Six Years Old, First Day, and Already Late for University

A primary teacher in Valencia had taught first grade long enough to have a first-day speech, and to be fond of it. His name, on the board. The rule about the toilet. A promise that nobody would be made to read aloud for a week.

One September he got as far as his name.

A girl in the second row stood up. He assumed she needed the toilet, which is what standing up means in the first week. She did not. She wanted to know, politely, whether he had much more to say, because she was in a hurry to get to university.

Her parents, it emerged, had explained to her over the summer that without a university degree a person had no future. They had meant it kindly, as encouragement. She had heard it as a deadline.

You offer a child a sensible sentence about education and it comes back as a timetable.

The teacher, who told the story years later, did not laugh where she could see. He told her that university was an excellent plan, that it was a long way off, and that the first thing it required was sitting down. She sat.

I recognise the parents’ sentence, because I have said a version of it at every kitchen table in four countries. In Madrid it was about languages. In Copenhagen it was about maths. In Brussels it is about “options”, a word I use roughly forty times a week without defining.

The youngest has been listening. Last month she asked for a meeting. She had a list. It said she would like to be a vet, a pilot and a judge, “in that order”, and wanted to know which school was best for all three.

I said it was early to decide. She said I had told her it was never too early to keep her options open. I said that was not exactly what I meant. She asked me to write down what I had meant, so that she could check it.

I tried. I got as far as two lines. They contradicted each other. My husband read them over my shoulder and said that, as parenting philosophies go, it was concise.

The Valencia teacher, by the way, was still slightly indignant years later about having his speech interrupted. I understand. Nobody likes to be hurried by someone who has taken them literally.

The youngest has since revised her list. She now plans to be a judge first, “so I can decide about the others”.