brightly coloured certificate listed all the things she had done in school that day. Listened attentively, tried hard, taken part in class discussions. and so on. It ended WAY TO GO EMILY. It was a blatant American import into our education system and on behalf of Emily I thank the USA for showing us the way on this one.

Encouragement of this kind is a little alien to the British psyche. In the past the emphasis has always been on not letting kids get too over confident in case they start getting ideas of their own. Or even worse, ideas above their station. This kind of cold understatement is not particularly new and it is certainly not just the Englsih. I have found the Welsh and the Scots even more sceptical of enthusiastic praise. They assume an ulterior motive. In the 70s and 80s this tendency was accentuated by a misguided left wing trend that argued that praising one child would make the rest feel undervalued. Thus members of the Socialist Workers Party made common cultural cause with conservative house masters at leading private schools.


" Don't get big headed you have only scored 6 goals in 10 minutes but the game is not over yet."

The distrust of passion cuts across class and well as age barriers.

My cousin Walter who is neither upper class nor a socialist personified this kind of lingusitic restraint when describing his son's achievments.

" Aye the lad's not done too bad", her said to me over Sunday lunch in Sheffield

His son, a tall handsome young man with a beautiful wife and two children, has a PhD and works for a leading Bio-Technology company in Cambridge. Most of our family left school at 15 to do unskilled or semi-skilled factory jobs. But Walter obviously feels that a more expansive description of Justin's career would be showing off. Walt keeps his pride to himself. Enthusiasm is not the British way.

As for Emily, her certificate has pride of place on the mantlepiece and she is feeling much better about life in general. School is hard work for her and she has great difficulty reading but this bit of public encouragement gave her a real lift. I have told her to her face how very proud I am of her but for the 4 people and a dog reading this blog I repeat

WAY TO GO EMILY!